If there is something to be learned from the words people pick for their passwords and proxies, then Lena Dunham\u2019s choice of aliases \u2013 pseudonyms that, as a public person, she has used over the years to conceal her identity when checking into rehab or ordering room service \u2013 give us a tiny glimpse into the writer and director\u2019s self-image. Among her staples, \u201cLauri Reynolds\u201d (after her mum, Laurie, with whom she is strikingly close); \u201cRose O\u2019Neill\u201d (after the American millionaire illustrator, who lost her fortune to burnout and hangers-on); and my favourite, \u201cRenata Halpern\u201d, an alias Dunham shares with readers of her delicious new memoir, Famesick, without explaining the name\u2019s\u00a0origin.<\/p>\n
\u201cHas anyone else clocked the Renata Halpern reference?\u201d I ask Dunham, who is in her apartment in New York, talking fast via video call while waiting for an egg-and-cheese bagel to be run up from the deli. On the brink of 40, she is in her dark-haired era \u2013 very Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes \u2013 which, this morning, is set against a bright orange shirt and the pale, glowy skin she describes as the single happy side-effect of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic condition of the connective tissue with which Dunham was diagnosed in 2019. Later this month, she\u2019ll return to London, where she has lived for the last five years with her husband, Luis Felber, and where she enjoys greater anonymity than in her native New York \u2013 although, she says, not enough to dispense with the aliases. (\u201cJust when you think no one cares, someone does something creepy, so you have to watch out.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Renata Halpern: the alter ego of Savannah Wingo, luridly traumatised minor character in The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy\u2019s timeless potboiler of the mid-1980s, made into a movie starring Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte which has always attracted a certain kind of smirking obsessive (hi!). Dunham screams. \u201cNo one\u2019s ever caught it! The amount of mail I\u2019ve received to Renata Halpern \u2026 thank you. Now I\u2019m going to have to change my fake names.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here we are, then, nine years after the sixth and final season of Girls<\/a>. If Dunham gravitates towards the names of hurt or traumatised women, it is advisedly so; for the last 20 years, her life has been a lot. Famesick covers it all without flinching: the early exposure that coincided with social media\u2019s wildest west period; the creative and personal pressures of running a hit TV show that would\u2019ve buckled a grizzled veteran three decades her senior; the health dramas, including a multi-year struggle to get doctors to take her endometriosis seriously; the subsequent addiction to prescription drugs; the dysfunctional and damaging sex and relationships; the challenge of dating musician Jack Antonoff; the challenge of managing actor Adam Driver; the fallout with her close friend and business partner Jenni Konner; the work; the loneliness when the success \u2013 irony klaxon! \u2013 of a show typifying the lives of a group of millennial women threw her completely out of sync with her peers.<\/p>\n In Famesick, Dunham places PTSD, loss, trauma, fuck-up and body horror at the centre of the story, and describes herself variously as oversensitive, people-pleasing and always lying in bed. And yet, reading and talking to her, one is keenly aware that, alongside this version of Dunham, is the other one: the absolute powerhouse of a woman, steely eyed, tunnel visioned, who pushed through punishing volumes of work at the highest of levels, year after year after year.<\/p>\n Denham, pictured centre, with fellow Girls cast members Adam Driver, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet and Alex Karpovsky, 2014. Photograph: Photo 12\/Alamy<\/p>\n It is, of course, this version of Dunham \u2013 the gimlet-eyed artist, ambitious to get the thing right \u2013 who wrote the book. Famesick is frank, unsparing, in parts horrifying and more honest about the experience of fame than anything I\u2019ve read. As one would expect, it is also very funny. Here\u2019s Dunham in hospital shortly before her hysterectomy, when she has been pumped full of drugs more commonly used to trigger labour: \u201cIt wasn\u2019t lost on me,\u201d she writes, \u201cthat this was the closest I\u2019d ever come to birth \u2013 but beside me was not my husband, ready to greet our bundle of joy, but only Mary, a nurse from Staten Island who wondered aloud why I was so often nude on television.\u201d (After the operation, her uterus, she discovers, was \u201cworse than anyone had imagined. It was the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, full of both subtle and glaring flaws.