10 min readHow can I possibly interview Lena Dunham after reading her new memoir Famesick? This searing indictment of “success,” and the damage it has done to her, shows what happens when you mix vulnerability, celebrity, and ambition into a toxic cocktail and serve it ice cold with a twist to an impressive woman in her early twenties. She downs it and orders another, and then another, at an after-party that only ends when she reaches rock bottom, the overhead lights are turned on and she realizes, finally, it’s time to go home.
Me asking Dunham to rip the Band-Aid off old wounds so I can package up her past two decades into a story with a neat headline is, in some way, part of the problem. The actor, writer, and director has suffered such an assault on her mental and physical health over the years that she now lives in what she describes as “pretty much constant pain of some kind.” She has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS)—a connective-tissue disorder—and had a hysterectomy as a result of endometriosis. These conditions would have affected her regardless, but the huge success of Girls and the lifestyle that came with it—working to burnout, developing a prescription-drug addiction, accidentally setting herself on fire, problematic sexual encounters and daily attacks on her personality, morality and life choices—surely made symptoms even harder to deal with.
But she has chosen to do this interview, and she’s chosen to write a brutally honest account of her life in the spotlight, putting herself right back in it when she could have just, you know…not?
“I wrote a book that’s about listening to my own needs and instincts, not becoming a servant to this larger industrial force that will swallow you up,” Dunham tells me over Zoom from her bed in her apartment in New York, wearing a pink striped shirt over a bright pink tee, comfortable, rather than convalescing. “And yet, even all of these experiences couldn’t quell my love for doing the thing that I do, which is telling stories.”
That contradiction—ambition versus self-preservation—is the central tension of Famesick. The book circles the strange gravity of success: the way it pulls you outward even as every instinct tells you to retreat. Dunham is both drawn to and repelled by the life that fame built around her. She now lives with her husband, musician Luis Felber, and their pet animals—rabbits, a dog, and pigs—between London and Connecticut.
It’s a quieter existence than the one she inhabited when Girls exploded into the culture in 2012. Back then she seemed almost mythological: the prodigy who wrote, directed, and starred in her own HBO show at 25 and who was deemed either the voice of her generation or the problem with it.
“I think part of getting older has been me going, ‘I’m very open to the idea that I’m wrong about everything,’” she says, laughing.
But even if that is the case (and I don’t think it is), the memoir is compelling, especially for those of us who grew up alongside Dunham and hungrily consumed her output, from Girls to Lenny Letter (her popular newsletter that ended in 2018), her book of essays, movies, and recent shows such as Too Much and Industry. We obviously can’t wait for her next film Good Sex, a rom-com starring Natalie Portman coming to Netflix later this year. But in the meantime, Famesick is gossipy and splashy, like all good celebrity memoirs, but contains an authenticity of emotion you won’t get from an A-lister’s ghost-written tome. She leans into shame and regret as much as the wide-eyed joy of being, at one time, as she says in the book, “the girl who got the thing.” I couldn’t put it down.
Looking back at life in her early 20s, when she was the messy millennial with the Midas touch, Dunham shows great tenderness for her younger self. “I wish that I had known when I was 20 and looking at myself and thinking, You are fat, you are greasy, what a gift it is to be inside of a body that’s working.” She tells me she finally understands what her father meant when he used to say, “No one should be allowed to put a show out until they’re 30.” At the time she deemed this absurd. Now she thinks he’s right.
Allison Williams, Zosia Mamet, Lena Dunham, Adam Driver, and Judd Apatow at the 2013 Golden Globes.
Dunham’s relationship with her father is beautifully rendered in the book; he’s by her side throughout every storm, from health scares to media controversies. And his feedback, after admitting that chapter nine (where Dunham details her hysterectomy and how she “separates from (her) body and starts acting out in ways that are sexual and not safe”) needs to be erased from his brain, was: “I know that this will mean a lot to some people, and then other people will say, ‘Why can’t this girl shut the fuck up already?’”
Often when she’s writing, Dunham has what she describes as “necessary amnesia”—believing no one will ever see or engage with the work. She explains, “It allows me to approach each creative project and meet it as it needs to be met.” But as she gets closer to it going out into the world, “I go, ‘Why the fuck did I do this?’” Interestingly, when I ask why she wrote Famesick, she’s very clear. “It would be very easy to do an interview and for me to go, you know, ‘I am married now and I’m almost 40, and life is really beautiful. And that was a period and we’re past it.’ That is what celebrity asks of people—to condense their experiences and flatten them down so that a woman after a divorce is asked, ‘How are you doing?’ And she goes, ‘I’ve learnt so much about myself; I’ve never loved myself more.’ That’s the headline and we’re done.”
So is writing this book the ultimate power move? She’s controlling the narrative for real now, whereas with Girls, her essays and autofiction, that narrative power and control was always an illusion? She says, “During Girls, it was complicated because I had to create so much story engine. Every little shred of life, real life that I experienced was going directly in.”
Getting into a slower cycle with self-disclosure has been helpful. “It allowed me to consider what I think should be in the world. I got to write it over a long period of time, and it went through angrier iterations, it went through more defensive iterations. And I landed in this place where I need to include anything that directly affected my behavior, actions, and experience afterwards. But if something is in there for color or comedy or even drama, it doesn’t need to live there.”
