3 Reasons to Read Lena Dunham’s Unflinching New Memoir, Famesick
Lena Dunham is a lot and so, too, is her new memoir, Famesick.
The book unpacks the decade of her life in which she went from unknown indie filmmaker to excessively loathed/critically acclaimed showrunner and star of HBO's Girls. It's a period of her life jam-packed with drama and the book takes on everything from the perils of young celebrity to the agony of endometriosis to toxic professional and romantic relationships.
There are even blind gossip items.
Dunham has been masterfully teasing the nearly 400-page book’s release for months on her Instagram and has embarked on a powerful press tour for the memoir, which was released on April 14. (Her interview with The New York Times’s David Marchese is a must-watch.)
Here are three reasons to read Famesick.
She goes deep on difficult relationships
If you want the Adam Driver gossip and the tick-tock on her break-up with Girls collaborator Jenni Konner, you’re in luck because Dunham mostly delivers on both counts while avoiding the trap of tell-all, score-settling territory.
In the book, she details the very cliché, very actor-y broodiness of Driver, who played her on-again, off-again boyfriend Adam on Girls. In Dunham’s depiction, the Star Wars actor comes off as an angry young man-type that’s both familiar and goofy—he throws things, he stalks off set, he vacillates between negging and wooing her. He's kind of like a toxic work husband.
It’s a far more interesting portrait of a relationship than the one she paints of her years-long coupling with singer and music producer Jack Antonoff. (In the book, Antonoff feels more like an absence than a presence in her life—he's either relentlessly touring or asleep.)
However, it's her partnership with Konner—which began when Dunham was hired by HBO in her early 20s and Konner was in her 40s with kids—that is the core relationship of Famesick. In fact, the Antonoff breakup pales in comparison to how much Dunham's friendship with Konner (and its subsequent breakdown) seemingly continues to consume her. She still can’t decide if this was a convenient union between a young creative commodity and her older, business-savvy mentor, or a genuine friendship that spanned a generational divide.
For the reader, it feels like a mix of both.
She does a masterful job of depicting the multi-tiered hell of chronic illness
Dunham’s fame coincided with her undergoing a decade of truly ill health, and as much as the book deals with her missteps (and there are many, some of which she doesn’t directly tackle), it’s also a log of her struggles with debilitating endometriosis and addiction to Klonopin.
Her significant health challenges affect her relationships too, and anyone who has ever dealt with a chronic illness will recognize the unhappy cycles of pain, misdiagnoses and medical misogyny that mark such an experience. She also doesn't shy away from discussing how health issues negatively affect the relationships between the chronically ill and their loved ones.
She doesn't shy away from sharing deeply personal stories
Dunham did not win her laurels in prestige TV by being discreet. As Girls made clear, she’s not the kind of artist who worries about appearing on a toilet seat or without pants.
That propensity for revealing the gritty bits is a signature feature of Famesick, too. Her memoir unpacks the dark side of certain toxic sexual relationships in her youth and their connection to her often powerful self-hatred. It’s confessional and lurid stuff—but likely also highly relatable for many of her readers.
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Flannery Dean is a writer based in Hamilton, Ont. She’s written for The Narwhal, the Globe and Mail and The Guardian.
