Lena Dunham Announces Memoir ‘Famesick’ Chronicling Years ‘I Thought I Wouldn’t Survive’

Lena Dunham’s forthcoming memoir Famesick has been in the making for seven years, the writer and director shared in an announcement post on Instagram. Set for publication by Random House on April 14, 2026, the book will reflect on the most tumultuous decade of her life, spanning from 2010 through 2020.

“A decade in which my life changed profoundly and permanently, in which nearly every strand of my DNA reconstituted itself,” Dunham shared. “But it’s also about illness as teacher, body as tattletale, our societal relationship to women on the edge, and the conditions that create art vs. the conditions that create happiness.”

More from Rolling Stone

Dunham first started working on Famesick following a stint in rehab. Having been out for 30 days, she said, she was “in the cloud of delirium that comes with new sobriety — the world was suddenly so LOUD, and I thought that meant I knew what I was hearing.” The process later revealed itself to be far more complicated. “If you’d told me then that the writing process would take me through the next seven years, I probably would have ripped up my contract and chucked my laptop in the tub,” she said.

The decade-long period that anchors Famesick encompasses the five-year span of Girls, the hit HBO series that ran from 2012 through 2017. In her statement, she compared the experience of being in Hollywood to “a goth girl at the cheerleader’s slumber party, wondering if she can call her mom from the landline without being overheard,” as though she was trapped on the sidelines. She used writing to break away.

“Throughout my twenties, writing was all pure immediacy,” Dunham continued. “I’d have an experience, put some version of it through the filter of fantasy, and it would be playing on television six months later. Writing was how I processed as it was happening. I hadn’t lived enough life to deal with it in retrospect. I didn’t understand the value of time — to heal us, to make sense of where we’ve been, to actually change the patterns we keep replaying in our work and our art.”

This is one of the lessons Dunham doesn’t feel “ashamed of having had to learn” anymore, one of the three key points of the memoir alongside “illness and addiction and heartbreak” and “years of impossible magic and years I thought I wouldn’t survive.” She describes the book as having been “one of my most steadiest companions,” to the point that setting a publication date for it brought her a feeling similar to grief.

“The gift this book has given me over the last seven years was that it was always there,” she said. “No matter what changed — my location, my body, my mind — there was a constant: this place I could go to try and make sense of the story.”

Best of Rolling Stone

Lena Dunham Announces Memoir ‘Famesick’ Chronicling Years ‘I Thought I Wouldn’t Survive’

Tags: