Book Review | A Body In Revolt
While Lena Dunham was making “Girls,” her form was failing her.
By Lena Dunham
Random House, 416 pp.
When you hear the name “Lena Dunham,” who do you think of? Maybe a spoiled brat who constantly puts her foot in her mouth; a sassy feminist who needs to grow up. Maybe a genius who created an unflinchingly honest show that people misunderstood. Perhaps a little bit of each. Even those who aren’t disciples of her landmark show, Girls—which followed four young disaffected Millennial women in New York who discussed sex, bodies and friendships with a repelling or alluring frankness—may know Dunham as a mouthy klutz. She was forced to deny biting Beyoncé and had to walk back a comment about wishing she’d had an abortion to empathize with women who have had one. The latter resulted in one of the greatest celebrity apologies of all time: “My words were spoken from a sort of ‘delusional girl’ persona I often inhabit, a girl who careens between wisdom and ignorance and it didn’t translate. That’s my fault.”
In her extraordinarily candid new memoir, Famesick, the writer, director and star lays bare her physical struggles. During and post-Girls, she was making problematic decisions under delusions, drugs or alcohol, and checked into hotels as “Rose O’Neill” or “Ruth Stein” as a method of excusing herself from herself. “I had heard my given name so often, and in so many unnerving contexts, that it ceased to belong to me,” she writes in the introduction.
Her 2014 essay collection Not That Kind of Girl pluckily danced around life, serving as a bonus add-on to Girls. Famesick begins post-Oberlin College, when Dunham was living at home, writing her webseries Delusional Downtown Divas and her first feature-length film, 2010’s Tiny Furniture, whose acclaim got HBO’s attention. The book includes her notes from Girls’ first-ever pitch, which demonstrates how her vision was clear from the beginning; the four titular girls, she wrote, “have that mix of know-it-all entitlement that is the mark of all great Jewish comedians and many twenty-four-year-old women with liberal arts degrees.”
What runs through this first third of Famesick is the unbridled joy of artmaking from a 23-year-old who believes she can do anything and is also given the money to do so. “In that moment,” Dunham writes, “I had never worked harder: to express myself clearly and with conviction, to say something that was worth hearing, to overcome my fear of failure and submit to what life was offering me.” She gabs with Barbara Walters about anal sex and lunches with Nora Ephron. She’s unstoppable and fresh, and HBO executives can’t get enough of her honest, urgent writing. Life was offering her an undeniable opportunity. With it came a hand up the ladder to the top of a miles-long slide that would prove to be spiky and unrelenting.
In the first days shooting what would become Girls, Dunham’s naivete emerged. She wasn’t a creative kid scribbling away in her room anymore, but a boss, “like a child who had been given control of a Fortune 500 company.” Suddenly people are relying on you to make a product—and that product is your art, which is based on your life. What happens when the lines get blurry?
Dunham’s openness in her writing and acting, if you’ve followed her tirade of apologies, has been her Achilles heel—touching to the people who feel represented by her work, repelling to those who flinch at public rawness. Most of the criticism, including an anecdote from her first book that people misinterpreted as an admission to having sexually assaulted her sibling, surprised Dunham. She was raised in Manhattan, “where adults overshared at dinner parties and my parents took me to see performance art where women writhed and yelled and jerked off…I still believed in art as a space for uncharted freedom.” I think of when her character Hannah Horvath rails against the concept of TMI: “There’s no such thing as too much information, this is the information age!”
To not use humiliating stories would be to refuse the power of turning a depressing situation into a joke, anecdote into armor—that’s the Dunham Doctrine.
In her early days in the director’s chair, she develops several chronic illnesses, vast and mysterious forces that made her sleep for days, bring a heating pad on set or submit to an aching body that feels like constantly being in a car crash. She buries herself in work, but the relentless writing and filming breaks her down further. In the most creatively promising period of her life, her body is demanding a standstill.
Dunham likely doesn’t believe in heroes or villains—it would go against her nuance—but she does believe in telling the truth, and Famesick does what celebrity memoirs ought to do—dish. The two people she’s had the most complex relationships with have also been the longest-lasting ones: Jack Antonoff, the music producer and her partner for nearly a decade, and her creative partner Jenni Konner, a self-described “hairy, pudgy Jewess,” who matches her vision, but not her style of work. They form a triangle of Jewish Millennial optimists, soundtracking the music at hipster Brooklyn coffeeshops—Antonoff’s “We Are Young,” “Some Nights”—and inspiring countless numbers of vaguely personal fiction writers. Other relationships of note are Adam Driver, her Girls co-star who she says was prone to violent chair-throwing fits and whom Dunham has not spoken to since the show’s end, and Lorde, described as the “teen pop star” whose album Antonoff was producing while Dunham was in hysterectomy recovery. (When she was moving around the apartment with a walker, Lorde would call her “Aunt Lena.” “You’re just mad because she doesn’t want to be your friend,” Antonoff tells Dunham; she figures he’s right.)
She and Antonoff meet at the best and worst time for each of them. They bond over old Saturday Night Live episodes, “two lonely kids kept company by the type of art we were now trying to make.” Her show is taking off, and his two bands are off on worldwide tours. As her illnesses progresses, Antonoff becomes increasingly detached; Dunham is pragmatic in her assessment—of course, she’d like someone to be present for her (he shows up late to her hysterectomy), but she also knows that her whole deal is a lot.
Konner’s story is slightly different. Bonding quickly, the pair spend days working on scenes for Girls, but Dunham’s mixing of business with friendship created sticky situations—she even advocates for Konner to make the same salary as her. But Konner fundamentally misunderstands Dunham’s illness—not unreasonably, as it shifted and mutated—as a roadblock to work production. “You keep saying you’re sick,” Konner says to her one day, “like you still believe it’s physical.” For someone who had ejected cherry tomato-sized cysts, had starved themselves, had gotten addicted to painkillers, had demanded the removal of their malfunctioning, traitorous uterus at 30, this was, of course, the last thing Dunham wanted to hear.
As Girls is renewed for season after season, Dunham shows up to set exhausted or broken, because what would happen if she refused? “Hollywood’s culture has always been permissive toward everything but human frailty,” she writes. “Cruelty in the name of achievement was considered justified, but stopping in the name of grief or pain or simply fatigue was not.” (She filmed her and Driver’s last scene together, at a diner, with a broken elbow.) Her father likens her to the goose that lays golden eggs—no one’s looking after the mother, just the product. She writes: “I was so tired that my sexual fantasy had become a scenario in which a faceless man tenderly said, ‘You’re exhausted, aren’t you? I think what you need is to head to bed for twenty-four hours straight.’”
Sometime after she and Konner start their newsletter in 2018, Lenny, a fan writes in guessing Dunham’s diagnosis to be Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which finally provides her with some clarity. Her symptoms don’t become more manageable, but they’re an explanation for something, at least. Even so, she fears telling Antonoff and Konner, worried it’s the next in a long string of excuses. “At this point,” she writes, “I was starting to understand that illness wasn’t just a town I was passing through, but a city that I was going to pay taxes in.”
Eventually, she gets her strength back. She breaks up with both Antonoff and Konner—romantically and creatively, respectively—removes her uterus, goes to rehab for pain meds, and moves to England. At some point she considers having a child via a surrogate and IVF, a shocking admission for someone spending an entire book lamenting her body’s lack of functionality. While directing the pilot of the HBO show Industry, Dunham starts writing stories, parts of Famesick, journal entries. Suddenly, with little pressure, her mind expands. She starts seeing someone; their sex is liberating rather than torturous. She accidentally lights her nightgown on fire trying to burn a candle and laughs about it, writes about it. After their business breakup, Konner pleads with Dunham not to write about their relationship immediately. Dunham complies.
After years of others toying with her story, Famesick is where Dunham reclaims her name—not excusing every gaffe or mistake, but offering explanations along the way. Sometimes the culprits are close to home—there’s a complex and compelling tension with her mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, who is now yoked to her daughter’s legacy. “Her art had always been her religion, the one thing I knew I could not touch, change, inform, or be more essential than,” Dunham writes. “And now I was the story.” Once, when getting in line to vote, her father tells her, “I don’t know if I want to be seen voting with Lena Dunham.” She wasn’t his daughter anymore, but a proper noun in headlines. She ends the book “not perfect, not blameless, not shameless, but total,” the sweet spot.
After she emerges from rehab, she rushes to tell Konner stories and people she’s met. “I’m sure it’s very funny,” she replies, “but you’re not meant to be getting funny stories out of this.” Obviously, this goes against every foundational principle of Lena Dunham’s work. Life’s humiliations are its narrative threads—rehab is about getting well, but it’s also about the time your roommate thought you were delusional because you claimed your boyfriend wrote P!nk’s “Beautiful Trauma.” To not use this would be to refuse the power of turning a depressing situation into a joke, anecdote into armor—that’s the Dunham Doctrine.
(Top image credit: Elena Ternovaja (CC BY-SA 3.0))