\u201d)<\/p>\n On accusations of nepotism, she writes: \u201cNobody watching HBO had ever heard of my parents, unless they had trawled some of the quieter corners of the Museum of Modern Art and really studied the wall tags.\u201d And this, which made me laugh out loud: \u201cWhen I met my husband, he told me about his trauma, and I told him two things I saw as facts: I was sick, and people did not like me.\u201d<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with that last one: in the early 2010s, after the first season of Girls aired, she found herself the target of obsessive online criticism. As she writes in the book, strangers online reached out repeatedly to tell her about, \u201cmy bad body, irritating voice, clearly horrific politics, inability to walk in heels, poor sense of style, and the fact that anyone \u2013 literally anyone \u2013 was more deserving of all of this than I was\u201d. A young woman with talent, opportunity, power and exposure, who didn\u2019t look as if she habitually starved herself, Dunham was extremely triggering to a large number of constituencies, from angry basement-dwellers to the legions of men who hate women, to anyone older than her who hadn\u2019t had the writing career they felt they deserved. What I find remarkable, after that first flush of fame, is that Dunham didn\u2019t stop looking at the online commentary or sharing intimate thoughts and feelings. Instead, she remained perversely, hopelessly open. Why on earth put yourself in harm\u2019s way like that?<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d she says. \u201cIf you have an addictive personality, which clearly I do, any hit of the dopamine of positivity [is welcome] and there\u2019s also a hit of adrenaline that comes from the negative. And then, because you see something negative, you want to see something positive to erase it, and you end up in this cycle. It\u2019s easy when you\u2019re young to feel the internet\u2019s a game you want to win. I remember breaking up with a guy in my early 20s and him writing an email that was really mean. And my father said, \u2018Well, why don\u2019t you just ignore him? You\u2019ve broken up, you don\u2019t have to do anything else.\u2019 And I was like, \u2018Because I don\u2019t want him to have the last word.\u2019 And then you meet up with the person and they act sweet so you kiss them, then they act mean again. And that\u2019s the relationship you\u2019re in with the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n Photograph: Chris Buck\/The Guardian<\/p>\n It is interesting to compare Dunham\u2019s experience with that of young women in the public eye today. No one is as young as she was \u2013 just 23 when she sold Girls, and 25 when it first aired. The nearest comparison would be 30-year-old Rachel Sennott, who at 28 sold, then later wrote and starred in, HBO\u2019s hit show, I Love LA (Sennott\u2019s pitch: \u201cEntourage for internet girls\u201d), now heading into its second season. Sennott has acknowledged her love of Girls and debt to Dunham, some of which occupies definite cautionary-tale territory. For young women in the public eye, now, says Dunham, \u201cI am one of the many examples they have of what [can happen] and there\u2019s a sense of people learning how much vulnerability is useful and how much is not. And I did not have any of that. I didn\u2019t have any sense about even just simple things like posing, or\u00a0style, or how to show your body, or how to show your\u00a0face.\u201d<\/p>\n She and her fellow Girls stars were like \u201clambs to the slaughter.\u201d This was driven home to Dunham recently while talking to a 26-year-old about obsessive compulsive disorder. \u201cI said, \u2018What are the things that come up for you?\u2019 I was thinking about the stuff that comes up for me, my big OCD thoughts, which are the classics, like, \u2018Am I a pervert? Am I evil?\u2019 Ideas about purity. And he said, \u2018I have very extreme cancellation anxiety.\u2019 And I was like, oh, I heard the word \u2018cancelled\u2019 in real time when someone said to me \u2018you\u2019re cancelled\u2019 and I was like, what does that mean? Like a TV show?\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markA friend overheard someone saying, \u2018Lena Dunham\u2019s been throwing sex parties, and it\u2019s really hard to get an invitation.\u2019 She was like, it must be really hard to get an invitation because she\u2019s literally always in bed watching The Bachelor <\/p>\n She has been cancelled too many times to count \u2013 she addresses them all in the book, big, small and enduringly weird. (As she writes, \u201c\u2018I saw Lena Dunham serve her dog salmon on a china plate\u2019 should not have been a headline, but it was.\u201d) In New York, rumours about her rose to the level of legend. \u201cOne of my best friends, Alyssa, was once in a book store in Brooklyn and she overheard someone saying, \u2018Lena Dunham\u2019s been throwing these really exclusive sex parties, and they\u2019re happening once a month and it\u2019s really hard to get an invitation.