In the most compelling way, Lena Dunham’s forthcoming memoir, “Famesick,” is a lot. The book, which she worked on for nearly a decade, includes her carefully wrought and provocatively unstinting reminiscences about the offscreen drama behind “Girls,” her 2012-17 HBO show that became a true millennial touchstone. That drama involved her complicated, confusing bonds with her co-star Adam Driver and her co-showrunner Jenni Konner, as well as Dunham’s toxic tango with fame and the media. She, as you may remember, generated a huge amount of discourse, and was aggressively scolded for being un-self-aware, an oversharer, overly privileged, not attractive enough, self-absorbed — you name it. (Much of that negative attention now scans as blatantly misogynistic and wildly disproportionate, but as Dunham, who was only 24 when she created the show, freely admits, she has always had a knack, maybe even a need, for making herself a target.)
A dispatch from the eye of the “Girls” storm alone would’ve been enough for a meaty memoir. But Dunham also writes, in a wry and rueful voice, about her struggles with painful chronic illness (Dunham has endometriosis and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome); drug addiction and rehab; sexual and romantic relationships ranging from the deeply nurturing to the disturbingly abusive; and, ultimately, finding a measure of self-acceptance in her creative life and with her husband, the musician Luis Felber. As someone who has read a truly absurd amount of celebrity memoirs, I can tell you that in rare fashion Dunham goes deep. And, as I found out, she did the same in conversation, too.
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Whose name are you most anxious about popping up in your inbox to say they’ve read the book? Any time you get feedback from someone you’ve written about that you love — or have loved — that’s always stressful. But honestly, having my parents read it was the most anxiety-producing part of the process. Because I knew they were going to fact-check while also looking at it in a protective-parents way. So when they popped up in my inbox, that was a curl-up day.
What was their response? My father said one of the most amazing things, which is, “It’s hard for me to understand why anyone would want to publish a book such as this.” And the “such as this”: He said some people are going to connect to it and feel it’s for them and some people are going to say, Why won’t she shut the [expletive] up already? I thought that was a pretty accurate assessment of the options.
The book is amazingly candid, and it’s coming from someone who has often been misunderstood. Do you hope that you will now be better understood? One of the reasons I took so long to write the book is that it was important to me that I not put it out from a place of saying, Here’s a referendum on how I feel that I have been perceived. Because every two years there’s a new article about a woman that’s like “Blank is finally telling all,” “Beep is finally herself,” “ABC in her own words,” and in a lot of ways, it’s about keeping a career arc alive. I wanted to make sure in publishing the book that I knew what my own aims were. I don’t like revenge writing. I don’t like writing that’s like, Here I am, kiss my ass. I’m at peace with the fact that there are people who will never understand, and they don’t need to.
At the beginning of the book, you write about your name and how it started to carry negative connotations. For you, not even for other people. What did your name represent? Myopic millennial thinking or hapless feminism or man-hating or liberal twit-dom or ——
It’s a long list! It’s a long list, and there were people who maybe shared my politics and my lifestyle but were irritated that I was talking. I remember, and this is not in the book, I was going to vote with my father. I’d been campaigning for Obama. It was 2012. And he said, “I don’t know if I want to go vote with Lena Dunham.” I was like, My father feels like going to vote with me is going to signal something. He’s like, “I don’t want to go and have it be a whole thing.” That’s your father. Who’s like my best friend in the whole world. But he was saying, basically, Can you go around the block and vote on your own? That was the moment when I understood something’s going on here. “Girls” had only been on the air for six months at that point.
In hindsight, what do you think the intensity of the loathing of you was really about? I’d be lying if I said I haven’t spent time thinking about this. I’m going to say something that sounds like a cop-out, but I can only phrase it this way: I have annoyed people since I was so small. I was an annoying kid. I was a tryhard. I was loud. I didn’t always know how to move through space with other kids in a way that wasn’t a little off or disruptive. But, also, that was coupled with intense rage about the female sexuality on the show. There was the intense rage about my body, which is so crazy to look back on now, because I was this little slip of a 26-year-old. Had I known my own powers, I would have behaved very differently. And then my own way of moving, whether it was through media or how I handled myself online or even in my writing, didn’t quell it.
What did you mean a second ago when you said you would have behaved differently if you’d known your power when you were 26 and a slip of a person? Great zeroing in, David. I guess what I’m saying is that the feedback that I got, which was like, This person is an eyesore — that’s how I perceived myself. The show was about somebody who had a negative self-perception and made romantic and platonic choices that reflected that. I looked at a lot of photos and diaries to put the book together, and I felt sad that that person didn’t have a sense that — it’s not even just about being normatively beautiful, but I was full of light. And as I looked at the photos over the course of the show, it’s such a cliché, but the lights just went out.
