Writer-director-actress-memoirist Lena Dunham is now writer-director-actress-memoirist–short story author Lena Dunham: The “Summer Fiction†preview issue of Dunham’s new newsletter Lenny features the story “Six Sausages,†which is not the tale of a half-dozen anthropomorphic chorizos, but instead an account of a young New York native introducing her maybe-boyfriend to the city she loves. Here are the first two paragraphs:
She picked him up at the airport at 9:30, just as the sun was setting, orange and blue above the hangars at JFK. She had cut and flat-ironed her own bangs, which were longer on the left side and came to a gothic point, and purchased a shapeless blue cotton dress at Old Navy. Despite her mother’s feet being as big as paddles, she always borrowed her shoes for important occasions and this was as important as anything, so she limped across the median towards the terminal doors. He came off the plane with a dazed look like a just-landed astronaut. She clapped her hands when she saw him, and then back-tracked to a shy wave.
In the cab back to her parents’ house he stared out the window. He was more transfixed by the nothingness surrounding the airport, the broken-down pre-fabs and mattress warehouses and tortilla factories, than he was by the city’s bridges, hanging like fine necklaces and which she could never accurately name. When she explained the geography of New York to him, she was really explaining her personal geography.
Yep, that’s definitely a short story!