I broke protocol a few weeks ago and met one of my heroes. I interviewed Lena Dunham and her husband, Luis Felber for the Sunday Times Magazine. You can read the interview here.
Thank god she was as clever, funny and charming as I’d hoped she would be and at the end of our interview, we had a lovely chat about The C Word, the excellent podcast Lena co-hosts which I’ve written about a couple of times in this newsletter.
While we were chatting, she very kindly recommended a few great things she’s been reading, watching and listening to recently. And now I’m passing them on to you.
Over to Lena. Enjoy!
The TV series that I think is really smart and I wish more people were talking about is The Sinner with Bill Pullman. It’s a detective show about the most interesting character. It’s well made and haunting and the only thing that distracts me from life is people investigating murders. I’m not alone in that.
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures but the TV show that I don’t think is necessarily giving me new brian cells is The One That Got Away. I can’t stop watching. It’s a reality dating competition on Amazon where people are presented with folks from their past.
Have you read Strangers To Ourselves by Rachel Aviv? It’s about how we pathologise people’s cultural experiences of mental illness. Aviv is a writer from the New Yorker who has taken her interest in mental health and really expanded it. It’s beautiful and charming and important and completely wonderful.
I think Blank Check is an amazing podcast. It’s a couple of very smart guys talking about what a movie looks like when a filmmaker is given the total freedom of a blank check. They choose various movies throughout history like A Clockwork Orange, Space Odyssey and Three Thousand Years of Longing. The reason it works so well is that they’re so funny and they have an amazing deep, nerdy knowledge of film. They’re fantastic.
THANK YOU
It’s Hannah again. I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has taken the time to subscribe to, read and comment on this newsletter since I launched it in March.
It means a lot to me to have you here and I love all of your thoughtful and funny comments and brilliant recommendations.
Look forward to seeing you all in 2023.
Until then…
Hannah x