Recently, idly researching, I happened upon a Vanity Fair video from about a decade ago in which a 29-year-old Lena Dunham, wearing a shiny olive blazer with her cropped hair swept into a quiff, speculates what the future will bring. “In 2025, I think that feminism is no longer a dirty word,” she says confidently. “I think that we’re probably on our second female president? If our president’s not female, they’re definitely down with calling themselves a feminist because they recognize it’s the sexy thing to do and it’s gonna get them laid. Our first female president’s gonna be Hillary Clinton, unless there’s a real last-minute dash by Viola Davis.”
It might be enough to make you weep: the blithe optimism, the cutesy cheek, the Buzzfeed-esque title (“Lena Dunham: 8 Thoughts on Feminism”), the corporate–meets–Hot Topic styling, the ease with which Dunham proclaims that things will only get better. Were we ever so young?
When the video was published, Dunham’s precocious HBO show, Girls, was heading into its penultimate season, its creator having long since become an avatar for bratty, clumsy Millennial feminism in a way that obscured her talent. Her second memoir, Famesick, which is out this week, is a fascinating shift from her first, Not That Kind of Girl, which was published in 2014 and drew scorn from every imaginable direction: critics, who argued that the book failed to live up to its reported $3.5 million advance; Dunham’s feminist peers (“this vein of narcissism—every bit of the world existing only to make you feel some kind of way—would be unpleasant at any age and any gender,” a mixed Jezebel review argued); and, most cruelly, right-wing writers, who seized on confessions Dunham had made about her curiosity regarding her baby sibling to argue in the worst possible faith that she was a child molester. The internet of the 2010s was a shooting range for prominent and imperfect women, and Dunham was an impossibly popular target.
Why? Because she simply cannot contain herself. She’s unbridled id, pouring herself all over the page, the screen, the extended Instagram caption. “I want to tell my stories, and more than that, I have to in order to stay sane,” she wrote in the introduction to Not That Kind of Girl. I know more about her uterus, at this point in time, than I do my own. She’s unabashed about her appetites, her desires, her cravings. (Food is an underexplored feature in the first few episodes of Girls; never forget that Hannah Horvath’s erstwhile memoir in Season 1 is titled Midnight Snack.) Feminists have always abraded and enraged people, other feminists chief among them, and Dunham was an obvious stand-in during the 2010s for a confrontational frankness and joyful arrested development that many people found infuriating. Her public profile superseded her art, which is a shame, because her art can be sublime.
Rewatching Girls, as many people have been doing, is clarifying: Dunham’s show, which debuted when she was 25 years old, is sharp, profound, and acutely funny, confessionally tender about the state of 21st-century young adulthood. She has an extraordinary gift for observation, noting the specificity of her surroundings and drawing out the absurdity. She’s the native child of a scene that often comes close to parodying itself, and yet Dunham does it better than anyone else. (See Hannah in Girls, observing the shaggy, guitar-toting Desi: “He looks like someone in, like, the Pacific Northwest knit a man.”) Her goal as a writer, she noted in 2014, was to obliterate “the expectation that my femininity, my body, or my work should conform to any set of rules, any aesthetic other than my own.” More than a decade later, having endured a kind of mass apoplexy and even outright hate as a result, Dunham is now trying to share with us what that endurance cost.
“I’ve spent much of the last ten years sick,” she writes in the introduction to Famesick, which is not, she now knows, “a truth that anyone wants to hear.” (She’s referring to her diagnoses of endometriosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and fibromyalgia, and her experiences with chronic pain.) She’s also “spent the last ten years famous,” which even fewer people have been able to sympathize with. The rough thesis of Famesick, as the title implies, is that these two dominant conditions of her life have come hand in hand, equally toxic and equally debilitating. Once again, she seems entirely propelled by an impulse she can’t quite control; she describes it herself as “an unrelenting drive toward self-expression.” I would argue, though, that Dunham has actually learned from her garrulous and unfiltered excesses—she’s got stories to tell in Famesick that blow the roof off, but she’s wielding them with precision this time around.
God bless a memoir that drops names—the more bold-faced and braggadocious the better. (Cher by Cher is beneficent on this front, with its nods to David Geffen and his self-actualization workshops and Salvador Dalí’s pet ocelot, Babou.) Famesick begins with Dunham on summer break from Oberlin College in the latter half of the 2000s, casting her family in a short film that she debuts at the Slamdance Film Festival to a room of about 10 people. (The screening that follows is a much more impressive title featuring puppets that just happens to have been directed by Josh and Benny Safdie.) Dunham graduates, and noodles around with a web series while sharing office space with Greta Gerwig.
