Newspapers publish the rough draft of history, as the saying goes. And what's the rough draft of the news' I would argue that it's gossip, as filtered by good reporters. Which means that gossip is the very rough first version of what ends up in the history books. I first thought of this syllogism while reading primary sources for my book of cultural history, and it came to mind recently as I dove into Lena Dunham's highly entertaining new memoir, Famesick. 'God bless a memoir that drops names'the more bold-faced and braggadocious the better,' my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote this week in an essay about the book. Gilbert also laments that Dunham's second memoir fails at what her groundbreaking HBO series, Girls, managed to do: 'make broader meaning out of her experiences.' It's true that the book cannot compete with the show's ability to explain members of a generation to themselves. And yet, as primary-source material about the making of Millennial art, Famesick is hard to beat....
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