What do you think it says about you that even in the face of so much positive affirmation you were also getting back then — you had a popular show, a lot of opportunities, making good money — the negative stuff is what sticks? It’s a human nature question. One friend of mine who read the book was like, “You reflect so much on the relationships that were painful, but where are all the people that loved you and supported you and took care of you?” I mean, they’re all in the acknowledgments. But I was born with such a healthy dose of guilt, shame and self-hatred, which is in direct contrast to my almost pathological need to continuously express myself. Those things are dancing all the time.
You were born with self-hatred? Not to get too woo-woo, but sometimes I feel like there’s so much ancient generational stuff.
Like Shirley MacLaine style? I’m not going to go that far, although I respect Shirley MacLaine’s work, and who hasn’t tried past-life regression? But, you know, there’s pride mixed with this incredible desire to self-immolate and self-erase, and I don’t ever remember not having it. I don’t look at my parents and go, You guys did this to me. It’s a little bit of an existential mystery.
I have a theory about this existential mystery of yours. If David Marchese can explain me to me, it would help me a lot and save me a lot of money.
You can make the check out to cash. But before that: Through this period where there was all that painful noise from the outside world, you were having complicated relationships with the people with whom you were working and you were chronically ill. How did your health affect your relationships with the people around you? One of the reasons the book is called “Famesick” is because the two most corrosive forces in my relationships were celebrity — how it perverted the space around old relationships, how it colored my ability to understand new relationships — and illness. Illness, like fame, can make you contract into self because physical pain is one of the most selfish feelings that exists. All you want is to be out of it. Also, illness is scary to people. They want a narrative in which you had a cold for three days, you recovered; you got appendicitis, they took it out. Somehow my health picture kept getting less clear, not more, which also makes it very hard for other people to empathize with, because it seems abstract, amorphous.
They lose sympathy, or think you’re making it up. Yeah, and also we live in a society where the highest value for people is to be able to go and go and go. It took me a long time to understand that, actually, I could have a fragile body and a strong mind and have a lot to offer without betraying my own physical self over and over again.
In addition to being chronically ill, you had multiple traumatic bodily experiences, which I’m sorry you went through. Thank you.
You write about being molested by a babysitter. You write about abusive sexual relationships. All those experiences with your body had emotional ripples. So how did your sense of your body affect your own sense of self? Those experiences that you describe created a distance between myself and my body that then made it easy to separate myself from pain and to keep moving, but made it hard to tune into my own body and identify what was happening to me physically. I once had a really interesting conversation with [the physician] Gabor Maté. He was interviewing me for a book about the intersection between illness, addiction and trauma, and I asked him: “I understand it happening once when I’m a little kid. Why does this keep happening to me?”
What is “this”? Finding myself in situations where I am suddenly not in control of what is happening to my body. And Maté said: “Lena, once you have that experience as a kid, it’s like the weak wolf that gets picked off the pack. Someone who is looking for that sees you.” It was so beautifully put. These experiences build up in you, you develop more distance from your body, people who want to cross boundaries are able to identify that you are someone who might not know how to deflect that. I needed some narrative cohesion to understand why there was this consistent pattern of feeling violated, and that was really soothing to me. Then once you get sick, especially gynecological illness, which is still not the most beloved topic in American culture, your feeling of yourself as a vital young person is extremely diminished, and your feeling of yourself as a viable partner is extremely diminished. It is also a crazy hormonal ride. So there’s a lot. I hoped that in the book I was able to capture those different buckets in which illness separates you from yourself.
The psychological paradigm that you just described, where people saw something in you that they could exploit, I want to know how that fits with descriptions you give in the book of being in abusive sexual relationships. You had feelings of wanting to be degraded or were seeking out situations in which you could confirm the bad feelings you had about yourself? There was something about recreating a situation I had been in that was not my choice with some measure of what appeared to be my own free will — that somehow, if I executed it right, I could erase the thing that had happened before, and maybe I will be loved for my ability to perform well in this dynamic. Now there’s kink and sub-dom stuff, but when I was 24 and these things were happening to me, I thought I was alone. And of course, these things have existed since the beginning of time. Now we have the language for people to identify their desires in a healthy way. We also know that sometimes people use this language to excuse behavior that is not consensual or not healthy. And in the book, I wanted to capture the complexity of placing yourself in a situation that you knew was at least to the outside world unsavory and trying to find some shred of dignity or romance in it. The saddest thing for me, looking back, was the idea that I thought at the other end of it there might be something resembling love.
Might there be ways in which the dynamics that you just described, in terms of personal or sexual relationships, had parallels with your relationship with the public? Yes. It’s like, I’m going to lean into what people think I am, but I’m going to do it my way.
