As Gen Z Reevaluates Girls, Zosia Mamet Looks Back on Her Career in New Book

It's been 13 years since the premiere of the HBO series Girls, but Zosia Mamet, who played fast-talking virgin Shoshanna Shapiro, still gets recognized as her character.

"I loved every second of playing her. There were no downsides," Mamet tells New Times of her breakthrough role. "There were no bad days with Shoshanna."

Lena Dunham's seminal show attempted to capture the millennial experience — including delayed adulthood, narcissism, and success — through its four 20-something main characters. The hundreds of thinkpieces it spawned — both complimentary and critical — made it feel like the biggest show on cable. (It wasn't. Girls' viewership was relatively small compared to other HBO shows, especially juggernauts like the Sopranos or Game of Thrones.)

By the time the show wrapped in 2017, the public's patience with Dunham, the show's creator and star, seemed to wear out. The criticism leveled at the show appeared to be more about hating her than offering good-faith commentary. But the passage of time has led to a reevaluation, with Gen Z rediscovering the show as a time capsule into what is now known as the "indie sleaze" era.

"It sort of makes me feel closer to it again," Mamet says of the show's renewed popularity. "It just makes me feel so happy to know that it's landing with a younger generation, that the work we create is living on in a true way, that people are finding it funny, they're finding escape in it, they're finding comfort in it; that this younger generation feels seen by it in the same way that we hoped people would when we were creating it."

Mamet, the daughter of playwright and film director David Mamet and actress Lindsay Crouse, and self-professed "B-minus nepo baby," has had steady work since her breakout show ended in 2017. Last year, she starred opposite Stephanie Hsu in the Peacock series Laid and as Pampinea in Netflix's loose adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio's the Decameron. She also recently released a collection of essays, Does This Make Me Funny?, which has already received positive reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.

"I didn't come up with the title, actually," she says of her book. "I was having a hard time thinking of a title. I felt that was a very heavy decision to make, and I kept thinking of things that I liked, but didn't quite fit. I was talking to my very dear friend and collaborator, Catherine Burrell, about it, and I let her read the intro. Obviously, she knows me very well. When I told her the titles that I was considering, she suggested it."

For Mamet, making the title a question leaves room for interpretation. "I write about it in the epilogue, that so much of my life I feel like I've finished everything like a question, as kind of a caveat to protect myself," she adds.

In the lead-up to the book's release, Mamet shared excerpts with several publications, including the Cut, which published her essay on diving into New York club culture. Meanwhile, the Hollywood Reporter published her essay on the time she quit a high-profile job after being berated by a director. Internet sleuths scrambled to figure out who the perpetrator was, but the investigation missed the point entirely. Mamet's takeaway from the experience is about advocating for herself.

"In a day and age of everything being readily available to us information-wise, we've all sort of become internet detectives, and I think there's something fun about that," Mamet says of the reaction to the essay. "So, no, I'm not surprised."

From battling anorexia to sexual assault, not much was off the table for Mamet when it came to writing the book.

"That's not the way I think of something when I'm trying to create," Mamet says of putting limits on herself. "I feel like doing the first thing that comes to mind, and if it's open, what comes out, comes out. I also really trusted my manager, who was the first person to read any of the pieces, and my editor to be the ones to discern what was too much, or maybe not enough, and push me forward or back in ways that they felt they needed to."

As far as what readers take from her essays, Mamet says that's up to them.

"My husband always says the reason that we tell stories is to help people feel less alone, and I think sometimes that comes in many different shapes and sizes on any given day," she shares. "Maybe it's that they need to feel seen in something, maybe they need something that's going to make them laugh, maybe they need something that's going to help them cry."

Does This Make Me Funny? By Zosia Mamet. Viking. 256 pages. Hardcover; $28.

An Evening With Zosia Mamet. 6 p.m. Sunday, September 14, at the Hub at the Janet and Richard Yulman Campus, 5950 N. Kendall Dr., Pinecrest; 305-667-6667; tbam.org/the-hub. Tickets cost $38 via ovationtix.com.