\u2019 And she was like, it must be really hard to get an invitation because she\u2019s literally always in her bed watching The Bachelor.\u201d<\/p>\n The fact that for years now she\u2019s been free of social media apps on her phone \u2013 Dunham writes posts which\u00a0someone else uploads \u2013 is, she says, \u201caside from\u00a0sobriety and moving more slowly and understanding my health better, a huge part of how my life can be calm and joyful\u201d. In recent years, she has only caved in, once. \u201cI\u00a0made the mistake of going to [the apps on] my husband\u2019s phone \u2013 I wanted to see what people said about our wedding picture.\u201d My hand flies involuntarily to my mouth. In 2021, Dunham married Felber, with whom she\u2019d been set up by a friend, and for the ceremony in London, wore a beautiful satin gown designed by the British designer Christopher Kane.<\/p>\n \u201cI was so excited,\u201d she says, her voice falling. \u201cI felt like it was so joyful and I wanted someone to say how cute my husband is, whatever. And I looked for five minutes and \u2013 it was five minutes I deeply regretted.\u201d<\/p>\n Famesick cuts off before the detail of Dunham\u2019s marriage to Felber. Instead, there are two, central love stories in the book: one with Antonoff, the indie rock star and producer whom Dunham dated and lived with for five years until they broke up in 2017, and a platonic one with Konner, her ex-producing partner and a woman 15 years her senior, who was assigned to Dunham by HBO as a mentor when she first started working on Girls. Konner was married with two children when she met the young Dunham and the next 10 years were an absolute corker of toxic female friendship: jealousy, manipulation, sulking, clinginess and, eventually, the death of the relationship \u2013 as well as some lovely, sunny periods of mutual admiration and support.<\/p>\n With her parents, Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham, 2016. Photograph: Nicholas Hunt\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Dunham\u2019s youth and inexperience made her vulnerable, in those early years at HBO, to the influence of older people, not all of whom had her best interests at heart. She wasn\u2019t a child star, but might as well have been; a wunderkind who, after graduating, hustled the low budget to write, direct and star in the autobiographical movie Tiny Furniture<\/a>, which after winning best narrative feature at South by Southwest in 2010, brought her to HBO\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n double quotation markMy life was built around my job. Everything else came second to that. Whereas a lot of people I was close to, their life was built around their relationships, their social life <\/p>\n It was an extraordinary position to be in at 23: given the keys first to the pilot, then to the season, then to a six-season arc of the hit show she would not only write, but also direct and star in. At the time of signing, Dunham was still living at home in the family\u2019s Tribeca loft. When she travelled for meetings in LA, she had a stuffed toy in her suitcase. She had never had a job, apart from babysitting or other Saturday-type jobs. She had no idea what was coming, and when her dad \u2013 someone she characterises drily in the book as, \u201cforever looking a gift horse in the mouth\u201d \u2013 tried to warn her things might be about to get weird, she shooed him away. \u201cI was like, \u2018You dumb old man, you don\u2019t know how the world works! You check your email once a week!\u2019 And he was right about everything.\u201d<\/p>\n As catalogued in Famesick, the first fallout was major disruption within her close friend group. Before Girls, Dunham\u2019s only plan post-graduation had been to get a job teaching video production at Saint Ann\u2019s, her old high school in Brooklyn, partly for the health insurance and so she could make \u201cweird indie films\u201d on the side. Instead, she became suddenly, outrageously successful. As her fame grew, so her closest female friends withdrew from her. She discovered dinners and weekends away that she wasn\u2019t invited to. When they did invite her to things, nobody asked her a single question about her life, either because her success was so triggering to them or because they assumed her life was perfect. In one, painful scene, they prank-called her. These parts of the book are fascinating, and brave. It\u2019s such a taboo to talk about this stuff, but of course, that\u2019s not a challenge from which Dunham has ever shrunk.<\/p>\n \u201cThe jealousy thing; it\u2019s so complicated,\u201d she says. \u201cYou never want to be the person who\u2019s saying, \u2018People are jealous of me\u2019, because then people are like, \u2018Girl, no they\u2019re not.