If there’s something to be realized from the phrases folks decide for his or her passwords and proxies, then Lena Dunham’s selection of aliases – pseudonyms that, as a public particular person, she has used over time to conceal her id when checking into rehab or ordering room service – give us a tiny glimpse into the author and director’s self-picture. Among her staples, “Lauri Reynolds” (after her mum, Laurie, with whom she is strikingly shut); “Rose O’Neill” (after the American millionaire illustrator, who misplaced her fortune to burnout and hangers-on); and my favorite, “Renata Halpern”, an alias Dunham shares with readers of her scrumptious new memoir, Famesick, with out explaining the title’s origin.
“Has anyone else clocked the Renata Halpern reference?” I ask Dunham, who’s in her condo in New York, speaking quick through video name whereas ready for an egg-and-cheese bagel to be run up from the deli. On the brink of 40, she is in her darkish-haired period – very Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – which, this morning, is about in opposition to a vivid orange shirt and the pale, glowy pores and skin she describes as the one pleased facet-impact of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic situation of the connective tissue with which Dunham was recognized in 2019. Later this month, she’ll return to London, the place she has lived for the final 5 years with her husband, Luis Felber, and the place she enjoys larger anonymity than in her native New York – though, she says, not sufficient to dispense with the aliases. (“Just when you think no one cares, someone does something creepy, so you have to watch out.”)
Renata Halpern: the alter ego of Savannah Wingo, luridly traumatised minor character in The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy’s timeless potboiler of the mid-Nineteen Eighties, made right into a film starring Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte which has at all times attracted a sure type of smirking obsessive (hello!). Dunham screams. “No one’s ever caught it! The amount of mail I’ve received to Renata Halpern … thank you. Now I’m going to have to change my fake names.”
Here we’re, then, 9 years after the sixth and last season of Girls. If Dunham gravitates in direction of the names of damage or traumatised ladies, it’s advisedly so; for the final 20 years, her life has been quite a bit. Famesick covers all of it with out flinching: the early publicity that coincided with social media’s wildest west interval; the inventive and private pressures of working successful TV present that might’ve buckled a grizzled veteran three many years her senior; the well being dramas, together with a multi-12 months battle to get docs to take her endometriosis critically; the following dependancy to pharmaceuticals; the dysfunctional and damaging intercourse and relationships; the problem of courting musician Jack Antonoff; the problem of managing actor Adam Driver; the fallout with her shut good friend and enterprise companion Jenni Konner; the work; the loneliness when the success – irony klaxon! – of a present typifying the lives of a gaggle of millennial ladies threw her fully out of sync with her friends.
In Famesick, Dunham locations PTSD, loss, trauma, fuck-up and physique horror on the centre of the story, and describes herself variously as oversensitive, folks-pleasing and at all times mendacity in mattress. And but, studying and speaking to her, one is keenly conscious that, alongside this model of Dunham, is the opposite one: absolutely the powerhouse of a girl, steely eyed, tunnel visioned, who pushed by way of punishing volumes of work on the highest of ranges, 12 months after 12 months after 12 months.
It is, of course, this model of Dunham – the gimlet-eyed artist, formidable to get the factor proper – who wrote the e book. Famesick is frank, unsparing, in elements horrifying and extra sincere concerning the expertise of fame than something I’ve learn. As one would count on, additionally it is very humorous. Here’s Dunham in hospital shortly earlier than her hysterectomy, when she has been pumped full of medicine extra generally used to set off labour: “It wasn’t lost on me,” she writes, “that this was the closest I’d ever come to birth – but beside me was not my husband, ready to greet our bundle of joy, but only Mary, a nurse from Staten Island who wondered aloud why I was so often nude on television.” (After the operation, her uterus, she discovers, was “worse than anyone had imagined. It was the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, full of both subtle and glaring flaws.”)
On accusations of nepotism, she writes: “Nobody watching HBO had ever heard of my parents, unless they had trawled some of the quieter corners of the Museum of Modern Art and really studied the wall tags.” And this, which made me chortle out loud: “When I met my husband, he told me about his trauma, and I told him two things I saw as facts: I was sick, and people did not like me.”
