At the age of 26, Lena Dunham achieved fame as the creator, writer and star of the TV series Girls. A loosely autobiographical depiction of the real lives of young women in New York, the culture-defining TV series’ six-season run transformed her into an auteur of the post-Noughties zeitgeist. It would also, as her new memoir Famesick details, turn her into an object of relentless scrutiny, unrecognisable even to herself.
Having very recently rewatched Girls, I had all the right references fresh in my mind when I dived into Famesick. Sleeves rolled up, I was primed for a juicy glimpse behind the curtain of a show that courted as much controversy as acclaim for its unflinching representation of gratingly imperfect, self-centred, sexually yearning twentysomething women – perhaps the first believable female protagonists to appear on mainstream TV. Some people called it genius; others a disgrace. Most though had an opinion on Dunham, who bared it all in the form of her solipsistic character Hannah, only to become the internet’s favourite human punchbag for angry incels, body-shamers and moralistic feminists alike.
But Famesick is not, as I soon discovered, just a Girls tell-all. Its early chapters will certainly satisfy fans’ thirst for behind-the-scenes gossip, including some lurid off-screen moments with some well-known names, including a now well-publicised disagreement during filming with her co-star Adam Driver, who allegedly threw a chair at a wall, narrowly missing Dunham. But Famesick’s real focus is on everything that came after – in particular the culmination of a lifelong health crisis and an addiction to prescription drugs that became all-consuming.
Dunham writes with fluency about interminable weeks spent in hospital, consulting dismissive doctors and undergoing painful – but ultimately ineffective – surgeries on and around her uterus. She writes about the friends, co-workers and boyfriend who gradually ran out of sympathy for her unnamable but ever-present affliction, a phenomenon that anyone suffering from a chronic illness will recognise. And through it all, Dunham writes of trying and failing to ignore the constant hum of the internet’s unrelenting animosity towards her. There’s real meat to these stories, which keep the pages turning even once Girls is far in the rear-view mirror.
It’s clear in Famesick that Dunham’s writing has benefited from the last decade of introspection. Her 2014 memoir Not That Kind of Girl, which she wrote at the age of at 28, read like a rough-hewn work-in-progress, a collection of indulgent personal anecdotes with very little to connect them, and without a sturdy “moral of the story” to justify so much self-exposure.
But Famesick, while still dripping with Dunham’s trademark candour, is fortified by the presence of a firm narrative arc. She offers the details of some of her most intimate struggles from the stable vantage point of a person no longer in them, not just sharing salacious snapshots for the sake of having something to say but because, told in succession, they build a compelling story about the coalescence of fame, illness and drug abuse.
The book also feels distinctly Jewish, probably because Dunham, who is Jewish through her mother, mentions her Ashkenazi roots as early as the first page when she reveals that she’s named after her maternal great-grandmother. Dunham adds that her mother’s surname, Simmons, “had been changed at least four times over the generations to disguise its origins”. She starts the book this way because Famesick is essentially a story about losing ownership over her name. “It was only when the name entered the spin-cycle of mass media, surprising my early classmates, my family, but no one more than myself, that it started to feel alien, like a character in a film I didn’t write.”
There have never been valid grounds for the vitriol Dunham has received since she first appeared on our televisions in 2012. Nor should anyone need an explanation as to why she didn’t deserve it. But Famesick offers an explanation anyway. Moreover Dunham’s understanding of the pitiful cycle of fame, abuse and self-harm is acute. She is still, then, the “voice of a generation”.
Famesick, by Lena Dunham, is published by Fourth Estate
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