Lola Kirke is an actress (Sinners, 2025), country singer, and, most recently, the author of her memoir, Wild West Village (2025/Simon & Schuster). Lola shared in the memoir that when she was 10-years-old, her 15-year-old sister Emi (Jemima Kirke) asked Lola to pose in her “underwear, holding a [Marlboro Medium] cigarette”.
Lola pleaded, “But I’m only ten, don’t you think-”
Nonetheless, the risqué portrait was completed and hung, framed in gold, in the foyer of their West Village brownstone. Of the portrait, Lola wrote:
The naked ten-year-old smoking version of me hung framed in gold in our foyer for about a decade, until we moved. [...] Our home was part house, part museum, curated expertly by my mother.
Lola wrote that throughout middle school, she had a friend “from down the street” named Tilly. Lola shared that throughout middle school, she would dry hump Tilly, which Lola described as a game, where Lola fantasized that she was “an unspecified businesswoman in love with her boss [i.e., Tilly] and his son [i.e., Tilly]”.
All through elementary school, I was either an unspecified businesswoman in love with her boss and his son (my friend Tilly down the street played both), or a sort of simple country wife. While the former game involved a lot of dry humping [...]
In addition, after Lola shared that she used to play “an assortment of sex games with Barbies”, she wrote that she and Tilly exhausted “most” of their “playdates unknowingly enacting the plots of bad pornos”. Interestingly, Lola wrote that she didn’t really consider Tilly to be a friend. Why? Because Lola and Tilly were “essentially fucking”.
In addition, in terms of (pre) teen girl-on-girl affairs, Lola shared that she and a girlfriend “made out once behind the port-a-potties at a wedding”, and she and Erin played: “an eighth-grade game of spin the bottle”.
Lola related that when she was a child, her family spent their summers, specifically “[...] Augusts topless on private beaches, doused in tanning oil (no SPF), [we] were heathens.” Thus, unsurprisingly, while at sleepaway camp, a fellow camper put the following note in the “Warm and Fuzzy” jar: “Lola walks around naked.”
At her sister’s Sweet Sixteen, Lola “danced all night in Mary Janes and a ripped slip dress a few sizes too big.” Consequently, the straps of the slip dress “kept falling, baring” Lola’s “flat chest to the rest of the party.” Of her pre-teen public nudity, Lola wrote: “But what did I care?”
A year after discovering her father’s infidelity, which was when Lola was in the 7th grade, Lola started spending more time with Bettina Richards Goldblatt during the summers in East Hampton. Bettina’s home cost “Twelve million dollars,” which caused Lola to write: While we were wealthy, we weren’t Bettina wealthy.
While in East Hampton, Bettina would pay Lola compliments. For example, Bettina complimented Lola on her lips, because, per Bettina, Lola had “DSL” (i.e., “dick-sucking lips”). However, per Bettina, she had “nicer eyes and hair” than Lola. Interestingly, Shayla, Bettina’s nanny, purchased Bettina a bra that “generously gathered her chest fat into breast-like mounds.” (In “Oblivion”, a post on Medium (Feb 7, 2022), Lola wrote that Bettina “slept in a sports bra to prevent sagging”.) Of Bettina’s breast-like mounds”, Lola wrote: “She was becoming so grown up, just like I wanted to be and secretly felt I already was.”
One summer in East Hampton, after Lola “wandered upstairs to discover a trail of girls from Bettina’s day camp lined up outside her bathroom door”, Bettina introduced Lola to the pleasures of (teen) masturbation (via a waterfall).
“You guys,” I announced myself, “what are you doing?”
“Shhhh!” they all hissed through retainers I envied.
[Per “Oblivion”, Lola learned from one of the girls, “Bettina’s doing a waterfall.”]
Suddenly, Bettina flung the door open. “Ugh! I’m so refreshed!”
“ `Cause you showered?” I asked, confused.
“No, idiot.” She grabbed my wrist and yanked me into the bathroom, then lay down in the tub. Spreading her legs wide on either side of the faucet, she turned it on, letting the water spill into her crotch. “But you don’t want it too hot!” she admonished.
Within seconds, her hips were pulsing in a strange rhythm, and she was laughing maniacally [...] [Lola wrote in “Oblivion” that Bettina “began to moan.”]