\u2019 So I was self-conscious about it. But I was also interested in the way in which having a very clear professional arc in your 20s, when a lot of your friends aren\u2019t there yet, isn\u2019t just that they\u2019re jealous of you; it\u2019s that their life has a different central narrative. My life was completely built around my job. And everything else came second to that. Whereas a lot of people I was close to, their life was built around their relationships, their social life. People worked so that they could go and hang out, instead of hanging out a little so that they could feel better about always being at work.\u201d<\/p>\n Photograph: Chris Buck\/The Guardian<\/p>\n And my God, she worked, endless long days with responsibility for hundreds of cast and crew. Dunham\u2019s leadership style was \u201ccoper\u201d, and bravado is a big part of this story, the feeling she had, rightly or wrongly, that any show of weakness and this vast opportunity would be taken away from her.<\/p>\n double quotation markI have lots of amazing men in my life. There\u2019s plenty of them walking around. But there were years when I thought: Can\u2019t I just make things that only have women in them? <\/p>\n \u201cOne of the great lessons of my life has been, like, companies are not your friend. And companies that are publicly traded are not your friend. I\u2019m no longer interested in breaking my body for a company that gets more in tax write-offs in a year than any of the artists will make in their lifetime.\u201d It wasn\u2019t only her youth that put Dunham in an invidious position. \u201cI know lots of male wunderkinds, and they\u2019re having a different experience,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n How so? \u201cYoung men are allowed the grace of learning how to behave, and the expectation isn\u2019t that they\u2019re going to do really brilliant work and then also be kind to everyone and listen to everybody, and remember everybody\u2019s children\u2019s names, you know. I\u00a0did things on Girls like saying, \u2018I don\u2019t think we should go 10 minutes late because people might be hungry.\u2019 And that doesn\u2019t occur to men running sets, because they\u2019re given the freedom to just be creative and have a stormy mood, and go into a room and rethink something and come back out. But as a woman, you have to perform grace all the time, in a way that I\u2019m only just now startling to unbuckle from. But: I also care a lot about having a set where people are happy, and feel free and heard and unafraid. Largely because I don\u2019t want people to feel some of the ways that I felt.\u201d<\/p>\n I tell her that, given she was his boss, I found her account of how Adam Driver behaved towards her on set and in rehearsal completely unacceptable. Driver played Dunham\u2019s character Hannah\u2019s on-off boyfriend, Adam Sackler, for all six seasons of Girls, during which time he was spectacularly rude to her, according to the book. He once hurled a chair at the wall next to her. He punched a hole in his trailer wall. He screamed in her face. She smiles. \u201cAt the time, I didn\u2019t have the skill to \u2026 it never entered my mind to say, \u2018I am your boss, you can\u2019t speak to me this way.\u2019 And, at that point in my 20s, I still thought that\u2019s what great male geniuses do: eviscerate you. Which is weird, because I was raised by a male genius who would never do that.\u201d<\/p>\n She says, \u201cI have lots of amazing men in my life. Judd [Apatow] is a great hero of mine; Tim Bevan at Working Title is a huge part of my life and so is cinematographer Sam Levy. I just worked with Mark Ruffalo, the most thoughtful, sensitive, politically engaged, beautiful person. There\u2019s plenty of them walking around. But there were years when I thought: Can\u2019t I just make things that only have women in them?\u201d<\/p>\n There is another strand to the jealousy story that\u2019s even harder to write about, but Dunham goes there \u2013 and that is parental resentment. A great hero of the book is Dunham\u2019s affable dad, Carroll, an artist, who brings her coffee every morning when she\u2019s feeling sad, accompanies her to doctors\u2019 appointments and is an all-round mensch. Her mother, Laurie Simmons, also an artist, is a more complicated figure whom Dunham refers to as her \u201coriginal frenemy\u201d and whose number she has saved in her phone under \u201cLaurie Simmons\u201d not \u201cMom\u201d.<\/p>\n With her husband, Luis Felber, 2025. Photograph: Jason Mendez\/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival<\/p>\n Of Simmons, she writes: \u201cArt had always been her religion, the one thing I knew I could not touch, change, inform, or be more essential than. And now I was the story.\u201d When things got tough between them during those early days of Dunham\u2019s fame, \u201cwe never discussed it,\u201d she writes. \u201cTo name this would be to cop to an ugly emotion, directed at an even uglier target \u2013 her own child.