{"id":1729,"date":"2025-09-04T16:46:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T16:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/1729\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T16:46:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T16:46:10","slug":"lena-dunhams-second-book-famesick-will-be-out-next-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/1729\/","title":{"rendered":"Lena Dunham\u2019s Second Book, \u2018Famesick\u2019, Will Be Out Next Spring"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve followed the career of Lena Dunham<\/a> and read some of her most poignant writing<\/a> for this magazine, you\u2019re likely aware that she\u2019s not afraid to bare her personal struggles \u2013\u00a0with relationships, with health, with extra-long nails<\/a>. An ability to combine profound reflection with insight, grit and humour is one of the hallmarks of the director, actor and writer\u2019s non-fiction work. \u201cMy nurse,\u201d she wrote in an essay about her hysterectomy for Vogue, \u201cis a model-gorgeous woman, sardonic and odd, like the sidekick on a TV show who producers pretend is less stunning by slapping spectacles on her.\u201d<\/p>\n

This spring, 10 years after the release of her best-selling memoir Not That Kind of Girl<\/a>, she will publish her second book, Famesick, a nonfiction work about how health troubles have intersected with her life in the spotlight. \u201cI felt a little bit like the detective in the movie who has the newspaper clippings and the red strings,\u201d she tells me of the process of writing the book, which involved going back into her emails and diaries, \u201ctrying to put it together and understand exactly what had happened and how it had happened and why it had happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, the book is not just a medical mystery; it\u2019s also a study of ambition, the desire to please \u2013 especially as a young woman \u2013\u00a0and what happens when those impulses run up against physical limits. Dunham first found success at just 23 years old, when her debut feature, Tiny Furniture, was released in 2010; Girls<\/a> would follow in 2012. At the same time, her health struggles (coupled with substance abuse issues) were compounding.<\/p>\n

It was hard to hit pause on all her obligations and desires, she says: Writing for film and television was her \u201cversion of going to the Olympics \u2013\u00a0it doesn\u2019t matter if you have a cold, it\u2019s the Olympics.\u201d The breakthrough finally came when, as she puts it, \u201cthe override function stopped, and I was no longer able to do the suppression that was required to participate in daily life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The year 2018, she says now, was \u201cthe year that did not exist,\u201d as though she had stepped \u201cthrough the looking glass\u201d into an alternate reality. \u201cYou start to feel like, I\u2019m no longer in the land of the living, and will I ever get to go back there?\u201d (Not coincidentally, the image on her new book\u2019s cover \u2013 a photo by Anna Gaskell that Dunham has loved for years \u2013\u00a0is a reference to Alice in Wonderland.)<\/p>\n

Dunham feared that airing what was happening would lead people to perceive her as something of a liability: \u201cWe live in, for lack of a better word, an ableist, capitalist world, where your ability to produce is so connected to the idea of your worth.\u201d Now, she says, she has come around to the idea that \u201chonestly expressing how hard things have gotten, and then the fact that you moved through and beyond them, makes you actually the opposite of a liability.\u201d She also took comfort \u2013and inspiration \u2013\u00a0from writers who have contributed to the broader canon of work in this genre, like Leslie Jamison<\/a>, Melissa Febos<\/a>, TV producer Barbara Gordon \u2013\u00a0who wrote the best-selling memoir I\u2019m Dancing as Fast as I Can<\/a> \u2013\u00a0and Joan Didion (particularly Blue Nights).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019ve followed the career of Lena Dunham and read some of her most poignant writing for this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2693,489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-1729","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-arts-lifestyle","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}