Lena Dunham wrote an essay for The New Yorker about ordering delivery, but also about death. These two ideas are not actually connected except by the title of this essay, which is “Deliverance.”
Just as she opened her essay about puppies with a look back at her childhood (“When I was a child, my greatest dream was to find a box full of puppies”), so she begins this essay with a glimpse of her mystical youth: “Family legend: I am four.” Simultaneously special and universal, forever the relatable, messy, superb snowflake.
And! Dunham has some controversial thoughts on paella, which she relates to mid-nineties fashions, because really, what else do we have to talk about?
I’ve always found paella kind of pretentious, a food that wants to be everything and is therefore nothing. Much like the mid-nineties trend of wearing a skirt over pants, it seems the height of indecision.
We would argue that donning a skirt over pants is not nothing. It is antithetical to pretentiousness. It is something that was sold in the fall 1999 dELiA*s catalog as a “skant.” Just some thoughts for the next essay, about distressing fashions of our collective youth.
