“She was the firstborn,” says Lena Dunham of Ingrid, her eight-year-old Mexican hairless pug. “I was single. I was living in New York. I was by my lonesome. It was post-breakup. I need a little buddy and a companion.”
A friend who knew Dunham had a soft spot for hairless creatures—her mother is allergic to cat hair, so the family had kept hairless felines—sent her photos of a hair-free pup residing at A Purposeful Rescue, a Los Angeles shelter. People were, Dunham says, “losing their minds on the internet over this dog”—perhaps a slightly hyperbolic description from the woman over whom people actually have lost their minds on the internet. Some waffling followed, but eventually the dog—“the size of a loaf of bread”—was flown across the country in a blue onesie covered in a banana print, and that was that.
Photographed by Emilia Staugaard
Photographed by Emilia Staugaard
“The first night, I tried to put her in a crate, because I know that’s the correct dog-owner thing to do,” says Dunham. “And she cried, so I took her out, and she fell asleep on my chest and she slept for 14 hours. And she’s slept for 14 hours in that position every night ever since.”
Of course, there have been changes in Dunham and Ingrid’s lives in the years they’ve spent together: a transatlantic move; a marriage (for Dunham); a bestselling memoir, years in the making; a rehearsal-dinner speech heard round the world. Most important of them all, however? The adoption of a new companion—the five-year-old Cornichon, a half-Havapoo, half-Chinese Crested dog—by Dunham and her husband, the musician Luis Felber.
Cornichon (or Corni, as he’s known) entered the household (which now also includes pigs named Victor, Cherry, Lila, and Leslie) about one week after the Dunham-Felber nuptials. Dunham admits to haunting the adoption message boards, where she encountered “Dobby” (as Corni was then known) living in the Welsh countryside. He was “this little guy with no hair on his body but a perfect bob haircut,” says Dunham. “And somehow, in the fever blush of early marriage, I got Lu to rent a car and drive up seven hours to Wales.”
