Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Random House
Lena Dunham was a wreck. She was rich, famous, widely scorned, and in possession of a body that innovated ways to fall apart. Cruising into the sixth and final season of Girls — the TV show she made and that made her — she was in and out of the hospital, plagued by endometriosis and other ailments that repeat surgeries couldn’t fix. No matter what happened, Dunham could not seem to help posting through it, her public persona one of infinite jesting confession. She treated Twitter like a group chat, albeit one with really mean friends. She piled side projects on top of her main project, ricocheted between coasts, got hooked on Klonopin, and suffered in private and in public. In Famesick, her memoir and second book, Dunham connects the dots: Writing from the vantage point of someone who has accepted chronic illness as a fact of life, she describes how her exploding career imploded her body — a disintegration that, by her late 20s, had her walking “hunched over, protecting my belly like a wounded animal.” It’s a Hollywood story written in blood (and vomit and pus) by someone who, during a medical procedure, once had to listen to “a nurse from Staten Island who wondered aloud why I was so often nude on television.”
Next month, Dunham will turn 40. Her youth — our youth — is passing into the rearview mirror. She was 23 when her film Tiny Furniture won a big prize at South by Southwest, 24 when HBO picked up her pilot, and 28 when she published her first book, a collection of personal essays titled Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” which reportedly earned her a more than $3.5 million advance. In Famesick, she shades this parade of triumphs with a parallel timeline of physical and psychological pain, from the acute colitis she developed while writing the 2012 pilot to disordered eating to the shingles and impetigo that burbled up before her Vogue cover in 2014 — and throughout, her ongoing gynecological nightmare, “the scraping and biopsies and cysts,” the blood clots “so big at times that they floated out of me and bobbed to the surface of the bathtub like cherry tomatoes.” Neither her diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective-tissue disorder, nor her 2017 hysterectomy would heal her for good. Dunham no longer expects anything to do that. The book is a document of her slow realization that “illness wasn’t just a town I was passing through, but a city that I was going to pay taxes in.”
It occurred to me while reading Famesick that this may be the first Dunham work built on deep hindsight. I’d gotten used to hearing about her life events right after they happened. Although she has always transformed her material more than she was given credit for, the work Dunham made in her 20s could trick you into thinking she was smearing raw life onto the page. This was what made Girls, with its casual nudity, bad sex, panic attacks, and millennial rat-a-tat dialogue, so immediate and infuriating. If you were around her age (and I was), it could feel exposing, or annoying, even as it made you laugh. She was criticized for not including people of color in her show, but such was the nature of her project; if the names checked in Famesick are anything to go from, her social world was simply a white one. I remember feeling insulted and slightly violated when an older male relative told me that watching Girls helped him understand millennials. How presumptuous, I thought. I now see Dunham’s gift was such that she could make him believe he was getting the whole story. In a since-canonized moment from the Girls pilot, Dunham’s wannabe-writer avatar, Hannah Horvath, tells her parents she thinks she could be the voice of her generation, or at least “a voice of a generation.” Dunham — who credits her Gen X writing and producing partner, Jenni Konner, with suggesting that “a” — never could’ve known how that gag would haunt her.
Dunham’s time in TV has trained her well. She knows to foreground the relatable. She finds it even in Famesick. Although most young women are not also writing and directing a series that makes them a household name, Dunham finds a way to hang her experiences on a scaffolding of normal feeling, describing the kinds of nausea and social panic one can experience even without an HBO deal. Dunham, a Manhattanite raised in the bosom of the art world, famously made Hannah someone more provincial than herself: a midwestern transplant with bad style. In her memoir, she does something similar, understating her own drive and determination while dwelling on her moments of weakness. We don’t hear much about struggles to write or to come up with ideas. In Dunham’s world, work just needs to happen, so it does. The book dwells on, sometimes wallows in, long descriptions of bodily pain and creeping feelings of rejection and indebtedness to other people — even when they’re the guy who inspired Adam Driver’s Girls character, a filthy loser “who would barely let me sleep over after he fucked every hole I had and probably some I didn’t.”
