There’s a good joke that reverberates around the Internet every so often: “Oh, you’re a people pleaser? Name three people who are pleased with you.”
It’s hard not to think of that line while reading Lena Dunham’s new memoir, “Famesick” (her second before reaching the age of 40). It chronicles a decade or so in Dunham’s life when her rapid ascent to the eyewatering heights of creative success and her self-described desire to make people happy resulted in years of medical crises — exacerbated, Dunham writes, when she ignored them to continue on her dogged quest to never let anyone down.
A quest that, it turns out, has come with a curious number of fallings-out, of “wounded friendships, numbers blocked and unblocked.” Many of them are described, in excruciating detail, in this hardcover book released by a Big Five publisher — a move sure to please these people even more than they have already been pleased.
“Famesick,” like many of Dunham’s works, is largely breezy and entertaining, with funny little bon mots (“I have loved being a woman, but I have hated operating the equipment”) and tidbits of celebrity trivia: The final scene of the Greta Gerwig breakout “Frances Ha” was filmed at Dunham’s apartment. Famous auditionees for “Girls” included Elisabeth Olsen, Dakota Johnson, Cristin Milioti and Amy Schumer. Allison Mack, of “Smallville” fame and NXIVM infamy, “wasn’t right for any of the roles but invited me via email to her ‘intimate women’s group’ every week for the next year (there but for the grace of God go I),” Dunham writes.
It also offers a compelling story about women’s chronic pain, a topic that remains mysterious due to centuries of sexism and social taboo, and a personal affliction that ultimately landed Dunham in rehab for prescription drug abuse. Some passages shimmer with insight and self-awareness: Before informing her best friend and boyfriend of a new, additional diagnosis to explain her chronic pain, Dunham writes of worrying that it “contained an itchy grain of doubt. … I’d sniffed this weakness in women, and hated what I smelled — a pathetic choice, a desperate bid for attention and empathy while not doing anything to deserve it.”
It’s when Dunham gets to what she believes is the root of her professional and personal struggles that one begins to squint a little. Dunham writes that for years she ignored her body’s increasingly noisy distress signals in pursuit of one goal: “I am, insofar as this is even a healthy response to life, a person who wants to make others happy,” she writes. “I want to make them feel seen, heard, understood, perhaps even bolstered or like their own life had been improved by knowing me or reading me or watching me.”
She then divulges the granular, gruesome details of every relationship that’s gone sour in her quest to better the lives of everyone around her. Her sibling Cyrus Dunham, her longtime boyfriend Jack Antonoff and his sister Rachel Antonoff, her creative partner Jenni Konner, her co-star Adam Driver and a trio of childhood friends that includes The Wing founder Audrey Gelman all get named in the process.
Cyrus, she claims, ghosted her on a campus appearance she’d booked solely to see him. Driver, after a prolonged but ultimately unconsummated flirtation, allegedly once threw a chair at the wall next to her in anger and abruptly disappeared from her life. Antonoff is portrayed as having spent suspicious amounts of time with a teen pop star while dating Dunham and reportedly arrived hours after a scheduled surgery with the flimsy excuse that “The tour bus got stuck in the tunnel — I texted to see if you guys could wait.”
Konner, perhaps most tragically, disappears from the narrative with a bang after, as Dunham understands it, tiring of Dunham’s long absences from their work. Dunham and Konner fell for each other instantly writing “Girls,” Dunham writes; she later advocated for Konner as an equal creative partner even when HBO didn’t want to pay the two women equally. Still, in the end, a newly sober Dunham finds herself pantsless in her front yard, smoking a cigarette while shakily texting Konner: “You do not make me feel safe or proud, and I cannot speak to you until we are in front of a therapist.”
The filmmaker Ti West (a former quasi-boyfriend of Dunham’s) makes an unflattering cameo, depicted as a freeloading weirdo who was “sleeping with every girl in American Apparel leggings but me.” Dunham attests that a group of “professional acquaintances” abandoned her for being, essentially, too chaotic and too sick. A model Jack Antonoff dated after breaking up with Dunham, the writers of “Saturday Night Live” and Daniel Day-Lewis’s son all catch strays too. This blithe, sometimes spiteful oversharing is a feature, not a bug, of Dunham’s long career in the public eye. It does little, though, for her case for martyrdom.
In rehab, Dunham learned about the concept of “living amends”: “the idea of undertaking your new sober lifestyle, not only for yourself, but as a consistent measure of apology to those you have harmed. There would be no promise that they’d celebrate it, or me — and yet I’d continue on, living as that better person.” Surely there was a better way to make it up to those friends lost along the way than by re-airing all their dirty laundry.
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