The successfully performative cultural commentator Emily Gould recently announced that she has decided to stop being mad at Lena Dunham.

If you would assume that she was mad for the same reasons everyone else had been (more on those momentarily), you’d be wrong. Gould had been jealous of Dunham’s relative success in a similar field, if not necessarily the same profession. Gould admitted as much to a reporter, word got back to Dunham, and awkwardness between two Jewish women ensued.

Writer-envy, a story as old as time.

Emily Gould – Lena Dunham feud

Gould has also attracted criticism and controversy for her public feud with the actor and writer Lena Dunham pic.twitter.com/zhU1BvOHba

Something about this story seemed familiar—which led me to remember that I’ve had my own parasocial relationship to this anecdote for oh my goodness nearly a decade. (We can’t all be splitting the atom.)

Eight years ago, I was an editor at The Forward. Sounds prestigious, right? Let me start again: I was a freelancer, part-time, at the ‘Sisterhood’ blog aimed at seeking social media clicks from otherwise elusive young women. The real goings-on of New York’s most storied Jewish publication remained out-of-reach, reserved for the full-time staff. Along with this supporting role, I was writing a book, The Perils of “Privilege,” that came out a couple months later. The book got coverage, but was met with a great big why is this lady writing a book about online call-out culture, who cares?

Well, people eventually would care about online call-out culture! They didn’t then. Maybe they should have gone on not caring. Maybe the world would be in a better place.

But set all of that aside. The point is that while I was more of a writing-world insider than some, from where I sat, the likes of Lena Dunham or Emily Gould were in another stratosphere. I wished I could be jealous of Lena Dunham, but I was too busy being jealous of Emily Gould!

I share this story not because the nuances of who sits where in intellectual or artistic hierarchies is inherently compelling (resentments kind of are, though), but to convey the extent to which even seemingly similar people can interpret the same events in radically different ways. That will be relevant, so bear with me.

I wrote about how I got over a grudge for the Cut's Grudge Week https://t.co/i6BnfKF0DG

Here’s the bit that is plausibly of general interest. Gould remembers the Lena........

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