Clare McHugh

In her seminal 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes of her former self, a 20-year-old naif arriving in New York City for the first time: “Was anyone ever so young?” Lena Dunham – an avowed Didion stan – should have used that line as the title of her new book, an account of the messy process of making Girls, the HBO show she created, scripted, directed and starred in. Despite her inexperience and juvenile blunders Dunham, at age 25, produced a hit. Why, then, call her memoir Famesick? Because, she contends, the most important story she has to tell is how her body turned on her “right in sync with the public.” It’s true that Dunham has been the object of sustained fascination since Girls launched in 2012.

Last June, Jack Schlossberg, the Kennedy nepo baby currently running for the open seat in New York’s 12th Congressional District, called out the television mini-series, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. Executive producer Ryan Murphy was, Schlossberg declared, exploiting this couple’s courtship, marriage and death, and “profiting off of it in a grotesque way.” On a key point, Jack can rest easy. Love Story, now airing on FX/Hulu, treats his uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. reverently. Elizabeth Beller, Bessette’s biographer, praises the show for “honoring the legacy of everyone involved.” If JFK Jr.

Which is your favorite Jane Austen novel? OK, maybe not a conversation prompt appropriate for every setting, but a reliable one, I find, to break the ice at DC dinner parties where I’m not well acquainted with my fellow guests but spy someone who seems likely to know her work. I also ask it of younger fiction writers who come looking for advice about plot construction. I once resorted to it with a stranger, a woman of a certain age, to distract me from my irritation, sitting on an Acela train inexplicably halted outside Wilmington, Delaware, for two hours. She chose Persuasion, Austen’s elegiac account of late-in-life love.