She eventually writes a feature—2010’s Tiny Furniture—that’s bullied into existence by Dunham’s mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, who rolls up her sleeves and calls friends for investment. (“It was this dogged belief, this clearing of the path, that has made every aspect of my life possible,” Dunham writes, and while she’s long been skewered for her “privilege”—the term nepo baby did not exist prior to the 2020s—you get the sense that she’s benefited even more from her mother’s sheer force of character than from inherited connections.)
Tiny Furniture, much like the HBO show that succeeded it, was a loosely autobiographical account of a liberal-arts graduate floundering in sexual abjection and undefined creative ambition. It starred Dunham, her mother, and her sibling, and was filmed in her parents’ Tribeca apartment. Entire scenes, Dunham notes, were taken directly from a sadistic relationship she’d been having with a man whom she says gagged her with her own pantyhose, verbally abused her, and then watched cheerfully while verbatim chunks of his own obscene dialogue were brought to the big screen. (“People just like to feel seen,” Dunham shrugs.) Tiny Furniture won the Grand Jury Award at South by Southwest, and Dunham—thanks in part to a prescient early profile by the New York Times’s David Carr, became a hot commodity at 23. In a meeting with HBO, she pitched a series that would be a deglamorized version of Sex and the City, set in the interim phase where, as she told executives, “we’re having sex fueled by the availability of porn, and we’re feminists who don’t know how to live our politics. I want to see my friends on TV.” HBO offered her a blind pilot deal, and the rest is history.
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For everything that was written about Girls across its six seasons—and there was a lot—nothing has offered the access and insight that Dunham provides in Famesick. For example: She cast the show in six weeks, and auditioned actors including Elisabeth Olsen, Cristin Milioti, Dakota Johnson, and Amy Schumer. The suggestion to employ the straight-edged Allison Williams as Marnie came from the show’s godfather/producer Judd Apatow, who thought her normalness would gel well with Dunham and Jemima Kirke’s bohemian quirk. As for Apatow, he struck Dunham less as the Hollywood fixture he was than as “Howie, the Long Island exterminator my mother’s cousin Eileen was briefly married to, and to whom my father referred as ‘the insect assassin.’”
Knowing that Dunham would need a supervisor to help school her in the structure of television writing, HBO set up a meeting with Jenni Konner, who would become Dunham’s best friend and longtime collaborator. Famesick also ultimately paints her as its biggest villain, suggesting that she milked Dunham’s talent for profit and tossed her aside once her illnesses rendered her unserviceable. (In 2018 Dunham and Konner announced that they were pursuing individual projects, saying in a joint statement, “We have had one of the most significant relationships together in our adult lives and we respect each other’s choices.”)
There’s also Adam. Introduced as Hannah’s boundary-less hookup, inspired by Dunham’s unpleasant ex, but defined by the actor who eventually played him, Adam is one of the true gifts of Girls, extravagantly strange and inexplicably charismatic. Dunham’s revelations about Adam Driver, “all ears and nose, gangly and pigeon-toed,” whom she cast after an audition in which he bit her shoulder and then left without farewell or explanation, will likely dominate much of the discussion of Famesick. As brilliant an actor as Driver was (and is, and a ferociously private person to boot, in a way that charges these reminiscences with something like betrayal), Dunham writes that he ploughed through boundaries in search of his character, turning his and Dunham’s first choreographed sex scene into “something intimate, confusing, and primal.” He had a tendency, she writes, to spit and throw chairs when he was angry. The pair’s closeness almost crossed lines one night, as he arrived at her apartment after calling her to say, by her recollection, “I’m warning you, if I come up, I’m not leaving this time.” (Showing uncharacteristic instincts for self-preservation, Dunham refused to let him in, knowing that “however it went, my heart—bruised but improbably not yet broken—would crack.”)
What Dunham shares during Parts 1 and 2 of the book is the best possible combination of weighty and esoteric. Williams bought Dunham a tank top that said ALWAYS AND FOREVS, DOWN FOR WHATEVS. Zosia Mamet, who played Shoshanna, and Kirke, who played Jessa, moved in together, but their relationship fell apart when “Zosia began to casually date someone Jemima had claimed dibs on, despite the fact that she was married with a child.” Dunham started dating the musician and producer Jack Antonoff, who was as weird and “cozy” and neurotic as she was. The show became a very palpable hit, and almost immediately drew accusations that it was too white, too privileged, too popular.
As Dunham’s career took off, her health started declining: She suffered a bout of acute colitis a few weeks before Girls started filming, then excruciating pain she eventually realized was from endometriosis; her body gave her other “noisy signals” that the stress she was internalizing might not be sustainable. (Years later, after getting an email from a stranger who’d read about her issues, Dunham would be diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder that can cause joint issues and chronic pain.) Antonoff began working with someone Dunham identifies only as a teenage pop star, who refers to Dunham as “Aunt Lena” (she’s using a walker, following a surgery for her endometriosis), and whose closeness with Antonoff becomes fodder for a very viral PowerPoint analyzing signs of their supposed affair. (Yes, Dunham writes, she has seen it.)
