This is how Zosia Mamet describes herself in her new collection of personal essays: a “depressed, anorexic, anxious lump of brain matter existing within a meat suit,” and a “pill-popping, emaciated, self-hating, hollow-souled girl.”
These are clues that “Does This Make Me Funny?” isn’t the lighthearted Hollywood romp you might imagine. The arch phrasing also confirms what fans already know: She really is very funny.
Ms. Mamet is best known as the fast-talking naïf Shoshanna Shapiro in “Girls” and as the daughter of the playwright David Mamet. Her book has some colorful celebrity anecdotes: Axl Rose once stole her coat; Martha Stewart had strong opinions about “Girls” (“I want to beat all of you girls on that show”).
Again and again, however, Ms. Mamet turns to her well-being. A self-described “B-minus nepo baby,” she has long spoken openly about her mental and physical health. (Not many celebrities would feel comfortable, for instance, talking about their pelvic floor dysfunction.)
In the book, she describes her often debilitating anorexia and anxiety, but she laces it with occasional dark humor. “It’s a real survival mechanism,” she told me, “because if we didn’t find the funny in something, we would just implode.”
‘Comedy cracked open this other side of me.’
As part of the third generation of a show business family, Ms. Mamet, 37, spent her childhood on film sets and in theaters. Her mother is the Oscar-nominated actress Lindsay Crouse (whose godfather was Eugene O’Neill, the playwright). Her father is known for plays like “Glengarry Glen Ross” and films like “The Verdict.”
“There is nothing else I have ever wanted to do,” she said.
Her path was less steady when it came to her home life. Ms. Mamet’s parents divorced before she was a year old. She and her sister lived with Ms. Crouse in Los Angeles until she was 17, and then Ms. Mamet moved in with her father.
He didn’t give his daughter a curfew when she hit the clubs as a teenager. “As long as I came home in one piece, he didn’t seem to mind,” she writes. She would tell him she was flying to auditions or meetings in New York City; instead, she wrote, “I partied myself into a black hole.”
After graduating from high school, she hit the audition circuit without much success, trying out for a part in an Xbox webisode and delivering lines like “Jason’s party is gonna rock.”
Her career gained momentum in 2010 when she landed the part of Joyce Ramsay, the spiky photo editor on “Mad Men” who flirts with Peggy Olson. But her breakout role on “Girls” came in 2012.
Ms. Mamet wasn’t initially drawn to humor, but it was a fit, she said: “Comedy felt very healing to me, because it cracked open this other side of me.”
She channeled some of her own contradictions into Shoshanna Shapiro, and unlocked a new archetype with the character. Lena Dunham, the show’s creator, recalled that she was stunned when she viewed Ms. Mamet’s audition for the part. “She played her with this incredible mix of bravado and brittleness, like someone chasing a dream who is also in her own existential hell,” she said.
‘An unreliable narrator of my own reality.’
Ms. Mamet remembers herself as an anxious child who was plagued by stomachaches and bullies. She didn’t have friends and constantly felt, she writes, “the deep, overwhelming sadness of being unliked.”
When she was 8, a classmate made a disparaging remark about her weight — and her antipathy toward her body took root. By the time she was a teenager, she had anorexia and worried she would “never be skinny enough to love,” she said.
At 17, she weighed 88 pounds, and a doctor told her that if she lost any more weight, she could die. She recalls thinking that death “sounded quiet, it sounded calm,” she writes. “I knew that if I died, I could stop trying.”
Thinness felt safe, she writes, but it was actually the opposite: “I was dancing with death and getting date-raped and drinking to excess and popping pills like Tic Tacs and exposing myself to all kinds of delicious abuse just to feel something.”
She has been in remission from her eating disorder for many years, she said, but the culture of the entertainment industry keeps stirring her body dysmorphia. She writes about an exploratory visit with a fertility expert after she married the actor Evan Jonigkeit.
She recalled that the specialist, who treats other celebrities, brought up weight gain: She could “get away” with putting on only about 20 pounds during pregnancy, including the weight of the baby. That would mean a smaller child, the doctor added, but if she wanted her kid to be taller later on, there was always human growth hormone.
The triggers never stop, Ms. Mamet said, but she has gotten better at anticipating them. Therapy has helped. “I’ve come to realize over the years that I am often an unreliable narrator of my own reality,” she said, “because dysmorphia feels so incredibly real, when it very much is not.”
Similarly, she accepts that anxiety will be a “daily occurrence in my life,” she said. “It’s just a matter of what percentage.”
Her life now is more grounded with Mr. Jonigkeit, who is currently acting in Netflix’s raunchy Texas murder mystery “The Hunting Wives.” She has a circle of good friends. And she no longer believes that every role she takes will be her last. She recently wrapped production on Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming A.I.-themed feature, “Artificial.”
I asked Ms. Mamet whether writing about painful memories in “Does This Make Me Funny?” helped her process them.
Not really, she replied: “My therapist would probably have things to say about this, but it felt a little bit like I was writing about someone else.”
Recording the audiobook, however, made the words more visceral. She would come home from the studio in tears, feeling drained. “It very much caught me off guard,” she said.
Telling her stories aloud made them real.
Jancee Dunn, who writes the weekly Well newsletter for The Times, has covered health and science for more than 20 years.
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