Let’s begin with that final one: within the early 2010s, after the primary season of Girls aired, she discovered herself the goal of obsessive on-line criticism. As she writes within the e book, strangers on-line reached out repeatedly to inform her about, “my bad body, irritating voice, clearly horrific politics, inability to walk in heels, poor sense of style, and the fact that anyone – literally anyone – was more deserving of all of this than I was”. A younger girl with expertise, alternative, energy and publicity, who didn’t look as if she habitually starved herself, Dunham was extraordinarily triggering to a big quantity of constituencies, from offended basement-dwellers to the legions of males who hate ladies, to anybody older than her who hadn’t had the writing profession they felt they deserved. What I discover exceptional, after that first flush of fame, is that Dunham didn’t cease wanting on the on-line commentary or sharing intimate ideas and emotions. Instead, she remained perversely, hopelessly open. Why on earth put your self in hurt’s manner like that?
“I don’t know,” she says. “If you have an addictive personality, which clearly I do, any hit of the dopamine of positivity [is welcome] and there’s also a hit of adrenaline that comes from the negative. And then, because you see something negative, you want to see something positive to erase it, and you end up in this cycle. It’s easy when you’re young to feel the internet’s a game you want to win. I remember breaking up with a guy in my early 20s and him writing an email that was really mean. And my father said, ‘Well, why don’t you just ignore him? You’ve broken up, you don’t have to do anything else.’ And I was like, ‘Because I don’t want him to have the last word.’ And then you meet up with the person and they act sweet so you kiss them, then they act mean again. And that’s the relationship you’re in with the internet.”
It is fascinating to examine Dunham’s expertise with that of younger ladies within the public eye in the present day. No one is as younger as she was – simply 23 when she bought Girls, and 25 when it first aired. The nearest comparability could be 30-12 months-previous Rachel Sennott, who at 28 bought, then later wrote and starred in, HBO’s hit present, I Love LA (Sennott’s pitch: “Entourage for internet girls”), now heading into its second season. Sennott has acknowledged her love of Girls and debt to Dunham, some of which occupies particular cautionary-story territory. For younger ladies within the public eye, now, says Dunham, “I am one of the many examples they have of what [can happen] and there’s a sense of people learning how much vulnerability is useful and how much is not. And I did not have any of that. I didn’t have any sense about even just simple things like posing, or style, or how to show your body, or how to show your face.”
She and her fellow Girls stars have been like “lambs to the slaughter.” This was pushed residence to Dunham just lately whereas speaking to a 26-12 months-previous about obsessive compulsive dysfunction. “I said, ‘What are the things that come up for you?’ I was thinking about the stuff that comes up for me, my big OCD thoughts, which are the classics, like, ‘Am I a pervert? Am I evil?’ Ideas about purity. And he said, ‘I have very extreme cancellation anxiety.’ And I was like, oh, I heard the word ‘cancelled’ in real time when someone said to me ‘you’re cancelled’ and I was like, what does that mean? Like a TV show?”
She has been cancelled too many instances to rely – she addresses all of them within the e book, large, small and enduringly bizarre. (As she writes, “‘I saw Lena Dunham serve her dog salmon on a china plate’ should not have been a headline, but it was.”) In New York, rumours about her rose to the extent of legend. “One of my best friends, Alyssa, was once in a book store in Brooklyn and she overheard someone saying, ‘Lena Dunham’s been throwing these really exclusive sex parties, and they’re happening once a month and it’s really hard to get an invitation.’ And she was like, it must be really hard to get an invitation because she’s literally always in her bed watching The Bachelor.”
The undeniable fact that for years now she’s been free of social media apps on her cellphone – Dunham writes posts which another person uploads – is, she says, “aside from sobriety and moving more slowly and understanding my health better, a huge part of how my life can be calm and joyful”. In current years, she has solely caved in, as soon as. “I made the mistake of going to [the apps on] my husband’s phone – I wanted to see what people said about our wedding picture.” My hand flies involuntarily to my mouth. In 2021, Dunham married Felber, with whom she’d been arrange by a good friend, and for the ceremony in London, wore a wonderful satin robe designed by the British designer Christopher Kane.
“I was so excited,” she says, her voice falling. “I felt like it was so joyful and I wanted someone to say how cute my husband is, whatever. And I looked for five minutes and – it was five minutes I deeply regretted.”
