Girls Recap: How Long Does It Take To Write A Book?

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Girls Recap: How Long Does It Take To Write A Book?

10:30 am, February 18th | by Sarah Devlin

First thing’s first: this episode seems to confirm what I began to suspect last week, that Lena Dunham’s idyll with Patrick Wilson could have been a fantasy. That she shows up at Café Grumpy and does not get reamed out by Ray for skipping out on a shift seems to support this. Of course, Ray could just be distracted because Shoshanna keeps trying to get him to pay for Learning Annex lectures from Donald Trump and the like, as she seems to be getting more and more freaked out about her older boyfriend’s lack of direction.

Ray isn’t the only person being pushed in an uncomfortable direction by Shoshanna — she also hears that Marnie has been asked to host an event at Booth Jonathan’s place, and gets in Marnie’s head about how this is a very significant step for them as a couple. That Booth and Marnie are a couple is completely weird and unbelievable, although I suppose, since she was so grossed out by being treated well by Charlie, perhaps it makes sense that she’d let the pendulum swing in the other direction. Booth Jonathan is the type to take a meeting with his hip assistant while stark naked in bed with Marnie, a meeting that ends with yelling and his assistant quitting, which Marnie does not appear to find as weird as she should.

Meanwhile, Ray ends up at Adam’s apartment to retrieve his copy of Little Women, which Hannah borrowed and left at Adam’s place. He finds Adam acting crazier than ever, hiding from a dog he stole outside of a coffee shop (who bit him quite nastily on the arm). This sets in motion an odyssey in which the two dudes attempt to return the dog…to his home in Staten Island. Along the way Adam feels provoked by Ray and goes completely crazy, accusing him of wanting to sleep with Hannah, and eventually abandoning him with the dog. Ray soldiers ahead and finds the correct house, only to get verbally eviscerated by the teenage Staten Islander who lives there, who doesn’t want to see her dad’s dog returned.

I have to say (knowing full well that this might seem oversensitive) that the number of scenes in which people screamed at, pushed or got violent with each other in close proximity to the dog were very upsetting to me, to the point where I found it difficult to focus on what I should — that by the end of this journey Ray is totally unraveling, and ends up sitting with the pup on a park bench staring at Manhattan and crying.

Meanwhile, Hannah goes to Booth Jonathan’s party, where Marnie greets her wearing some kind of plastic dress contraption, and generally makes Hannah feel small and uncool and ignored while she hobnobs with Booth’s friends. Hannah tries to generate some cool currency for herself by talking about the “e-book deal” that a very irritating editor offers her following an afternoon drink in Brooklyn, giving her a month to write it, but she’s having trouble getting started and anyway, everyone else at the party has an e-book deal too. Perhaps Jessa, who is currently being depressed all over Hannah’s apartment, is right when she says that this book won’t matter to anyone (…I mean, she’s probably right).

After the party’s over, karma pays back Marnie for her treatment of Hannah when Booth offers to pay her for her hosting services in the wine cellar and she has to admit that she thought she was acting in a girlfriend capacity. Watching Allison Williams fake cry in this scene was truly painful, and really took me out of it. Booth turns things around on her immediately, accusing her of not liking him at all for who he is, but rather for his work and what he represents (he’s probably not wrong). Hannah and Marnie end up catching up over the phone at the end of the episode, in a nice scene in which both of them try to pretend that nothing’s wrong and they’re each doing better than the other one is, even though it’s obvious that they’re both completely lost.

TAGS: girls recap | lena dunham