But leaning into a thing that you know makes you feel bad! One hundred percent. And I think the thing that concerned my parents is, Is this book another iteration of that? It’s like the girl in the horror movie where you’re like, “Don’t go down the stairs!” She’s going down the stairs. You know why she’s going down the stairs? Because she’s a slut and she’s going to get killed. And what was interesting was that those dynamics, which in life were scary and lonely, would be recreated on television and people thought they were funny and sexy! I didn’t write Adam’s character to be a romantic hero. By the end, everyone was like: I want a boyfriend like that! I want a boyfriend who throws two-by-fours and spanks me. That is not what I was going for.
I want to ask about two of your central relationships during the “Girls” period. The first is with Jenni Konner. You and she had this incredibly supportive, symbiotic relationship while you were working on the show, and ultimately that soured. You imply that there was a transactional aspect with Jenni that didn’t align with your values. So I want to know what your relationship with Jenni taught you about the difficulty of being in business with friends. I was extremely naïve about the fact that when you work with people and your creative, financial futures are intertwined, there are going to be moments where that is in tension with friendship. I was not an adult. I still lived with my parents, and I was desperately looking for safety and a sense of security and something that felt unconditional. Business relationships are conditional. They have to be. I remember my father being like, “Not everybody says I love you to everyone they work with and sleeps over at their house.” As a 40-year-old, I can now recognize that I was looking for a different kind of relationship than the one that work can provide.
Is there a way that things could have developed that would have allowed you to continue working together? Or was it a necessary break? I made a necessary break with everything. There was a moment where I broke up with my business partner, I broke up with my partner, I had a hysterectomy, I stepped back from work. I went from full-on to sitting in a back room in my parents’ apartment in silence, collaging letters together. My mom came in to be like: “That’s really nice. You’ve made a collage that says ‘see me.’” It was not a time where I was capable of keeping anything going. I remember once I said to my mom, “I’m so glad you’re my mom.” And she was like, “It could have been no other way.” There’s so much “it could have been no other way” in this story.
That line echoes one that Adam Driver says in the book. You’re wrapping your work together on “Girls,” and he says something like “It is how it had to be.” There’s this scene in the book involving you and Adam where it seems like the idea of having a sexual relationship was in the air. You make a plan for him to come to your apartment, and he says yes — this is in your telling. [Playfully] What are you talking about? That’s not in the book.
And he gets there and calls you and you don’t answer because you’re apprehensive about the emotional fallout of sleeping together. You were worried about possible “humiliation.” Why was humiliation what you were worried about happening there? I was worried about humiliation happening everywhere. I also want to say, when you’re that age, there’s something in the air all the time, but it might mean nothing. What I was trying to capture in that relationship was this feeling that we were entering this adult professional phase where we were still moving through the world in this youthful way, ripe with possibility and not saying what we felt and trying to read each other’s signals — and then having an adult awakening. I had been of the mind that any scrap of positive male attention was going to automatically elevate me — suddenly I would never be afraid of death again — but then realized actually that the supreme force was the work and everything had to be in service of that.
Jack Antonoff is another relationship you write about in the book. How did fame deepen that relationship, and how may it have destabilized it? It’s a unique privilege to have every breakup song you love written by your ex. I feel blessed. I was a really late bloomer. That was my first. I felt like you fall in love with someone and then you’re together for the rest of your life. That ending was extremely intense for me. I looked around and was like, Is everybody this upset about their breakup? But it was also because of what it represented publicly for me: If you have this dynamic, intelligent, talented man who is signing off on you, how bad could you really be?
I would think there’s something exhilarating about being in a relationship with a famous person. Like, You’re cool and I’m cool and the world’s telling us we’re cool! But then life has to happen. Well, what delays life? Lots of external support, money. No one under 30 should be given any money, because then they can just play house for as long as they want. It’s like on the one hand we have Bruce Springsteen, and on the other hand Edna St. Vincent Millay after she got addicted to opium and fell down the stairs — and they’re living together in an apartment.
You’re pretty coy in the book about who the “teen pop star” was that Jack is hanging around with. [Again playfully] There’s no teen pop star in the book, David, you misread.
Do you think it would be giving people a “Green Light” of “Pure Heroine” to say who the pop star was? How long did you rehearse that for? That was really good. It was Connie Francis.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, Connie Francis.
Can I ask about rehab now? Of course! I loved rehab. I genuinely did. “Girls” finished in September of 2016, and I went away in April of 2018. I turned 32 the day that I left, and I’m about to be 40. So it’ll be eight years sober in April.
