During the final season of Lena Dunham’s acclaimed comedy drama series, Girls, the character she plays, Hannah Horvath, says her ambition as a writer is to make people laugh about painful things. In real life, this is exactly what Dunham has achieved with her second memoir, Famesick which opens with a prime example.
“It’s very hard to remember a time – aside from brief flashes of adrenaline on a set or a date or at a fashion party where people are inadvertently dressed like kids in a school play about Greek gods – when being in my body didn’t feel like towing a wrecked car across town at midnight,” she writes.
A searingly funny, bare-hearted exploration of the cost of success, Dunham’s book charts her meteoric rise as a young screenwriter, director and actor with brutal honesty.
Review: Famesick by Lena Dunham (4th Estate)
Smart, sassy and highly entertaining, Famesick is ultimately a painfully astute analysis of the ways a dream job can morph into a perilous nightmare. Particularly for someone who is neurodivergent, barely out of college, emotionally dependent on their parents and suffering from a rare, undiagnosed chronic disease.
Throughout the first decade of her glittering career, Dunham balanced precariously between adulation and critical attacks. Her intelligent, sharply observed humour defined her public and professional image, but her personal boundaries were all too permeable. The demands of her job bled into her life with devastating consequences for her body.
Careering from one disastrous man to another, leaning hard on colleagues and friends, Dunham looked to others for the psychological stability she hadn’t yet developed. Her heart dangerously exposed on her sleeve, she poured the events of her life into screenplays, medicated her stress and crashed her way through stardom, unprotected by the industry that relied on her.
Invision/Evan Agostini/AAP
The price of Dunham’s success was exorbitant, involving much more than long hours and hard work. Yet while parts of her story are harrowingly visceral, she refuses self-pity and keeps away from the confessional traps of trauma porn.
There is nothing gratuitous or exploitative in these pages and Dunham refrains from blaming others for her chaos. Instead, she frames her drug addiction, unhealthy relationship patterns and debilitating chronic health issues as the cost of her own ambition, with a central question in mind. Was it worth it?
A cursed, well-connected fairy tale
Dunham’s narrative begins like a modern-day fairy tale with the story of her name, chosen by her mother “because it sounded like the name of someone who could be a movie star or a lawyer with an equal measure of success”. As a legacy, this turned out to be something of a curse.
Raised within privileged and well connected New York circles, by artist parents, Dunham began experimenting with film-making while attending liberal arts college Oberlin. Her first breakthrough was in 2010, with the award-winning semi-autobiographical movie, Tiny Furniture. She was just 23.
Six months after her film premiere, Dunham’s career skyrocketed when HBO contracted her to write and direct the pilot episode of Girls. Aiming to reflect the messy, early twenties stage of life, “when you don’t even know enough to even know what you’re looking for”, the show, like her film, starred herself and her childhood friend Jemima Kirke, with Allison Williams and Zosia Mamet completing the quartet of titular girls.
The series’ most intriguing character was arguably Hannah’s oddball boyfriend, Adam Sackler, played with unnerving conviction by Adam Driver in his first major role. Sackler, a misanthropic alcoholic, was based on Dunham’s real-life abusive lover in the first season. Later, the character evolved into a tender and devoted partner.
Off screen, Driver and Dunham’s relationship was, according to the book, also intense. The two actors skirted each other as Dunham tried to fathom her co-star’s unpredictable, occasionally explosive behaviour.
On one occasion, rehearsing a fight scene, he threw a chair at a wall when she couldn’t remember her lines. But while she recalls his verbal aggression and short temper, she also remembers spending “an inordinate amount of time wondering if Adam liked me”. Given the obvious strength of her seemingly unresolved feelings for Driver, it’s hard to know how to read her interpretation of him, though she clearly never figured him out.
With its frank, often hilarious, sometimes uncomfortable, all too relatable depictions of troubled friendship, awkward sex, career missteps and the fraught struggle for identity, Girls made a huge impact. From 2012, it ran for six seasons and five years, by which time all four main actors were turning 30. According to Dunham, the ending was planned to avoid losing “the creative clarity and specificity that gave it value”.
Matt Sayles/Invision/AAP
The show established Dunham as a sharp-sighted, uniquely talented visionary, but also attracted pernicious criticism that took her many years to process.