Famesick cuts off earlier than the element of Dunham’s marriage to Felber. Instead, there are two, central love tales within the e book: one with Antonoff, the indie rock star and producer whom Dunham dated and lived with for 5 years till they broke up in 2017, and a platonic one with Konner, her ex-producing companion and a girl 15 years her senior, who was assigned to Dunham by HBO as a mentor when she first began working on Girls. Konner was married with two kids when she met the younger Dunham and the following 10 years have been an absolute corker of toxic feminine friendship: jealousy, manipulation, sulking, clinginess and, finally, the dying of the connection – in addition to some beautiful, sunny intervals of mutual admiration and help.
Dunham’s youth and inexperience made her weak, in these early years at HBO, to the affect of older folks, not all of whom had her greatest pursuits at coronary heart. She wasn’t a toddler star, however would possibly as effectively have been; a wunderkind who, after graduating, hustled the low price range to write, direct and star within the autobiographical film Tiny Furniture, which after profitable greatest narrative characteristic at South by Southwest in 2010, introduced her to HBO’s consideration.
It was a rare place to be in at 23: given the keys first to the pilot, then to the season, then to a six-season arc of the hit present she wouldn’t solely write, but in addition direct and star in. At the time of signing, Dunham was nonetheless residing at residence within the household’s Tribeca loft. When she travelled for conferences in LA, she had a stuffed toy in her suitcase. She had by no means had a job, aside from babysitting or different Saturday-type jobs. She had no concept what was coming, and when her dad – somebody she characterises drily within the e book as, “forever looking a gift horse in the mouth” – tried to warn her issues could be about to get bizarre, she shooed him away. “I was like, ‘You dumb old man, you don’t know how the world works! You check your email once a week!’ And he was right about everything.”
As catalogued in Famesick, the primary fallout was main disruption inside her shut good friend group. Before Girls, Dunham’s solely plan put up-commencement had been to get a job educating video manufacturing at Saint Ann’s, her previous highschool in Brooklyn, partly for the medical insurance and so she might make “weird indie films” on the facet. Instead, she grew to become immediately, outrageously profitable. As her fame grew, so her closest feminine buddies withdrew from her. She found dinners and weekends away that she wasn’t invited to. When they did invite her to issues, no person requested her a single query about her life, both as a result of her success was so triggering to them or as a result of they assumed her life was good. In one, painful scene, they prank-known as her. These elements of the e book are fascinating, and courageous. It’s such a taboo to discuss these items, however of course, that’s not a problem from which Dunham has ever shrunk.
“The jealousy thing; it’s so complicated,” she says. “You never want to be the person who’s saying, ‘People are jealous of me’, because then people are like, ‘Girl, no they’re not.’ So I was self-conscious about it. But I was also interested in the way in which having a very clear professional arc in your 20s, when a lot of your friends aren’t there yet, isn’t just that they’re jealous of you; it’s that their life has a different central narrative. My life was completely built around my job. And everything else came second to that. Whereas a lot of people I was close to, their life was built around their relationships, their social life. People worked so that they could go and hang out, instead of hanging out a little so that they could feel better about always being at work.”
And my God, she labored, limitless lengthy days with accountability for tons of of forged and crew. Dunham’s management model was “coper”, and bravado is an enormous half of this story, the sensation she had, rightly or wrongly, that any present of weak spot and this huge alternative could be taken away from her.
“One of the great lessons of my life has been, like, companies are not your friend. And companies that are publicly traded are not your friend. I’m no longer interested in breaking my body for a company that gets more in tax write-offs in a year than any of the artists will make in their lifetime.” It wasn’t solely her youth that put Dunham in an invidious place. “I know lots of male wunderkinds, and they’re having a different experience,” she says.
How so? “Young men are allowed the grace of learning how to behave, and the expectation isn’t that they’re going to do really brilliant work and then also be kind to everyone and listen to everybody, and remember everybody’s children’s names, you know. I did things on Girls like saying, ‘I don’t think we should go 10 minutes late because people might be hungry.’ And that doesn’t occur to men running sets, because they’re given the freedom to just be creative and have a stormy mood, and go into a room and rethink something and come back out. But as a woman, you have to perform grace all the time, in a way that I’m only just now startling to unbuckle from. But: I also care a lot about having a set where people are happy, and feel free and heard and unafraid. Largely because I don’t want people to feel some of the ways that I felt.”