Good for you. Thank you. It’s been a really good thing for me. Pretty much until the minute I got there, I had no idea that I belonged there. I thought I was following the doctor’s instructions a little too well, and suddenly I realized that like many Americans, I had a dependent relationship with pharmaceuticals. I was lucky enough that I could go somewhere and work through that. So many people have to grip the walls in their bedroom. It was a really important page-turn experience. A lot of addiction is feeling a positive feeling that is in direct contrast with the rest of your life. Your life is falling apart and you’re sitting on your bed in a good mood. There’s nothing in that. I want to have good feelings where you look under them and there are more good feelings.
Earlier in the conversation, you said you felt like you were born with certain feelings about yourself, and those feelings had ramifications for the life you led and the feelings you pursued. So I just want to throw out my theory about you that I mentioned. Because maybe thinking I was born with it is a cop-out? So yes, I would love your theory.
I wondered if because of your chronic illness, your normal state was a state of extreme discomfort. And as a result, in all these different ways, whether it was your relationship with the public or your relationships sexually, you put yourself in positions where you were going to feel bad because feeling bad was your base line. I’m taking that back to therapy, David. That’s really thoughtful and compelling — and true. I would add that when you’re in pain, the only thing that overrides it is more pain and different pain. That’s why I have so many tattoos. If you’re in pain and then somebody’s tattooing you for an hour, that’s what you’re focused on. And if you’re in pain and somebody else takes the reins and puts you through an experience, that’s what you’re focused on. It’s interesting because my capacity for discomfort has also been something that has helped me a lot in my life. My ability to withstand stress, to handle negative inputs — I’m not going to say with elegance, because that’s not a word anyone would associate with me — but with a certain stoicism is something that has sustained me and has certainly come from being sick.
I spoke to Dunham again a week later.
You seem at peace with so much of what you write about in the book. But there is one area where I’m intuiting that maybe you don’t feel quite as much at peace. That’s around the statement that you put out in 2017, which you write about in the book in a slightly oblique way, defending the “Girls” writer Murray Miller against an accusation of rape. You later apologized for that defense. You also write about how you were not in a great head space at that time, you were in a confused place. I was on drugs. It’s OK to say that.
But it seems like that still weighs heavily on you. Have you forgiven yourself? By the way, I didn’t say I was on drugs to create a blanket excuse. When you said “confused” head space, I was like, no need to be polite about it. The reason I wrote about it in an oblique way is because that story touches on a lot of other people’s lives. I struggled with whether to even include it, but it felt important because it was a real bottom in my sense of myself, in my sense of my relationship to the public. As for the question of will I ever forgive myself, I think what I was trying to say is that there were lots of things that publicly I look back on and I go: “That was dumb how people responded. I did not have to apologize.” But that was one where I did have to apologize, and I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to, and I can only hope that the way that I included it in the book won’t feel gratuitous or like it dredges too much up for other people.
I have another question that connects to the theory I had about some of your behavior. You know how I said I’m going to take your theory to my therapist? She seemed to agree. She seemed to think, Yeah, that guy’s got the joint cased. Then she offered some further thoughts that had to do with my childhood, and I was like, I gotta go to sleep. [Laughs]
OK, so we were talking about how you became a punching bag. And my theory was that maybe you were looking to feel bad, but the thing I left out was that you were saying provocative things that made people angry. I don’t want to go through the list of what they were. I don’t think that would be necessary.
But maybe the thing that you were interested in wasn’t pushing boundaries but getting scolded for pushing the boundary. You know, self-awareness isn’t the specialty of the house for 20-somethings. It was a complicated mix because I was always interested in pushing boundaries, but I also came from a very boundary-pushing place. I was 10 and going to see an art show where a woman sold herself to an art collector as the art. You’re watching a video of the two of them having sex, and I’m standing there watching it between my parents. My sense of what was naughty behavior was different. My father always said, “There are no bad thoughts, only bad actions.” A lot of people think there are bad thoughts and that you’re supposed to keep your bad thoughts to yourself. And I always thought, If we’re all just saying what our worst thoughts are, then we aren’t alone with them and isn’t that better? So there was a part of me that just had a really different worldview. But the thing that you’re saying is 100 percent accurate, too.
You’re not the focus of scrutiny in the same way anymore. Is there anything creatively freeing about that? Everything feels freeing about it. I have time to think, I have time to dream, I’m engaged with so many other artists that are compelling to me. Every day has an exciting, creative wrinkle to it. There are people who are really good at being artists and also maintaining the dance that you do with the public. It wasn’t my gift. I had to realize that everybody’s capacity is different. I thought I had to prove that I was tough enough to take it. Now that doesn’t seem like an important character trait. I feel that I was always meant to be where I am now.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio or Amazon Music. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
Director of photography (video): Leo Hsu
David Marchese is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a regular series featuring influential people across culture, politics, business, sports and beyond.
The post Lena Dunham Is Still Trying to Figure Out Why People Hated Her So Much appeared first on New York Times.
