From Giuseppe Verdi’s Violetta to William Shakespeare’s Ophelia, the young woman ravaged by disease has long been a fascinating, and romantic, figure. So fragile, so adorable, so strangely beautiful—and so terribly, tragically sick. But two centuries after audiences first wept for the consumptive heroine of La Traviata, as she collapsed and died beautifully in her lover’s arms, a new sick girl archetype emerged online, one for whom illness was not just romantic but aspirational, even a personal brand for millennial women.
There were hospital bed selfies, aesthetic photos of pills scattered like candy, and lots and lots of hashtags: #invisibleillness, #healingjourney, #disabledandproud. The women called themselves spoonies, after a famous metaphor offered by the blogger Christine Miserandino in 2003, when she used a handful of spoons to illustrate how even small and ordinary activities, like washing her hair, required spending down her limited supply of energy. They were tragic figures but also savvy marketers; as The Free Press’s Suzy Weiss wrote, their world was “an illness kingdom filled with micro-celebrities offering discounts on supplements and tinctures; podcasts on dating as a spoonie; spoonie clubs on college campuses; a weekly magazine; and online stores with spoonie merch.”
But among these micro-celebrities, there was one woman who was the real thing: Lena Dunham, the patron saint of the extremely online millennial. Posting from her hospital bed after she was rushed to the emergency room from the Met Gala; sharing her journey through surgeries, struggle, and addiction; spinning stories about her health journey the same way she once captured the millennial zeitgeist as the creator and star of HBO’s Emmy-winning drama Girls.