Dunham now believes her health became so bad in part because she didn’t think she could tap out. Admitting she needed time off would be the same as admitting she didn’t deserve what she had. So when people called her fat or privileged, Dunham responded. She doubled down. “It seems to me, looking back, that I thought the cure to such widespread disdain — some of it personal, some of it political, a lot of [it] the result of toxicity breeding only more toxicity — was not to show less of myself, but to show more,” she writes. She realizes now that she was “just begging” for validation. The book is crowded with relationships at various stages of ill health, such as the tension between Dunham and her mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, who finds herself suddenly defined more by her daughter’s career than her own. (At one point, Simmons storms out while Dunham is making a speech at, of all places, a fundraiser Dunham calls “the Endometriosis Ball.”) Blowback from her first book — in which she tells a breezy story about examining her sibling’s naked body when they were both small — led to a long estrangement from that sibling. (Her sibling would eventually transition, becoming Dunham’s brother, Cyrus, and they repaired their relationship.) There’s Dunham’s sweet romance with then-boyfriend Jack Antonoff, whom she describes fondly, and selectively, even while recounting how their relationship collapsed. And then there’s her tango with Driver, whom, it’s fair to say, Dunham discovered; she describes his volatility, his ability to allegedly throw a chair or punch a hole in his trailer wall, and implies that they stopped just short of sleeping together. She claims that by the time Girls wrapped in 2017, they had barely spoken to each other in three years for reasons she professes not to understand. (Their power imbalance is hardly addressed; she was, after all, his boss.) The old urge to confess is alive.
Her omissions are noticeable as well. At times, she sounds as if she ran a passage past her PR team, as in her tidy summary of Allison Williams, who played Marnie on Girls, as “one of the most polite, reliable, and morally correct people I’ve ever known.” She says Anna Wintour is “lovely and very funny and has given me less grief than all the chubby women in Hollywood combined”; she never says which chubby women she means. Then there’s the way she writes about “the one thing in my career, in my life, about which I felt — feel, still — genuine shame”: the time, in 2017, when actress Aurora Perrineau accused Girls writer Murray Miller of rape and Dunham and Konner issued a statement defending him. Dunham doesn’t name Perrineau or Miller or even describe what her and Konner’s statement was about, leaving the reader to investigate on their own. While she calls their words “careless, blithe, and damaging,” she can’t resist trying to explain herself; she writes that she had just been released from the hospital after her hysterectomy and had been “high for so many days” when their statement went out. (Miller denied Perrineau’s accusation and was never charged.)
Dunham gives herself the most leash when it comes to Konner. A more experienced screenwriter whom HBO assigned to “supervise” Dunham during the pilot process and who soon became her long-term partner in crime, Konner dazzled the younger woman with her ready humor and confidence. Dunham writes that as her fame, money, and responsibilities alienated friends her own age, she leaned more and more on her new mentor. They start a production company together and launch more projects and a newsletter, the doomed Lenny Letter. Dunham will come to regret putting all her eggs in this basket. In their good moments, she writes, Konner “was everything: the sister I no longer had, the mother I could no longer be sure was thrilled to see my name on her caller ID, the public that might adore me or might just shoot me a savage glare, depending on the day. I’m sure that was too big a job to give anyone. But I also know I was too young to understand what I could and couldn’t expect, and I know that she was older.” She implies that Konner enabled her disordered eating and was impatient with her frailty, that for Konner, it always came down to the work she could get out of Dunham.
As Dunham’s health bottoms out, the series ends, and she packs off to rehab for her Klonopin addiction, it finally dawns on her that their partnership must end. She writes that when she tells Konner she needs a break after wrapping their widely panned post-Girls project, the short-lived HBO series Camping, Konner retorts, “Or you could take the rest of the year off. Two years, even. And then I guess my kids can just pay for their own college education.” (This was after Dunham had helped her get a pay bump during Girls contract negotiations.) When she tries to explain to Konner how the mix of overwork and chronic ailments was making her sicker, she remembers Konner replying, “But you keep saying you’re sick. Like you still believe it’s physical.” Their final conversation takes place in a therapist’s office. They dissolved their production company in 2018.
It’s not a spoiler to say Dunham is doing better now. Married, living in London and Connecticut, and eight years sober, she is making films and TV and writing about clothes and beds and pet pigs on Substack. Can her work survive a pivot to coziness? Nothing she has made since Girls — including last year’s series, Too Much, which was inspired by Dunham and her husband’s love story — has touched it for visceral feeling. In January, she published a blog post about her social-media manager, admitting she hasn’t allowed herself to post directly on Instagram in years. She writes in Famesick that she was once tortured by her desire to “have this big, impossible life and be loved by everyone I met in the process.” It doesn’t seem like she’s given up on the latter. But she has allowed her life to get a little bit smaller.
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