The New Yorker:

Most people accept the city’s chaos as a toll for an expansive life. It took me several decades to realize that I could go my own way.

By Lena Dunham

I cannot tell you the moment that New York began for me, only that I began in New York. There are stories from the months before I was born, when I was still nestled inside my mother like a Yonah Schimmel knish to go. In September, during her first trimester, the city was overtaken by a heat wave so mighty that it made being inside without A.C. unbearable—you had to stay moving just to create a breeze. My mom remembers thinking that New York hadn’t felt so unhinged since the Summer of Sam, that the heat lent an edge of hysteria to everyday interactions. Circling the block one day, she ran into an equally sweaty and disoriented friend on the corner of Broadway and Houston, who told her that the sculptor Carl Andre had been accused of throwing his wife, the seminal Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, out a window the previous night. Despite the temperature, my mother turned toward home.

I recall being told about another time, weeks before I was due, when my parents went to see a movie at Lincoln Plaza, and the smell of other people’s buttered popcorn made my mom so sick that she had to leave halfway through. Afterward, on the subway, my father—who has often been accused of charging ahead with little concern for those travelling with him—made a mad dash out of the train car just before the doors closed, leaving her behind. “I looked around and everyone was laughing,” she recalls. She laughed, too, just to seem like she was in on the joke. But then, as the train began to pull away, she placed her hand on the glass between her and my father and burst into tears. Come to think of it, neither of these is a very romantic story. They’re about the struggle of living in a city where, compressed like office workers in a stalled elevator, we are driven to a kind of madness.

Go to link