Lena Dunham Forces Gawker to Remove Embarrassing Book Proposal Leak

Lena Dunham’s lawyers forced the website Gawker to remove an embarrassing leaked book proposal from the creator of HBO’s new hit “Girls.”

The proposal finds Dunham revealing she made fun of fat girls, has been in therapy since she was seven years old, developed a fear of anorexia and wrote about a vow of celibacy when she was nine, felt like an “old maid” when she was 24, attended her first “Women’s Action Coalition” meeting when she was three, had a “vegan dinner party” the New York Times chronicled, and is concerned about the way her genitalia looks because she thinks she has the beginnings of a “FUPA (fat upper p*ssy area).”

The 26-year-old gained infamy during the 2012 campaign when she compared voting for Obama for the first time to losing one’s virginity in a web video. In October, Random House bought her 66-page book proposal for a whopping $3.7 million, or, as Gawker notes, about $56,000 a page. It is unknown when Dunham’s advice book, titled “Not That Kind of Girl,” about “frank and funny advice on everything from sex to eating to traveling to work” will be published. 

According to reports, the proposal divides “Dunham’s thoughts into six sections, titled “Work,” “Friendship,” “Body,” “Sex,” “Love,” and “Big Picture.”

Gawker obtained the leaked book proposal Friday but has since removed it from its site after Dunham’s lawyer threatened demanded Gawker remove the proposal. The website, however, did not remove some choice sentences Dunham, whom Random House describes as “a rare literary talent,” wrote in her proposal. 

According to Gawker, “13% of the proposal’s pages are devoted to reproducing a diary Dunham kept of what she ate in 2010.” She also “intends to devote an as-yet-unwritten chapter to ‘a collection of emails that screw the pooch, jump the gun, and terrify men.'” Dunham, in her proposal, writes that she is concerned with parts of her anatomy, writing that she thinks she has the “beginnings of a FUPA (fat upper p*ssy area),” and she wants to write about that as well in her advice book. 

Here are the sentences from Dunham’s proposal Gawker has kept up on its site: 

I went to my first Women’s Action Coalition meeting at age three.

I’ve been in therapy since I was seven.

When I was about nine I developed a terrible fear of being anorexic.

When I was about nine I wrote a vow of celibacy…. I knew my mother had waited until the summer after she graduated [high school].

At 24 I felt like an old maid….

When I got to college I suddenly had the sense that my upbringing hadn’t been very “real.”

Once I had a vegan dinner party which was chronicled for the style section of the New York Times.

Once at poetry camp I saw my friend Joana in a bikini…..

I immediately started seeing my mother’s nutritionist, Vinnie.

Every ice pop I ate, every movie I watched, every poem I wrote was tinged with a fearful loss.

Cassie was a very fat girl we knew who we had nicknamed fat Cassie because she also wasn’t that nice.

I’ve never kept a diary, [because] if a girl writes in her diary and no one’s there to read it did she really write at all?

Nikke Finke, of Deadline fame, wrote Dunham, who often feigns a sense of carefreeness, is “taking herself way too seriously over 12 unwitty sentences”:  

Granted Dunham’s proposal fetched so much money because publishers rightly or wrongly see this flavor of the moment as an influential creative voice for young women. But Dunham now is taking herself way too seriously over 12 unwitty sentences which Gawker describes (and I agree) are ‘indicative of a nauseating and cloying posture of precociousness that permeates the entire proposal’.