A still from the Painful Evacuation episode of Girls. Pic/official page of HBO

It felt like a punch in the gut to hear the writer Hannah, from the HBO series, Girls, was interviewing say with the air of eclectic authority that childlessness is the natural state of the female author. “Write that down,” she tells Hannah, who is herself struggling with inhabiting the identity of a female writer in an American literary scene still domina­ted by white privileged men. I should have expected nothing less from Lena Dunham’s series about a bunch of tremendously privileged white women in their late 20s, who seem to wade uncertainly through life utterly convinced that the world owed them something.