Lena Dunham reveals in her new memoir that she cheated on Jack Antonoff with her former childhood boyfriend.
Dunham writes candidly about the end of her relationship with Antonoff in “Famesick,” released Tuesday. The “Girls” creator (39) and the music producer (42) dated from 2012 to 2017.
Dunham wrote that her relationship with Antonoff has been strained since she underwent a hysterectomy in 2017, and that she rapidly became dependent on drugs.
At the lowest point in her and Antonoff’s relationship, Dunham contacted a man named Nick. She said Dunham was her ex-boyfriend from middle school, with whom she had kept in touch over the years.
One night, after telling Nick that she wanted him to cheer her up after surgery, the two met and she asked him to sleep with her.
“In the taxi, we hugged again and said, ‘I’ve been through something terrible. I don’t want to talk about it, but I want you to fuck me and I want you to do all the work.'”
Dunham later recalled the two having sex and wrote that she felt “the euphoria that only IV drugs have brought me in recent months.”
“It wasn’t really sexual pleasure…but I was thinking fully for the first time in months,” she continues. “They sounded like: I’m an adulterer. I’m true. My intestines are where my womb should go, but look at this, I’m alive.”
Dunham continued to sleep with Nick while Antonoff was away on tour. In the end, she says, she couldn’t ignore the need to break up with Antonoff.
She recalled tearfully telling Antonoff over breakfast one morning that she knew they could no longer make each other happy.
She says he agrees and they both cry and say it was their first great love.
“We put our foreheads together and cried. In a fit of paranoia, I asked if we could still date,” she wrote. “‘We can do anything you want,’ he said. A sense of relief filled us both with a feeling of adoration.”
A rep for Dunham confirmed that she and Antonoff split in January 2018 after five years together, telling Page Six at the time that the split was “amicable.”
Dunham also detailed an alleged on-set verbal abuse of her Girls co-star Adam Driver, who is now married to someone else.
Dunham married musician Louis Felber in September 2021, and Antonoff married actress Margaret Qualley in August 2023.
