FAMESICK: A Memoir, by Lena Dunham
“To have great pain is to have certainty,” Elaine Scarry wrote in her classic 1985 treatise “The Body in Pain. “To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.”
Peppered with Percocet, Klonopin, Lexapro, Demerol, Adderall et al, Lena Dunham’s new med-moir, “Famesick,” leaves no doubt that her body, analyzed by ruthless online harpies since she began in show business as a writer, director and actor, has been in great pain.
This is an earnest, exposing book; a portrait of a lady on fire (indeed, a candle mishap in a hotel room sends her to the burn unit). Its quick hits of wit, especially about rich hipsters — “film bros in their 30s and their wanly supportive girlfriends” or the “jaunty, Keebler Elfish cadence” of the Tracy Anderson workout method — are like sniffs from an oxygen mask.
Best known for “Girls,” the HBO series that established her alter ego and self as “a voice of a generation” (millennials), Dunham turns 40 in May. She has probably logged more hours in recovery bays than edit bays.
Hers is not the emperor of all maladies but a court of jostling jesters that has included endometriosis; ovarian cysts; migraines; hives; acute colitis; eardrum rupture; obsessive-compulsive disorder; at least one bulimic episode; diarrhea and maybe logorrhea; anxiety; depression; and a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome that gives her party-trick bendable thumbs.
Then there is the crucial comorbidity of celebrity in an internet age. Nonconforming and without filter, Dunham was rolled right into an unforgiving new content machine and spat out flat.
“It was noted that I walked in heels like a baby giraffe, that I should have had the money by now to fix my teeth, that I wasn’t as ugly as everyone said, that I was uglier,” she remembers. “My acceptance speeches were dissected — did I have a lack of humility, or was I feigning too much? Was I fun and real, or messy and exhausting? Did I have a bad case of ‘they like me, they really like me’ syndrome, or could I be forgiven for being shocked?”
Dunham’s first book, “Not That Kind of Girl,” a best-selling collection of personal essays inspired by Helen Gurley Brown, was candid in her signature fashion — oversharing or brave depending on your tolerance for other people’s bodily functions — but pert and packaged. There were lists, asterisks and cute little pen-and-ink illustrations.
“Famesick” dispenses with such pleasantries and — refreshingly, at a moment when some are all too coy — with most pseudonyms. It has a whiff of the old Hollywood tell-all, indie edition, with trash bags for curtains in an Eagle Rock group house.
The leading man-boy of “Girls,” Adam Driver, comes off as alternately inappropriate and avoidant: telling her “You’re a great director,” then, “and you’ve got a great ass”; cursing and throwing a chair at a wall during a difficult scene; and not contacting her since the finale. Dunham’s ex-boyfriend, the singer-songwriter Jack Antonoff, is characterized as an inadequate, possibly philandering Florence Nightingale, showing up late to her recovery from a hysterectomy in hotel slippers and bearing bodega flowers; their terms of endearment came from the puffy Tove Jansson character: “You’re my Moomin.” “No, you’re MY Moomin.”
And her fellow “Girls” showrunner, Jenni Konner, is portrayed as a callous task-mistress who bolted early from a therapy session intended to salvage their friendship, after begging: “Please don’t write about this immediately. I know how you work, and that you will. But please, just not right away.”
Maybe, contra Dunham’s mentor Nora Ephron, not everything is copy? Or at least … everything needs a copy editor? The Keebler elf makes a second, sexualized appearance; “Harold and the Purple Crayon” is invoked twice; and Jack and Lena share soup from a “terrine.”
“You’re the strongest person I know,” he — Jack, not the Keebler elf — told her once. And even if she sometimes seems “Too Much,” the title of her recent series set in London (where she lives part-time), what a relief that Dunham, sober for eight years and married to a man discreetly tucked into the acknowledgments, is not a true casualty of all the cruelty visited upon her. Parting ways with a bum uterus in your early 30s is no joke, and it’s generous of her to share the nitty-gritty. And the post-surgery scenes of sex with a high school ex? Well, gals, something had to one-up “All Fours.”
Familiar figures since her debut feature, “Tiny Furniture,” Dunham’s artist parents, Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons, and her sibling, Cyrus, who underwent gender transition, wander on here like somewhat weary supporting players in a rebooted sitcom.
Simmons frets that “Famesick” will be a “sad book” and, Dunham suggests, felt resentful that her career was eclipsed by her daughter’s. “We had gone from being spicy allies to being performatively polite enemies,” she writes, “afraid to give the other any ammunition by expressing our own vulnerability.”
And yet Dunham’s vulnerability has hardly been a state secret. Responsive on social media, overgenerous with time and favors as her star rose, she cries easily and can “vomit on command.”
“It’s not that hard,” Dunham says Konner told her when she got too thin and polished to play the quirky Hannah Horvath. “Just put food in your mouth.”
With apologies to Susan Sontag, who scorned illness as metaphor, it’s hard not to see this book as an acidulous regurgitation of all that Hollywood forced Dunham to eat.
FAMESICK: A Memoir | By Lena Dunham | Random House | 416 pp. | $32
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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