Celebrities: They’re just like us! They just have easier ways to make money during pandemics. Right now we’re most of us stuck at home, trying to stay safe and trying to stay sane, which often means trying out new projects: learning musical instruments, reading giant books, trying new recipes, seeing how long we can cry in one jag. Famous musicians have been playing songs (or even holding concerts) from their living rooms. Meanwhile, Lena Dunham is writing an online novel.
The A.V. Club picked this one up, namely that the oft-contentious creator and co-star of Girls (as well as a briefly scene-stealing Manson Family member in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) got hired by Vanity Fair to write a very internet kind of tome. Called Verified Strangers, it will be published one chapter a day, Monday through Friday, starting Monday (i.e., today). It follows a thirty-something woman who’s “addicted to dating” but decides to only go out with “verified strangers,” which is a jargon-y way of saying friends of friends.
But wait there’s more: Each chapter will end on a cliffhanger, and readers can vote what happens next by visiting Vanity Fair’s Instagram account. Dunham says she’ll write accordingly, describing the book as a “modern choose-your-own-adventure romance novel, written exclusively for quarantined singletons and the people who love them.”
You can read the first chapter here, and it’s not yet clear how long Dunham will keep it up, though it should be interesting watching her write a novel essentially in real time, not entirely unlike this classic Monty Python sketch.
(Via The A.V. Club)