Bettina had learned the masturbation technique from “Samantha from Sex and the City”. And, by the way, per “Oblivion”, the trail of girls were waiting for their turn to masturbate, because after Bettina grabbed Lola’s wrist and yanked her into the bathroom, the girls protested, “No fair! She’s cutting!”
After dinner that evening, Lola told Harry, a boy one year her senior, about Bettina masturbating, to which Harry exclaimed, “Dude. Masturbation is THE BEST. You gotta try it.” Lola took Harry’s advice and lowered herself into her “antique bathtub”. The water “pressure had only two crude modes: off and full on.” With her “legs spread and lying back” and a few seconds after she turned the water on, her body “cramped and seized until it entered a fugue state.” Within minutes, Lola was “at it again.” Lola wrote in “Oblivion”, that “[...] after a few moments [of masturbating], I began to feel as if I had been murdered. A sweet, beautiful murder.
And just like Bettina, Lola was addicted to having orgasms. Lola even started masturbating via the jets in Bettina’s pool. When Lola was alone, she would use her hand. Lola even masturbated while watching films. Lola wrote:
I spent the rest of the summer either doing exactly this or figuring out ways I could. My interest in Bettina’s snacks was quickly replaced by an intense romance with the jets in her pool. Pretty much any time I was alone or shrouded in darkness, my hand was in my pants. Even during films like What a Girl Wants and The Life of David Gale. I was sick. An addict.
In “Oblivion”, of her addiction, Lola elaborated: “I spent hours doing what I later learned was fucking myself into oblivion. I imagined what it would be like to [sic] it with somebody else.” And Lola wrote that despite the fact that she was only 12, her “sex drive was an 11 out of 10.”
In the 6th grade, Lola enrolled in the SoHo Child Actor’s Studio and soon after, Dina, the studio’s teacher, became Lola’s manager. In an effort to get an agent, Dina had Lola memorize a contemporary monologue. Lola wrote: “The monologue she selected was from a Tennessee Williams one-act play.” To Lola’s dismay, the monologue was of a child prostitute.
Initially, Lola’s career “went nowhere”. Consequently, she had to “hone” her “skills in plays at school and camp”. However, to Lola’s dismay, despite being a preteen, she was “cast as even more ladies of the night”:
A Thai streetwalker in the ensemble of Chess.
Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s sex slave in the middle school’s Greek festival
“Mozart’s loose wife in Amadeus.”
“The silent, philandering one in Strindberg’s The Stronger.”
“[A] pregnant teenager in a play about Troubles in Ireland.”
By the end of middle school, Lola had secured her “very first screen test.” But she had nothing to wear “that would pass for a “regular kid”, because Emi had been dressing Lola “for years” in miniskirts and fishnet stockings. (Lola lost the part to Kristen Stewart.)
In addition to (pre) teen nudity, (pre) teen girl-on-girl hookups, and (pre) teen masturbation, a recurring motif in Lola’s memoir is age-gap relationships.
Lola shared that when she and her sisters were in their youth, at one of her family’s legendary Christmas parties, one of her sisters offered David Bowie her hand as an ashtray; however, surprisingly, Bowie declined.
I wrote surprisingly, because I previously related that Nikki McWatters wrote in the Huffington Post piece “Predatory Teenage Girls” (December 13, 2012) that “Lori Maddox, a famous teenage groupie from LA, is alleged to have lost her virginity to David Bowie at the age of 13. [And s]he was Jimmy Page's steady girlfriend while still underage." But in a Thrillist post titled "I Lost My Virginity to David Bowie, Confessions of a 70s Groupie" (Nov 3, 2015), Maddox stated that she was actually 15 when Bowie "de-virginized" her, which she described as a "beautiful" event.
In terms of requited age-gap relationships, Mino (Domino Kirke), Lola’s then-15-year-old older sister, had a brief affair with a movie star. During the affair, Mino “fled” with the “movie star via his private jet.” However, after a “stern call” from Simon Kirke, Mino’s father, the movie star returned Mino “just in time for her Sweet Sixteen”. Lola wrote that the Sweet Sixteen was “celebrity packed”, but that Mino’s movie star was “banned from the event, [however] he sent sixteen dozen roses in his stead.”
