Lena Dunham’s memoir is a brutally honest reflection on fame and illness

MEMOIR
Famesick
Lena Dunham
HarperCollins. $34.99

It is no exaggeration to say that 39-year-old American actor, director, producer and writer Lena Dunham is one of the most simultaneously lauded and lionised women of her generation.

Best known for the six seasons of her 2010s HBO show Girls, she rose to prominence with a self-referential, self-made and financed film, quickly came to be regarded as everything that was wrong with Millennial feminism and was ultimately made a scapegoat for the worst excesses and most regrettable deficiencies of her generation.

It’s been a little less than a decade since Girls ended its critically adored run and a little more than a decade since she published her first book, an earnest collection of essays called Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s ‘Learned’. Dunham now returns with a self-excoriating memoir, a timely reminder that, for all her other interests and talents, Dunham is first and foremost a writer – and a talented one at that.

Famesick is a generously, honestly written book that chronicles what happened before, during and after Girls came to redefine Dunham’s life. Although it could be characterised as a “celebrity memoir”, it is an incisive, revealing and deftly written work.

While some early readers and critics have reductively treated much of what she discloses as mere gossip, it’s not. With insight and level-headedness, Dunham explores her evolution as an artist, her relationships with creative partners, parents, siblings and boyfriends (including her six-year relationship with musician and producer Jack Antonoff), her chronic illness, her addiction to drugs supposed to bring her medical pain relief, and her battles with severe endometriosis, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and fibromyalgia.

“I’ve spent much of the last ten years sick,” she writes in the introduction, which is not, she has learned the hard way, “a truth that anyone wants to hear”. She has, she tells us, “also spent much of the last ten years famous”, something even fewer people have understood. The overriding preoccupation of Famesick is the cruel co-morbidity of the two conditions, fame and physical sickness, and how the two intertwine to become toxic and debilitating.

Famesick opens with a twenty-something Dunham writing Tiny Furniture, which went on to win the prestigious Grand Jury Prize at South By Southwest and led directly to the meeting with HBO that resulted in the creation of Girls. It also led to the beginning of Dunham’s creative co-partnership (and close personal friendship) with fellow writer Jenni Konner, a woman who comes across as self-involved and self-aggrandising, and who ultimately discarded Dunham as both a friend and collaborator when her illness began to affect her ability to earn the big bucks.

Dunham’s health travails began with a bout of acute colitis a few weeks before Girls started filming and quickly progressed to debilitating episodes of pain related to advanced endometriosis. After years of attempting to manage the pain and submitting to countless surgeries, she underwent a radical hysterectomy in 2017.

The surgery took an enormous toll on her body and coincided with her longtime boyfriend cosying up to an up-and-coming pop star that Dunham does not name, but the internet has posited was New Zealand singer Lorde. It’s obvious from the rawness and opacity with which she writes about the time that its events wounded her deeply, both physically and psychologically.

Indeed, rawness and opacity are perhaps the words that best characterise the prose that Famesick comprises. With an admirable lack of guile or self-obsession, Dunham writes with honesty and clarity about the last two decades of her life, traversing tragedy and success in equal measure with the sort of insight that only suffering and great loss imparts.

Yes, she has learned lessons and gained wisdom, but at what cost?

As she writes: “I used to try so desperately to distinguish emotional pain from physical pain, psychic distress from the siren calls my nerve ending seemed to send out day and night. It never occurred to me that as my body disintegrated, it was speaking to me, and that it got louder when I refused to listen.

“It was telling me – because I refused to see the signs, heed the warning lights – what I couldn’t let myself know about the empty places I had been taking just because I was full of the desire to make art.

“It knew that fame held only disillusionment and isolation. It knew that the people who loved me when I was up were not going to hold me when I was down. It was certain, even though I could not be, that this was not the ‘more’ I had always thought I was destined for.”

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.