What's It Like When a Celeb Bares All? This

As far as celebrity profiles go, Allison P. Davis' lengthy piece on Lena Dunham for New York Magazine is noteworthy, both in terms of how well-written it is and just how far Dunham flings the door open. To wit, the piece begins with Davis recounting how shortly after she first met the writer and actress, Dunham had a hysterectomy—and Davis was right there with her, courtesy of the stream of photos Dunham started texting her, including "a close-up of her pubic area, showing off tattoos and hair and the place where the doctor had drawn incision marks in blue ink." Dunham seems to edit herself on just one occasion in the piece, which is when her split with Girls co-creator Jenni Konner comes up.

Otherwise, she's bare on things like the following: the reason behind her split with Jack Antonoff, whether he cheated on her with Lorde, her concerns over her desire to adopt a hairless black puppy and name it Rosa ("I'm worried people will get mad bc of Rosa Parks"), more mentions of Antonoff (he hates cats; recounting texts she recently sent him), why she didn't donate to Hillary Clinton's campaign, what she was thinking when she made her #MeToo gaffe, her PTSD and treatment, the artist she's now casually seeing, and how sex is for her now. What's the motivation? Davis addresses that: "She texts me increasingly intimate details that she knows I'll put in this article, as if she were trying to be the director of her own candid, sympathy-generating magazine story ... I begin to wonder if Lena Dunham, the performance artist daring us to hate her, is the work." (The full profile is worth a read.)