Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images

Back in 2018, Twitter user @buzzkillary made and posted a 29-slide PowerPoint titled “Lorde and Jack Antonoff — An Emotionally Broken Journey.” The presentation proposed a deeply researched theory that Antonoff had cheated on then-girlfriend Lena Dunham while working with Lorde on her album Melodrama in the years prior. At the time, Dunham and Antonoff had been publicly broken up for four months, and Antonoff had slammed any rumors about him and Lorde as “dumb heteronormative gossip.” Still, as the subtitle of the PowerPoint pointed out, “Lorde and Jack Antonoff 100% Were/Are Being Shady, Are Def Boning if Nothing Else, Lena Sucks Too But This is Bullshit and The People Deserve The Truth.” Eight years later, it seems like @buzzkillary may be getting what they wanted in the form of Dunham’s new memoir, Famesick.

In Famesick, Dunham writes in detail about her relationship with Antonoff and how it ended. At some point, an unnamed “teen pop star” who’s become attached to Antonoff enters the narrative. When Dunham was visiting her dying grandmother in the hospital in the summer of 2016, Antonoff FaceTimed her from his home recording studio, where he was, as Dunham puts it, “ensconced with a teen pop star I was too oblivious to be jealous of.” In the ensuing weeks, while Dunham was dealing with pain from what would later be identified as a large hemorrhagic cyst, she writes, “All I could do was rock back and forth in the bathtub, trying to stay out of the way of Jack and the young singer.”

Lorde and Antonoff were working on Melodrama together for most of 2016, an era that Dunham documents in Famesick since it coincided with her wrapping Girls. She was dealing with a lot of health problems at the time, which were probably not helped by the fact that there was a young starlet hanging out with her partner in her own house. “My boyfriend was locked in the back room with the teen pop star, whose needs seemed as massive and complex as my own, and who called me ‘Aunt Lena’ when I hobbled into the kitchen with my walker to grab another bottle of green tea,” Dunham shares. “Aunt Lena”?!

At one point during this period, Dunham returns to her apartment to find the teen pop star “sprawled across our sectional couch, weeping into Jack’s lap,” while he tells her, “Your teens are for experimenting.” Later, when Dunham suggested to Antonoff that his relationship with the singer was “striking an odd note” and that “she wanted something from him that he couldn’t give,” he tells her, “You’re just mad because she doesn’t want to be your friend.” Dunham concedes that this is true, but personally, I am ready to physically fight Jack Antonoff.

Dunham shares that her relationship with Antonoff began to really come apart in 2017, around the time she fell into a flirtation (and eventually a sexual relationship) with someone she knew from her childhood. She writes that, while she had never stopped flirting with people, she had always “observed careful boundaries.” “If I’d wanted to look, perhaps I may have seen that Jack was not observing them as closely as I was,” Dunham notes. She then acknowledges that the internet “made some pretty amazing PowerPoints on the issue” of Antonoff’s alleged boundary crossing. In fact, said PowerPoints — again, she does not mention Lorde or @buzzkillary by name here — were “so convincing they had me rethinking events that I myself had been present for.” She was so impressed that she recalls actually DM-ing the person behind the PowerPoint in order to “prove I was in on it, that I could take a joke, that I wasn’t, in fact, morphing into a pile of packing peanuts.” Instead of a warm reception, Dunham received an invitation to be on a podcast, which she declined.

It seems like Dunham is keeping her lips zipped about who exactly the teen pop star was while promoting her book — when the New York Times asked specifically if it was Lorde, she joked that, actually, it was the 1950s phenom Connie Francis. That being said, I think Famesick has given us enough information to return to the sacred texts (the PowerPoint) and make a few new additions. We definitely need an entire slide dedicated to “Aunt Lena.”

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