It’s interesting to think about who Dunham names in this book and who she doesn’t; who is mentioned lovingly in the acknowledgements (“TayTay,” for “the music that makes the whole world feel seen”) but kept otherwise private; who’s quite ruthlessly excavated for copy and who’s only lightly alluded to. In her first book, Dunham’s intimate, highly confessional style spoke directly to the reader—she was sharing all of this with us, she explained, because “if I could take what I learned and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine was worthwhile.” For all the book’s erratic and random inclusions—Dunham’s diet journals and fantasy revenge emails among them—that sense of connection justified the oversharing.
The revelations in Famesick feel much more loaded, as though Dunham is settling scores, but also justifying herself. She seems to really want to communicate that she has suffered, both from extreme chronic pain and at the hands of people she trusted. She is a confessedly calculated narrator. A version of the book shared with me by the publisher a couple of weeks ago features, perhaps by accident, the same scene twice—Dunham posing for the photographer Annie Leibovitz on the Brooklyn Bridge while a man jumps to his death behind her—but offers two different versions of how the crew reacted, that they “stopped in their tracks and gasped” and that they “just carried on, moving lights, holding umbrellas over Annie,” as though she’s experimenting with which version will land better for the reader. (In the published version, the bridge scene only appears once.) She cites something she says Bruce Springsteen once told her: “You don’t owe it to people to be honest about every little thing. That doesn’t mean you lie—it just means you can have secrets. You only owe it to them to show ’em how your mind works.”
This is, I’d argue—with apologies to the Boss—bad advice for a memoirist. We know how Dunham’s mind works. We know her sharp eye, her self-deprecation, her skill with bathos. We know that the line between her life and her art, insomuch as a line exists, is porous to the point of chicken wire. What I longed for more of, in Famesick, was what the writer Leslie Jamison has called “the infinitude of any given life as a site of reckoning and truth.” The paradox of Famesick seems to be that the more famous you become, the less you have to defend turning yourself into a subject. And so largely missing from the book is a quality I’ve always loved about Dunham’s work, across Tiny Furniture and Girls and the books and the essays: her impulse to make broader meaning out of her experiences. “I am already in mourning, but I am not in doubt,” she wrote in an essay for Vogue, about the pain so life-altering that it led her to have an elective hysterectomy in her early 30s, evoking an ocean of nuance about choice and dreams and physical limits.
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I’m not quite sure what the meaning of Famesick is, beyond getting certain things on the historical record. It is, in parts, riveting. Dunham is still among our funniest living writers. (Her mother’s diminutive psychic, Dunham notes in Famesick, once wrote a book called Small Mediums at Large; Dunham’s uterus, after its removal, is characterized as “the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, full of both subtle and glaring flaws.”) She is generous to many of her collaborators, and to her father, who emerges in the book as a beautiful soul and a wag for all time. (“Since you were five,” he tells Dunham, “you’ve been walking around like you killed a man in Reno just to watch him die.”)
Yet as the second half of the book spins out stories of very dubious new boyfriends and Dunham’s growing reliance on painkillers, something crucial seems to be absent. It feels unfair to call a memoir self-indulgent, but this one can be, at least for an artist with such talent—Famesick has a tendency in later chapters to read more like glib stenography than rigorous self-interrogation. And for someone who was once considered an era-defining feminist voice, Dunham writes nothing substantive about Trump’s election and nothing at all about the overturning of Roe or the significance of #MeToo. She spends several pages explaining the context behind one of her most widely criticized acts, a statement she and Konner issued in 2017 defending the Girls writer Murray Miller from an allegation that he had sexually assaulted the actor Aurora Perrineau. (Miller denied the accusation.) Dunham had only just been released from the hospital at the time, she writes, was heavily medicated, and has no memory of drafting anything, let alone “a careless, blithe, and damaging” note that remains the one thing about which she still feels “genuine shame.”
All of which perhaps explains why she chooses her targets and her subjects so carefully in Famesick. When you’ve been a lightning rod for almost all of your public life, maybe you learn that having strong opinions about subjects outside of oneself offers minimal gain, that very little you could say might make a difference, anyway. And that the best you can do is just keep trying, as Dunham has, to find ways “to do this job I love.” Her persistence, in that sense, is the best possible rejoinder to her haters—regardless of circumstance and to her credit, Dunham will always have her word.
The post The Price of Being Lena Dunham appeared first on The Atlantic.
