At Hackney’s Empire Theatre on Mare Street, east London, I’m seated next to Lena Dunham’s biggest fan. To my left, as it turns out, is also Lena Dunham’s biggest fan. The apex millennial in her mid-forties in front of me – jabbing a message into her iPhone SE, wired earphones attached to nothing, hair wrapped up “We Can Do It!”-style – is Lena Dunham’s biggest fan.

So is the 25-year-old who held the bathroom door open for me; so is the woman in her thirties peering over the curved tier above the main floor, trying to catch the first glimpse of the prophet. Interspersed throughout the wall of cheeky bobs are the men who date Lena Dunham’s biggest fan, and the men who are hoping to as a reward for attending this event. They’ve come from a WB Yeats lookalike contest – thin, spindly men wearing thin, wiry glasses.

They are shrinking into their seats. Dunham arrives on stage; the bobs rise in a chorus, glasses of rosé thrust into the air. These zealots are here for a conversation between the actor, writer, director and producer and Britain’s agony aunt, Dolly Alderton, about Dunham’s new memoir, Famesick.

Tickets were vanishingly scarce; an entire city of Girls girls crashed the theatre’s website on release day. To them, Dunham is an oracle for understanding the kinds of women immortalised in her cult television show – women she describes as “self-absorbed, yet deeply self-aware”, “simultaneously connected and isolated”; women, you might say, much like the women here. And, like any devout adherent, each believes she harbours a singular, mystical connection with the writer.

“Nobody gets Lena Dunham like me and my closest friends, who are all geniuses constantly teetering on the edge of loserdom,” read one recent post on X. “Lena Dunham is to me what David Lynch is to all of you,” ran another. Dunham’s women are distinct from the lady literati of other writerly fanbases.

Joan Didion’s acolytes are markedly more sombre: introverted, austere. You imagine them ordering a bourbon at the bar, forgetting your name at a party – a shivery woman with a Vogue cigarette poised between willowy fingers. Their workout routine resembles that of a Solovki prisoner.

Florence Given, a feminist influencer, meanwhile, has marshalled a legion of yoga teachers and Fleetwood Mac devotees who might happily drop £400 on a Ganni coat with flapping collars. Flossie, Lottie, Poppy, Lola, Immy. Beautiful girls reminding you that women don’t owe you pretty.

Girls girls are a little grubbier. “Who here has been to rehab?” Dunham calls out. A raucous cheer rings back. “I loved it there, because they wouldn’t even give you a razor,” she says.

Thunderous applause. These women felt represented, for the first time in their lives, by Dunham and Girls, Alderton tearily tells the crowd. The bobs nod.

They relish the brazen confessionalism of her work, the luxuriant self-indulgence of her declarations. When Dunham reads an extract from her latest book – about lighting her clothes on fire by accident to the point she burns her own nipple off – a pair of friends in front of me exchange a knowing smile. Dunham last toured 11 years ago for her first memoir Not That Kind of Girl, but only one pocket of the room will remember it – and this generational skew is the evening’s humming undercurrent.

“Who here is a millennial?” Dunham asks in her opening monologue. There are hoots, hollers. Gen Z? The loudest cries ring out.

Gen X? A sturdy – if quieter – whoop. When Dunham reveals she is turning 40 in a month, the woman beside me levitates from her seat.

Dunham herself is acutely aware of the spread, dutifully dividing her time between the kids’ table – talking Taylor Swift – and affectionate jostling with Alderton over S Club 7 and the Spice Girls. I google Geri Halliwell afterwards, to feel included in their jokes. In the pilot episode of Girls, in which her character Hannah Horvath accidentally smokes opium, Dunham delivers one of the show’s most quoted lines: “I don’t want to freak you out, but I think that I may be the voice of my generation – or at least a voice of a generation.” It now seems she is the voice of three.

What her work has come to represent is not merely the twee optimism of 2012 New York, but the more universal drudgery of the years in which one lurches from girlhood into womanhood. For Gen Z, Dunham’s nakedness – both literal and emotional – feels newly sanctified at a moment when most other female celebrities cannot admit to a broken-and-reset nose, or to a bloodstream half-composed of GLP-1s. This Girls revival, for them, counters a wider crisis of honesty, and Dunham – burned-off nipple and all – offers a welcome reprieve from studied perfection.

As Dunham’s girls spill out onto Mare Street after the show, they glow with the beatific sheen of devotees emerging from darshan. Clutching their copies of Famesick, a pair ahead of me lean into one another. “I really think she and I would be the best of friends,” one says. Her friend nods, presu