Accused of exploiting her nepo baby status, reviled for daring to expose her perfectly average physique, branded a myopic millennial, Dunham was both pummelled and pressurised for assuming the voice of her generation. “Or a voice,” as Dunham remembers her high-powered co-showrunner, Jenni Konner quipping. “Of a generation.”
Body as battleground
The irony of her situation was ridiculous. The whole point of Girls was to satirise the hot, flawed, contradictory tangle of young, white female adulthood experienced by Dunham and her friends. But like countless other women, Dunham was vilified for daring to give herself a platform. Worse – again, like so many other women – she experienced every mistake as an abject failure that filled her with shame.
Dunham’s extraordinary trajectory served as both example and warning to her peers, but behind the scenes of her controversial story, her body had become a battleground.
Between the pilot of Girls, when a colitis attack landed her in hospital, and the final season, when she shattered her elbow, collapsed from endometriosis and suffered a massive internal haemorrhagic cyst that caused so much pain she could barely walk, Dunham had chosen to “ignore my body’s noisy signals in favour of this thing I wanted so badly”.
In 2019, Dunham was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a rare genetic connective tissue disorder that explained many of her symptoms. Prior to this, her faltering health was often just another source of shame. Hospital stays and bed rest delayed production, which was expensive and upset Konner. So Dunham numbed herself with prescription pills and kept going.
Evan Agostini/Invision/AAP
On the brink of her career, Dunham was in thrall to Konner. Brought in by HBO, the 38-year-old supervisor was already a television heavyweight and represented a big sister figure for the less experienced creator, who was her junior by 14 years.
Within days of their first meeting, Konner began divulging intimate details of her life and making extremely personal remarks to Dunham, all while teaching her how to write a pilot. But once filming started, she began exercising her authority “on a more sinister note”, telling her protegee she had to gain weight and look dowdy in order to stay funny.
Years later, when working with younger women herself, Dunham could see “how absurd it would seem to link myself to them in ways beyond the playful support system an on-set adult provides”. But as the ingenue, Dunham placed all her faith in Konner, and immersed herself in a lopsided relationship that grossly transgressed professional boundaries.
Together with Kirke, and Dunham’s long-term partner, music mogul Jack Antonoff, Konner became one of the author’s “three Js”; effectively a triumvirate who “defined my world, and in relation to whom I defined myself”. Caught up in this circle of co-dependency, Dunham was invariably left with an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. She felt she was
always in trouble with one of them for something: A dinner I arrived late for and left early. A messy breakdown I couldn’t predict or control … and the endless cycle of reassurance I required afterward. The only thing I could promise was to never miss a deadline.
Jordan Strauss/Invision/AAP
Dunham is more circumspect when it comes to her parents. However, it’s impossible not to speculate over her enmeshed relationships in light of her family dynamic. Supportive, but also overprotective and possessive, her mother (“the original frenemy”) and father tended to burden her with “unreasonable expectations”.
And they appeared to have been threatened by her success, as Dunham explains, “because it forced them to admit how much of their own self-image rode on their own highly specific public identities”.
Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/AAP
Other telling details are scattered throughout the book, including the death of her beloved anorexic grandmother and her estranged brother, Cyrus, who couldn’t bear the attention his older sister’s fame commanded. (A media storm over a passage in Dunham’s first book had resulted in claims she had sexually abused Cyrus when they were both children, and though Dunham strenuously denied this and issued an apology, damage was done.)
There is enough here to know that Dunham’s comparatively untold family story has been a difficult and complicated one, with firmly embedded roots and a pretty long shadow.
After Girls, Dunham’s life imploded. Her physical suffering culminated in a hysterectomy. She broke up with Antonoff after five years. And her addiction to benzodiasepines, taken to suppress her anxiety, finally landed her in rehab.
Her recovery, chronicled in the third part of the book, was slow and incremental as she learned to reappraise her work ethic, to accept her body and to learn to live with chronic illness. She also had to let go of Konner, which broke her heart, but helped her become more forgiving towards her younger, needier self.
As the book moves towards its poignant conclusion, which sees Dunham married to British musician Luis Felber and settled into a more sustainable rhythm of work and life, the price she has paid for fame becomes clear.
“Hollywood’s culture has always been permissive toward everything but human frailty,” she writes. And with this final insight, she points her reader back to the front of her book, and the long, tragic list of now-dead stars to whom her memoir is dedicated, along with “anyone else who was too Famesick to be cured”.