\u201d And yet, at the same time, the family remains almost suffocatingly close. Long after Dunham moved out and bought her own apartment, she would spend several nights a week at her parents\u2019 house. \u201cEvery time my boyfriend would go on tour, every time I would have a hard day, I just reported immediately for duty to the guest room.\u201d<\/p>\n This was partly a question of delayed development brought on by losing all the milestones of youth \u2013 those incremental steps towards independence \u2013 to her brutal work schedule. It was also a response to the fact that, surrounded as Dunham was by people either hating her or sucking up to her to try to get their screenplays made, her parents were the only people who saw her as she was and would tell her the truth. \u201cI\u2019m sure people will have a lot of different perceptions about the relationships in the book, but I tried to do the most loving, not-takedown version of everyone because it was important to me that my own culpability in dynamics be explored.\u201d<\/p>\n Photograph: Chris Buck\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Well, I say, as a lesbian \u2013 a formulation with which I like to start fully 50% of my sentences \u2013 based on Dunham\u2019s account of her, we have all dated Jenni Konner, a textbook bloody nightmare of a woman: love-bombing and withholding one minute, and sulking the next; charismatic; keeping Dunham on eggshells until she gets her own way; resentful; occasionally amazing; making pointed comments about Dunham\u2019s weight; leaning on Dunham to get HBO to pay the two women the same, even though she didn\u2019t create the show or appear in it. Dunham is obsessed with Konner, desperate for her approval and terrified of her low opinion and it\u2019s a relief when, eventually, the pair go to a therapist to negotiate the end of the friendship. \u201cMy female relationships have always been very deep, and very complicated, and very romantic,\u201d says Dunham. No kidding, I say; you really do attach \u2026 forcefully. She hoots with laughter. \u201cForceful is a good way of putting it. You\u2019ll have to talk to my mom about that one.\u201d<\/p>\n A difficulty of memoir is that the writer spends years finding the right words to pick through the minefield of old relationships and then, during publicity, is invited to say it all over again, only less judiciously. Dunham clearly doesn\u2019t really want to go back over the saga of Konner, beyond thin observations of the \u201crecollections may vary\u201d and \u201cmistakes were made\u201d variety. She\u2019s aware of this, too, of course; as someone who has never had an unstudied response to anything in her life, Dunham says to me, \u201cI feel like because I am trying to be so measured in my response to you I am probably driving you mad.\u201d This is correct, but I get it. These things are hard.<\/p>\n To mitigate criticism of her old mentor, Dunham goes in hard on herself, itemising all the ways in which Konner must\u2019ve found her needy and annoying. She does the same when writing about the end of her relationship with Antonoff, flaming herself for being difficult and having too many needs. My opinion about this is that, in both cases, and based on the evidence of the book, Dunham\u2019s neediness was at least in part an anxiety response to the way these people were treating her; in other words, the withholding, the manipulating, the gaslighting: these things will drive a person crazy. Which isn\u2019t to say that Dunham isn\u2019t quite capable of being a nightmare in her own right.<\/p>\n Dunham with her ex, Jack Antonoff, 2017. Photograph: Jeff Kravitz\/FilmMagicWith former creative partner, Jenni Konner, 2017. Photograph: Michael Loccisano\/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s really helpful feedback,\u201d says Dunham. \u201cAt the time, I thought I\u2019m giving [Antonoff and Konner] all of me. Everything that I have to give is yours and what more can I do?\u201d Looking back, she understands this was a category error. \u201cThat\u2019s an essential misunderstanding of what the other person is asking of you.\u201d<\/p>\n She lives in London, now, on the other side not only of those first 10 years of fame, but of the terrible health problems that came with them. Dunham was in almost constant pain during the final seasons of Girls, due to multiple ovarian cysts from endometriosis and the undiagnosed Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. She had many unresolved, exploratory surgeries, culminating in the hysterectomy at the age of 31 that sent her into menopause. She developed a dependency on Klonopin, an anti-anxiety drug, that she puts down to lax prescribing by a doctor and that she overcame after a stint in rehab. In one horrific scene, a doctor gives her an excruciating, manual pelvic exam and bursts a blood-filled cyst. In another, a doctor removes 37 lesions from her bladder, liver, abdominal wall, and spine. He tells her he doesn\u2019t even know how she\u2019s been walking.