Imputing predatory motives to a 7-year-old girl and assigning a role of victim to her sister, who apparently doesn’t feel victimized in the slightest (Dunham reports that Grace laughed at the allegations) seems more predatory and abusive than anything that Dunham describes in the book, which also includes descriptions of masturbating in bed next to her sleeping sister (who hasn’t?) and bribing her with candy for kisses (come on).

Taking advantage of how easy it is to inflame onlookers both right and left with the mere suggestion of “abuse” is a below-the-belt tactic unworthy of any real critic, but of course that’s not the game we’re playing here. Williamson and his ilk seem to think that memoirists write about their lives because they get a thrill from putting their lives on public display – in order to brag, to list accomplishments, or to justify their actions. And so, to his mind, the appropriate way to critique a memoir is to critique those lives and accomplishments, and to question the justification of those actions.

But Williamson seems not to have read Dunham’s book very thoroughly, because he missed an excellent, pithy analysis in her introduction of what the point of memoir, hers included, truly is: She is telling stories, her stories. She has to do this, she says, to keep herself sane.

Most people who write in the first person feel similarly; they must, in order to keep going in a climate where people like Williamson can manipulate public opinion against them so deftly simply by quoting selectively from their work.

If you’re on the fence about whether Dunham is an “abuser,” you should probably read her book, and not a right-wing blogger’s cherry-picked version of its contents.  Forming an opinion before doing so does a disservice not only to Dunham, but to all women who’ve had the courage to describe their lives as they truly are, despite the risk that critics will use any underhanded tactic imaginable in order to silence them.