Does Lena Dunham Hate Brunch?

Rachel Tepper Paley
·Editor
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Photos: HBO

Sunday night’s season four premiere of HBO’s Girls left us with many questions: Will Hannah and Adam’s relationship survive the rigors of long-distance? What’s next for Shoshanna? And was Marnie’s disastrous performance at a jazz brunch really just Lena Dunham’s way of telling us she hates that much-maligned meal?

Obviously, it’s the brunch question that interests us most. The breakfast-lunch hybrid has been going through a rocky patch in the public relations department over the past three years, with The New York Times, Vice, Los Angeles Magazine, BuzzFeed, and Refinery 29 all publishing vehement anti-brunch accounts. Saveur editor-in-chief Adam Sachs is an outspoken critic of the meal, and even The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas has publicly admitted to detesting it (well, OK, detesting it sometimes).

"I don’t know how many, like, white people having brunch I can deal with on a Saturday afternoon," Casablancas told GQ in 2012. Last year, New York Times writer David Shaftel expounded on the sentiment: “What I can’t do anymore is live the brunch lifestyle, which has become a parody of itself. Now that I see brunch for what it is—conspicuous consumption disguised as urbanity—I can’t enjoy it.”

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The brunch scene depicted in the Girls premiere certainly doesn’t help the meal’s image. It’s a “jazz brunch”—Marnie and her bandmate, with whom she’s having an adulterous affair, are performing their latest folk-rock songs—and the meal is marred by screaming, unsupervised children and a mimosa-guzzling gaggle of mean girls (and one guy). Thin-skinned Marnie tears up mid-song, runs out of the restaurant, and convulses in sobs on the sidewalk. It’s not, one might say, brunch at its finest.

So we have to wonder: Does Dunham—a frequent commenter on all things food and diet—hate brunch? The verdict is still out. After all, Dunham was once spotted heading to brunch hand-in-hand with Taylor Swift. That sounds very pro-brunch to us.

So which is it, Lena? Are you for brunch or against it? What does it all mean? If you’re anti-brunch, does that signal that your fellow millennials are turning away from the boozy affair? Which might be a death knell for brunch as we know it? Tell us, Lena! Tell us!

More brunch good times:

The history of brunch (it goes back a long while)

The best wines to serve at brunch

How to throw the ultimate bagel brunch (if you’re into that kind of thing)

Are you for or against brunch? Tell us below!