<\/p>\n These parts of the memoir are astonishing and were the hardest to write, she says, not least because they coincided with her relationship with Antonoff. The pair met in 2012 and after a whirlwind romance, moved in together and things rapidly deteriorated \u2013 Antonoff, on tour with his band, Bleachers, was barely around and when he was, wasn\u2019t helpful. \u201cHe spent a lot of time telling me about the kind of person I was, and it wasn\u2019t the good kind,\u201d she writes. After her hysterectomy, he sauntered into the hospital two hours late bearing a bunch of \u201cbodega flowers\u201d, mumbling an apology and saying he had texted to see if they could wait for him. From the book: \u201c\u2018Yeah,\u2019 my father said, looking like he was considering grievous bodily harm for the first time in his life. \u2018Surgery is like a train, not a tour bus. You either make it, or you don\u2019t.\u2019\u201dShe got better. She split up with Antonoff. After a period of burnout, someone sent her the pilot for a new HBO show called Industry to see if she had any ideas about who could direct it. It was a lightbulb moment; Dunham, in desperate need of a change, offered to direct it<\/a>, flew to the UK, and the shoot \u2013 which involved lots of lovely young actors who reminded her of how she had been before fame fell on her head like a house \u2013 felt like a renewal. She met her husband. She made the movie Catherine Called Birdy<\/a> \u2013 a perfect film, in my view \u2013 and then the semi-autobiographical TV show, Too Much<\/a>. She has multiple projects in the works with her production company and its deal with Netflix.<\/p>\n London has been good for her, she says, not least because she thinks British women age differently. \u201cThey lean into their eccentricity as they get older. And it\u2019s not just artistic people \u2013 it\u2019s a woman who you see walking her dog on the road in the countryside in funny boots. It\u2019s very different in New York, where I feel like I grew up with women who had a lot more agita about ageing. It\u2019s really cool to get older with [the British model] as an influence.\u201d<\/p>\n Set design: Oscar Sanchez at Dry Clean Only Studio. Stylist: Anna Su. Hair: Peter Butler. Makeup: Matin Maulawizada. Manicure: Sonya Meesh. Above and main image: top and skirt, by D\u00f4en; earrings, index rings and diamond and gold cuff bracelet, by Alexis Bittar; gemstone silver cuffs, Leandra Medine for Aflalo; socks by Falke. Black outfit: jacket, by Fruity Venus. Polka dot outfit: dress, by Mac Duggal; index ring, by Alexis Bittar; opal pinky ring, by Haverhill; all other jewellery, Dunham\u2019s own. Yellow outfit: dress, by Willy Chavarria. Photograph: Chris Buck\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Being with Dunham has been a steep learning curve for Felber, meanwhile, who is not a creature of Hollywood but of north London. \u201cWhen I first met my husband, he was just a British boy who had not been engaged in all of the feminist dialogue I had, and when I said something like, \u2018You know, there are things about my job that are really hard as a woman\u2019, he said, \u2018Well, it\u2019s hard to be a person.\u2019 And I looked at him and said, \u2018Never say that to me again. Never. Do not even try it.\u2019 And now he starts everything with, \u2018Well, you know, as a woman in Hollywood \u2026\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Felber has also had to make adjustments around Dunham\u2019s closeness with her parents. \u201cHe\u2019s like, \u2018You cannot talk to your parents on speaker phone once we\u2019re in bed for the night. Four of us in the bed! You\u2019ve gotta take those calls out in the hall.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n She is happy, she says, and has been in a great place for well over half a decade. What does that mean?<\/p>\n \u201cIt means that when things come up, I\u2019m capable of handling them. I\u2019m capable of expressing my own needs, boundaries, requirements. I get to work regularly yet not in a way that breaks me down. I have amazing, really supportive people around me. It makes me sad sometimes that it required such a big reshuffle. I guess what I wanted to capture in the book was: right life, wrong time,\u201d she pauses. \u201cIf Girls had all appeared when I was a fully formed person, at 33, I would\u2019ve understood how to handle that work, that place, those gifts, those people in a different way. But it was, basically, that I got everything I could\u2019ve dreamed of at a time when I had no ability to handle it. And it required a rebuilding, and I\u2019m very happy with where I landed, and very lucky. That\u2019s just life, I guess.\u201d<\/p>\n