{"id":633945,"date":"2026-04-27T11:23:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T11:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/633945\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T11:23:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T11:23:09","slug":"famesick-by-lena-dunham-review-when-celebrity-causes-side-effects-autobiography-and-memoir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/633945\/","title":{"rendered":"Famesick by Lena Dunham review \u2013 when celebrity causes side-effects | Autobiography and memoir"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of last year, Netflix released\u00a0Too Much \u2013 a sickly, indie-sleaze romcom about an American transplant who falls for a troubled British muso. It was created by Lena Dunham and her musician husband Luis Felber, and apparently loosely based on the couple\u2019s backstory. It felt, to many critics, like second-screen<\/a> fare, decidedly Lena Dunham-lite. Was this really the same person who had given us the spiky, self-absorbed world of Girls, the millennial Sex and the City complete with brutal situationships, toxic besties and, er, one of the main characters accidentally smoking crack?<\/p>\n

Famesick sheds almost all the Richard Curtis-isms to find that old, controversy-courting Dunham alive and \u2013 if not exactly well \u2013 then learning to cope with it. Her second memoir (Not That Kind of Girl was published in 2014) charts the chronic illness and seemingly unending stress that came to define her 20s and 30s after she had snagged her own HBO series aged just 24. The afflictions described across its 400 pages include \u2013 though are not limited to \u2013 OCD, colitis, the connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, endometriosis, early menopause, PTSD and addiction to both opioids and benzodiazepines. At one point, Dunham accidentally sets herself on fire; at another, she panics about how Vogue will cover up the impetigo on her face, \u201ca waterfall of golden blisters, turning a sickly green as they dried\u201d. The book is scattergun and sometimes lacking in self awareness (who cares that Dunham had to give her designer booties up, like contraband, when she entered rehab?). It\u2019s also undeniably frank and exhaustive: a\u00a0lifetime of therapy condensed into something you\u00a0could conceivably rip through in a weekend.<\/p>\n

double quotation markMany inappropriate men walk in and out of Dunham\u2019s life<\/p>\n

Dunham\u2019s health doesn\u2019t initially dominate, but \u2013 like a chronic illness itself \u2013 it slowly and quietly becomes the focus. She describes it all in unvarnished but terrifying fashion, from the digestive tract she had treated \u201clike a clogged drain I was snaking\u201d \u2013 surviving on energy drinks and diet supplements on the set of Girls<\/a> \u2013 to her use of, and later dependence on, Klonopin, \u201con and off, for years, like a lover I wasn\u2019t particularly attached to, could take or leave\u201d. There\u2019s a horrifying retelling of an episode in which Dunham punctures her eardrum with a cotton bud that would go on to inspire a plotline on Girls. As Famesick continues, the injury feels almost trivial when compared to Dunham\u2019s constant gynaecological issues, or the run-in with a doctor that brings back long-buried, \u201csickly waves\u201d of memories of being sexually abused by a babysitter. The darkness increasingly creeps into the celebrity world she continues to inhabit, as with the Met Gala that Dunham attended in 2018 while on release from rehab, \u201cwan and haunted \u2026 champagne I couldn\u2019t drink circulating like a joke I wasn\u2019t in on\u201d.<\/p>\n

Many inappropriate men walk in and out of Dunham\u2019s life, like bit-part players in a TV show. The two that stand out are her former longterm partner, musician Jack Antonoff, and her Girls co-star Adam Driver, neither of whom come out of Famesick particularly well. Antonoff lavishes her with tchotchkes and promises of marriage and children, before \u2013 as Dunham tells it \u2013 slowly tiring of her medical issues and drug dependency. Driver, meanwhile, appears as an allegedly unpredictable, often angry man who may not have been doing much acting in Girls: \u201cI remember doing a fight scene with Adam \u2026 when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer \u2013 until finally, Adam screamed, \u2018FUCKING SAY SOMETHING\u2019 and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. \u2018WAKE THE FUCK UP,\u2019 he told me. \u2018I\u2019M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.\u2019\u201d Once the show had wrapped, the pair never spoke again.<\/p>\n

Lena Dunham, Zosia Mamet, Jemima Kirke and Allison Williams in Girls. Photograph: PR Company Handout<\/p>\n

The girls of Girls are described in loving but hazier terms, apart from Jemima Kirke \u2013 \u201cpart Lolita, part Keith Richards\u201d \u2013 who is faithfully drawn in a way that maybe only a childhood friend could be. The female friendship that really propels her through the making of the show, it turns out, is one with its producer Jenni Konner, who morphs from best friend to acquaintance and back to stranger as the book nears its end. There is so much going on here that it feels like there\u2019s scarcely space for Dunham to adequately explain the episode that saw her and Konner put out a statement in 2017 defending Girls writer Murray Miller against sexual assault allegations (denied by Miller) made by actor Aurora Perrineau. But, where she does address it, her sense of shame and the feeling she may have harakiri-ed her career is clear: \u201cI did not decide to kill myself,\u201d she writes, \u201cbut I did think it was time to die.\u201d Similarly, she apologises to anyone alarmed by her description in Not That Kind of Girl of touching her sibling\u2019s genitals as a child, although she does think that some saw it as an opportunity to take her down. She writes about dealing with the resulting online furore in the midst of a trip to the Netherlands to promote the book: \u201cHad you told me I\u2019d still be getting those comments 11 years later, I would have downed the rest of the bottle of pills and chosen that plane as my final resting place\u201d.<\/p>\n

It feels fair to say that Dunham doesn\u2019t always make it easy to feel sorry for her, though. There are moments big and small where her decision-making seems questionable \u2013 continually moving house, passing up career opportunities when she desperately needed them, deciding to carry a blind, ailing dog around in a tote on a TV set. Elsewhere, weighty names are dropped \u2013 from Oprah to Nora Ephron \u2013 in a way that sucks the oxygen out of the other words on the page (see also: needless cameos for a pre-fame Safdie brothers and \u201cTayTay\u201d \u2013 Taylor Swift \u2013 featuring in a long, long list of acknowledgements).<\/p>\n

And yet, there\u2019s an honesty and a fluency to her prose that makes her hard to dismiss. Illness, she writes, \u201cwasn\u2019t just a town I was passing through, but a city that I was going to pay taxes in\u201d; when Girls first took off, it was \u201ca miracle to me that I managed to speak cogently about the work, when I had to tell my feet to walk\u201d. On parenthood, and a failed round of IVF, she is at her most truthful: \u201cThe irony is that knowing I cannot have a child \u2013 my ability to accept that and move on \u2013 may be the only reason I deserve to be anyone\u2019s parent at all. I think I finally have something to teach somebody.\u201d<\/p>\n

Towards the end of Famesick, Dunham meets Felber, and the London era that inspired Too Much begins. Met Gala invites fall away and friends\u2019 weddings populate her calendar instead. It\u2019s easy to see now why she wrote that series, and retreated into something less jagged than the reality of her own past decade. But it\u2019s clear \u2013in Famesick as in Girls \u2013 that Dunham is able to write about the painful parts of life in a way that feels both\u00a0intimate and universal. Perhaps the real horror of this book (dedicated to, among others, Sharon Tate, Whitney Houston, Caroline Flack and Liam Payne) isn\u2019t so much that celebrity can make you sick. Rather, it\u2019s that no amount of fame or money can keep you safe once it does.<\/p>\n

Famesick by Lena Dunham is published by 4th Estate (\u00a318.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the end of last year, Netflix released\u00a0Too Much \u2013 a sickly, indie-sleaze romcom about an American transplant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":633946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-633945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/633946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}