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Tuesday, Dec 11, 2012 2:00 PM UTC

Lena Dunham gets snippy with Gawker

The "Girls" star is not pleased that the media outlet shared part of her $3.7 million book proposal

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Topics: Lena Dunham, Gawker, Media, Books, literature, Writing, Celebrity,

Lena Dunham gets snippy with Gawker (Credit: Evan Agostini/invision/ap)

Last Friday, Gawker published ”Girls” creator Lena Dunham’s proposal for her $3.7 million book deal. The book, “Not That Kind of Girl,” is pitched as a funny lady-advice book about life and relationships. The assumption is that whatever Dunham might lack in experience she makes up for in wit.

But last week Gawker got ahold of the proposal, publishing it and annotating 12 choice lines (one of which mentions that her “vegan dinner party” was featured in the New York Times) with a dose of snark. Dunham’s lawyer asked Gawker to take the proposal down (and it did). But now Deadline reports that Dunham wants the 12 lines to be taken down, too.

Deadline notes that “this is hardball“:

This is hardball: Harder represented himself to Gawker’s attorney as “litigation  counsel for author and actress Lena Dunham [and] Lena Dunham has retained an attorney to demand that Gawker remove 12 quotes from her book propsal from our site,” an insider tells me.  (I hear Random House isn’t bitching to Gawker, only Dunham.)

Instead of complying, Gawker has instead responded like so:

Update: Lena Dunham’s personal litigation counsel Charles Harder has contacted Gawker to relay a demand from his client, Lena Dunham, that we remove the above quote from our web site. In order to clarify our intent in quoting the above matter from Dunham’s proposal, we have decided to append the following commentary: The quoted sentence demonstrates that Dunham is incapable of conceiving a rationale for writing that doesn’t serve the goal of drawing attention to herself.

To many, it might seem that the wildly successful Dunham is being sensitive over the lines, but after all, she writes for “glory” and not money, and Gawker’s unflattering piece does not give Dunham either.

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Prachi Gupta is an Assistant News Editor for Salon, focusing on pop culture. Follow her on Twitter at @prachigu or email her at pgupta@salon.com. More Prachi Gupta.

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