Simon Kirke, in addition to being the father of Lola, Emi, and Mino, is the co-founder of the rock group Bad Company. On the “Nancy Spungen” episode of The C-Word podcast (July 8, 2021), Lena Dunham and Alissa Bennet said that 16-year-old Spungen bragged that she had sex with every member of Bad Company but that she only gave hand jobs (simultaneously) to two members of the rock band Aerosmith. As we wrote earlier, Lola wrote that when she was in the 7th grade, she “discovered a thread of secret emails” on her father’s computer, which revealed to her that “on the road, he led a double life”.
Despite Lola's age, Emi appeared to have a thing for Lola and smoking. One evening while hanging out in the hot tub on the Amagansett estate of a “gorgeous” pre-teen “heir to a vast tabloid fortune”, 17-year-old Emi “slinked”, topless, into the hot tub with the heir’s older brother and asked, “Do you smoke?’ Lola replied, “No. We’re twelve.” “But the Strokes smoke,” Emi said. Consequently, 12-year-old Lola “urgently” reached for the cigarette, because she “loved Julian Casblancas” - the then-24-year-old lead singer of The Strokes. (By the 10th grade, Lola’s mother would “dangle a Marlboro Light before” her, and “sometimes”, they smoked together.)
One school day, Lola mentioned at the dinner table that she needed help with her ninth-grade term paper on Charles Manson. Consequently, Emi exclaimed, “You have to interview Gustava [Vincent Gallo]!” Emi knew Vincent Gallo well, because when she was an (approximately) 18-year-old freshman at the famous Rhode Island School of Design, Emi had “willingly” taken time off from school to go on vacation with (approximately) 42-year-old Vincent Gallo. Unfortunately, Gallo was of little help to Lola, but after speaking on the phone for three hours, he offered Lola the starring role in a music video he was directing. Emi said no.
Next, Lola asked Poppy, Bea’s grandfather, “Could I please interview you about Charles Manson? Lola wrote that, despite Poppy’s age, she “loved” him, he was her “dream man”, and she “wondered if there was something romantic between” them. Lola wrote that Poppy was her “type”, because: “[...] he was dependably dressed in a three-piece suit and doused in Chanel No. 5. He loved to sing Marilyn Monroe songs, and he winked a lot. My dream man.”
Eve, a famous actress, used to help Lola with her acting. Eve and Jude, Eve's 16-year-old son, lived uptown, and they lived on a “sprawling” Long Island estate; however, a divorce forced Eve and Jude to move to the West Village with Lola’s family. Soon after, Lola “[...] became Jude’s girlfriend.”
Blanche, “who was a bit older than” Lola, took 15-year-old Lola out for Manhattans after Lola’s performance in her “school’s neofuturist production of Macbeth”. At the bar, Blanche asked Lola, “What’s Jude’s penis like?” Lola lied, “I’ve never seen it.” Blanche must’ve sensed that Lola was lying because Blanche continued to ask Lola about the size of Jude’s 16-year-old penis. Eventually, Lola informed Blanche that Jude’s penis was “perfectly nice”, which apparently was an understatement, because “One dark winter evening later that year,” Blanche informed Lola that Jude’s penis was “huge”. Blanche had found out about Jude’s penis size from Emi. Like Lola, Emi had first-hand knowledge about Jude’s penis, because, per Blanch, that prior summer, (approximately) 19-year-old Emi performed oral sex on (approximately) 15-year-old Jude in the Kirke’s pool house.
“So, you did not tell me that Jude’s penis is huge!” she said with a strange guttural laugh [...]
“Who told you that? I [Lola] replied, feigning nonchalance.
“Emi,” Blanche said. “You know she blew him, right? In your pool house? Last Summer?”
In a fit of advanced rage, Lola called Emi at Rhode Island School of Design and repeatedly called Emi a “cunt”.
In the chapter “Little Lolita of West Fourth Street”, Lola introduced the readers to Ray. “Ray had played guitar in a semi-successful ‘90s rock band,” but when the band disbanded, Ray did a “brief stint” as Lola’s live-in manny. 15-year-old Lola was often left alone with Ray; so, she “hosted sleepovers with [her] girlfriends every other night and smoked ceaselessly inside” while Ray flirted with Lola’s friends.
One morning, Lola “awoke to find Zora blushing in her underwear.” Zora informed Lola that she was smiling because Ray had kissed her while she was (nude) in the shower.