She turns on the lamp by her bed (“’cause of my pathological fear of the light changing as things start to get darker”), then adds, “Today, girls on the internet say I’m doing it for the story, and in my 20s I did a lot of things for the story. I felt, well, everything is copy; this will be useful later. And, probably as a result, put myself in some pretty detrimental situations, as I think is clear from the book … It’s nice to be adult enough to know life gives you enough story without you having to do anything for it.”
A through line in Dunham’s life and work has been the uneasy intimacy between pain and pleasure. “A reason I have so many tattoos is the very thin line between those two things. And recognizing what real pleasure feels like without pain has been huge.” She says it’s very complicated when the organs that are meant to give you pleasure are also where a lot of trauma is rooted and a lot of discomfort. “I have a complicated relationship with my own sexuality and with what pleasure feels like in that space. But I’ve stopped putting myself in situations that reaffirm that pain or shame, and instead have tried to expand my sense of what pleasure means.”
We talk about how she finds it way easier to write about “humiliating” sex than good, tender, loving sex—something she finds “embarrassing or cringey to talk about.” In Famesick, she discusses her long-term relationship with Jack Antonoff, and describes her time with other partners and the joy of meeting her husband, but when I tell her I experienced the book’s central love story as her friendship with Girls co-showrunner Jenni Konner, she nods at once.
Jenni Konner, Jenna Lyons, and Lena Dunham at the 2016 Met Gala.
“This was the most important relationship of my young life,” she says. “It was the love story of my young life.” Their eventual estrangement, she suggests, was harder to process because it didn’t fit the usual script for heartbreak. “I got bogged down in the idea of my break-up with a romantic partner,” she says. “Probably because it was too painful to consider the break-up of this other kind.” Does she still care what Konner thinks? “I’ll never stop,” she says quietly. “When you love someone, for me at least, you love them forever.”
The book also revisits what she calls “The Big Bad”—a moment when she and Konner publicly defended a colleague accused of sexual misconduct. The backlash forced a painful reckoning. “When you betray your own values, your own morality, your own sense of who you are in the world, that betrayal of self is much harder to come to terms with,” she says, then pauses. “A moment of deep disappointment with yourself is very painful. And you can continue to feel regret while also coming to some kind of peace with yourself.” Peace, in this context, doesn’t mean forgetting.
These days, Dunham has removed herself from one of the most relentless engines of celebrity culture: social media. “I haven’t had the passwords in eight years,” she says, adding “my mental health became about 60 percent better.” Occasionally she glances at her husband’s phone and sees the emotional chaos of Instagram. “It goes from an AI video of a lion feeding piglets to an image of war, to the life of someone you might be jealous of, to an image of someone you never wanted to see again.” After years spent learning how to regulate her nervous system, she can’t imagine re-entering that zone. Instead, she uses the internet: “I buy things from the ’90s on eBay,’ she says cheerfully. ‘And I research pet care.”
Living with EDS means her body is always surprising her. She has ended up in the emergency room in almost every country she’s ever visited (Japan is the best). But whereas once the hospital was where she felt most safe, now she can’t wait to get out and back to her life, which we agree must be a good sign.
I ask what the creative industries really need to understand about living with chronic illness, and she’s glad to share her strong opinion on the subject: “Hollywood has such a high tolerance for so many things: historically, abuse that’s verbal or physical. Being dismissive of your colleagues. Tyrannical behaviour, egotistic behaviour—yet absolutely no tolerance for physical fallibility. The show must go on! Being chronically ill, being neurodivergent…it involves a level of creativity just to move through the world. And we want that reflected in art. I think, just knowing that it’s not a one-size-fits-all system and that someone might need to take a break, so they can come back the next day, shouldn’t be so hard.”
Now, she works with understanding teams—she might direct from a massage table or insist that locations are all on the ground floor to preserve her energy. But one of the book’s most powerful lines is when she says to Konner, while filming episode 8 of Girls and after a violating medical experience, “nobody protected me.”
“Nobody told me what this was gonna be like.”
I ask how it felt to realize that at the time, and to write about it now. “It was the culmination of so much. You know, nobody told me what this was gonna be like. Nobody told me that getting naked on television was going to lead to this kind of intensity. Nobody told me that with success comes this other kind of intensity. And nobody looked at me and said, ‘Hey, you’re really sick. You need to stop.’ And nobody stopped (the violating incident she describes) from happening. And yet it’s nobody’s fault.”
While it’s clear Dunham has learnt to listen to her body and protect herself, there’s no neat ending to her memoir and it lacks anything like a hot take on the sprawling, complex, beautiful chaos of a life she’s still in the middle of. “My husband always wants to get everything done, because then he can relax. We have to fix the pipe in the house, then everything will be perfect … I was like, ‘Life is just things happening to you, all the time, forever.’”
“Is it constantly fixing the pipe?” I ask.
“Yes! Life is the house you own that’s always leaking.” She laughs.
As we’re finishing our conversation, one of her rabbits, Tammy, hops onto the bed and she moves the laptop to show me. “The white one’s very shy, so if she comes out it’s a lucky sign.” She loves it when the animals pile onto the duvet with her. It’s how her days at home start, followed by coffee and a bagel in bed, then “a great meeting or conversation that feels like it’s exciting, time to write and later, if I can, a beautiful dinner with friends or family.”
She has lots of outlets for pleasure—Google deep dives, audiobooks, making art, interior decorating—and says: “Right now, my life is very full of joyful hobbies.” Somewhere in the house, the pipe is still leaking. But maybe it doesn’t need to be fixed, and maybe knowing that is Dunham’s greatest achievement yet.
