In the aftermath, Dunham writes that “I did not decide to kill myself, but I did think it was time to die. That distinction may not make sense to everyone, but it will make sense to a lot of people. I was not going to take the decisive action to end my life. But I was going to cease fighting to survive by avoiding food, by drinking almost no water, through the carelessness of mixing pills and by acting – for all intents and purposes – like I was dead already.”
Though not explicitly stated, the reader could infer that Konner was the one driving this statement, and that Dunham may have felt manipulated. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that, throughout Famesick, Konner is presented as domineering, aggressive and emotionally abusive. Eventually, after a co-therapy session that Konner walks out of within the first 10 minutes, Dunham announces that their friendship has reached the end of the road. The reason this memoir took seven years, writes Dunham, is that Konner’s “one request” was that she didn’t write about her immediately. “I know how you work, and that you will. But please, just not right away.”
Claims that she sexually assaulted her sibling are ‘wilful misperception’
Another storm from her first memoir was prompted by the admission that, aged seven, “curiosity got the best” of her and she “opened” her then-one-year-old sister’s vagina to see if it was similar to hers. Later, she recalls bribing her sister with sweets for kisses, touching herself while the duo shared a bed, and comparing herself to a “sexual predator”. Ben Shapiro’s Right-wing publication Truth Revolt then ran the headline: “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister.” Crucially, the article included a typo, which changed Dunham’s age from seven to 17, adding a completely different hue to the story.
At the time, Dunham wrote a statement in Time Magazine apologising for minimising sexual abuse with the flippant use of the words “sexual predator” and expressing “dismay” for how some readers had interpreted the memoir.
In Famesick, she is notably less conciliatory. “I was already a Right-wing punching bag for my work with Planned Parenthood and the Obama campaign,” she writes. “But if I ever wanted a lesson in the way that a wilful misperception can escalate and become a fun-house mirror for people’s sense of their own righteousness, for their unbridled rage, this was it.”
She argues that children are “inherently innocent, and yet their imaginations are endless and deranged”, and explains that writing about her then-sister’s anatomy was prompted by the fact that they had always presented as male as very young (Cyrus later wrote about his gender reassignment, becoming Lena’s brother, in 2019).