Zora said, “I was in the shower, and he came in, and he just…kissed me. Oh! And then he asked me where the rolling papers were.”
And somehow, Ray had gotten hold of Zora’s bra, because: “A few weeks later, the housekeeper found Zora’s oversized bra stuffed in Ray’s sheets.” However, Lola did not say how Zora's “black lace” bra got into Ray’s bed. Of Zora’s bra, Lola wrote:
What do we do?” my mother asked [...]
“Probably give it back?” I suggested.
“You’re right. It does look expensive,” she agreed.
Very interestingly, Lola shared that as she was writing her 10th grade English paper on Lolita, she felt connected to the book, she shared that the Colombian seamstresses whom worked in her mother’s basement called her Lolita, and she related that when she was 13, her mother gave her “an original poster of the Kubrick film version.” And Lola wrote that she: “[...] thought it was a good thing to be a sexually precocious young girl, and who was more that than Lolita?” Thus, it appears that Lola agrees with novelist Robertson Davies' assessment of Lolita as: “[...] not [about] the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but [about] the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child”.
Of Gideon, Lola wrote that he: “[...] had been a heartthrob movie star since he was a teenager, but he no longer looked like it [...] he was now almost unrecognizably bearded and fat.” One day, at Lola’s house, “Gideon was sprawled across a sofa”, and he announced to no one in particular, “I want pot.” Lola’s mother replied, “Oh, Lola loves pot,” which was true, because Lola shared that, at the time, she was “smoking at least eight times per day.”
To fulfill Gideon’s request, Lola “ran upstairs two at a time”, grabbed her “stash”. Subsequently, Lola, in a “hot pink American Apparel catsuit”, and Gideon walked to Gideon’s loft where Lola “rolled a joint on the kitchen counter”, they smoked it “until it was gone”, and Lola “wafted to the center of his loft and began to dance for him” as she “considered what it would be like to kiss him.”
Although, despite the fact that Gideon was a movie star, Lola still held the stance that older men should “on no occasion wear sandals.” Lola realized that her “seduction had worked” after Gideon said, while “patting his lap”, “Come sit here.”
During Emi’s second year at the Rhode Island School of Design, which was when Lola was “just starting high school”, Lola went to visit Emi, whom had a “large poster of a movie about a pretty child heroin addict” hanging on her off-campus apartment wall. After Emi “did a line” and Lola smoked (a cigarette), they went to a house party where Lola sat “on a twin bed, falling in love with [Gary] a local.”
Lola wrote that Gary was like “the whole solar system”; however, at the end of their conversation, Gary wrote his number down on a piece of plywood with the caption: “Call me when yer [sic] 18”, which Lola brandished “like a trophy.” Later, at the party, Lola learned from Emi that Gary had recently broken into her apartment, but Emi reassured Lola that, “It was fine. We had sex.”
Like Paris Hilton and Julia Fox, Lola went to nightclubs in high school too. However, unlike Paris and Julia Fox, Lola went to nightclubs with her mother too. Lola wrote:
Being underaged, I’d discovered the secret to getting in wasn’t having a fake ID but looking like you didn’t give a shit.
Lola starred in Amazon Prime’s Mozart in the Jungle (2014–2018), but when she first learned of the role, she wrote that “the whole thing sounded dubious”; however, her “imagination went wild” after she learned that Gael García Bernal “was attached to star”, because she spent her adolescent masturbating to Bernal whom is 12 years Lola’s senior.
One afternoon [...] my agent called [...] he told me how a website that typically sold books was now making TV shows. Except the TV shows would be played not on an actual TV but on your computer. The whole thing sounded dubious [...]
When he mentioned that a foreign film star I’d spent my adolescence getting off to was attached to star, my imagination went wild.
Surprisingly, on the “Nancy Spungen” episode of The C-Word podcast, after Dunham said that 16-year-old Spungen bragged that she had sex with every member of Bad Company, Dunham failed to mention that Lola and Jemima’s father was a co-founding member of Bad Company. Of course, Dunham and Emi (Jemima) were co-stars on Girls. However, Dunham did write a blurb for Wild West Village:
Lola Kirke has captured more than just her own wild and specific New York upbringing. She has captured the yearning of a generation [...] She is a wise, witty, and unsparing writer.” - Lena Dunham
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