I inform her that, given she was his boss, I discovered her account of how Adam Driver behaved in direction of her on set and in rehearsal fully unacceptable. Driver performed Dunham’s character Hannah’s on-off boyfriend, Adam Sackler, for all six seasons of Girls, throughout which era he was spectacularly impolite to her, in accordance to the e book. He as soon as hurled a chair on the wall subsequent to her. He punched a gap in his trailer wall. He screamed in her face. She smiles. “At the time, I didn’t have the skill to … it never entered my mind to say, ‘I am your boss, you can’t speak to me this way.’ And, at that point in my 20s, I still thought that’s what great male geniuses do: eviscerate you. Which is weird, because I was raised by a male genius who would never do that.”
She says, “I have lots of amazing men in my life. Judd [Apatow] is a great hero of mine; Tim Bevan at Working Title is a huge part of my life and so is cinematographer Sam Levy. I just worked with Mark Ruffalo, the most thoughtful, sensitive, politically engaged, beautiful person. There’s plenty of them walking around. But there were years when I thought: Can’t I just make things that only have women in them?”
Tright here is one other strand to the jealousy story that’s even more durable to write about, however Dunham goes there – and that’s parental resentment. An incredible hero of the e book is Dunham’s affable dad, Carroll, an artist, who brings her espresso each morning when she’s feeling unhappy, accompanies her to docs’ appointments and is an all-spherical mensch. Her mom, Laurie Simmons, additionally an artist, is a extra difficult determine whom Dunham refers to as her “original frenemy” and whose quantity she has saved in her cellphone beneath “Laurie Simmons” not “Mom”.
Of Simmons, she writes: “Art had always been her religion, the one thing I knew I could not touch, change, inform, or be more essential than. And now I was the story.” When issues got powerful between them throughout these early days of Dunham’s fame, “we never discussed it,” she writes. “To name this would be to cop to an ugly emotion, directed at an even uglier target – her own child.” And but, on the similar time, the household stays nearly suffocatingly shut. Long after Dunham moved out and purchased her personal condo, she would spend a number of nights every week at her mother and father’ home. “Every time my boyfriend would go on tour, every time I would have a hard day, I just reported immediately for duty to the guest room.”
This was partly a query of delayed growth introduced on by dropping all of the milestones of youth – these incremental steps in direction of independence – to her brutal work schedule. It was additionally a response to the truth that, surrounded as Dunham was by folks both hating her or sucking up to her to strive to get their screenplays made, her mother and father have been the one individuals who noticed her as she was and would inform her the reality. “I’m sure people will have a lot of different perceptions about the relationships in the book, but I tried to do the most loving, not-takedown version of everyone because it was important to me that my own culpability in dynamics be explored.”
Well, I say, as a lesbian – a formulation with which I like to begin absolutely 50% of my sentences – primarily based on Dunham’s account of her, we have now all dated Jenni Konner, a textbook bloody nightmare of a girl: love-bombing and withholding one minute, and sulking the following; charismatic; holding Dunham on eggshells till she will get her personal manner; resentful; often superb; making pointed feedback about Dunham’s weight; leaning on Dunham to get HBO to pay the 2 ladies the identical, although she didn’t create the present or seem in it. Dunham is obsessive about Konner, determined for her approval and terrified of her low opinion and it’s a aid when, finally, the pair go to a therapist to negotiate the tip of the friendship. “My female relationships have always been very deep, and very complicated, and very romantic,” says Dunham. No kidding, I say; you actually do connect … forcefully. She hoots with laughter. “Forceful is a good way of putting it. You’ll have to talk to my mom about that one.”
An issue of memoir is that the author spends years discovering the proper phrases to decide by way of the minefield of previous relationships and then, throughout publicity, is invited to say it once more, solely much less judiciously. Dunham clearly doesn’t really need to return over the saga of Konner, past skinny observations of the “recollections may vary” and “mistakes were made” selection. She’s conscious of this, too, of course; as somebody who has by no means had an unstudied response to something in her life, Dunham says to me, “I feel like because I am trying to be so measured in my response to you I am probably driving you mad.” This is appropriate, however I get it. These issues are laborious.
To mitigate criticism of her previous mentor, Dunham goes in laborious on herself, itemising all of the methods through which Konner should’ve discovered her needy and annoying. She does the identical when writing concerning the finish of her relationship with Antonoff, flaming herself for being tough and having too many wants. My opinion about that is that, in each instances, and primarily based on the proof of the e book, Dunham’s neediness was not less than partially an anxiousness response to the way in which these folks have been treating her; in different phrases, the withholding, the manipulating, the gaslighting: this stuff will drive an individual loopy. Which isn’t to say that Dunham isn’t fairly succesful of being a nightmare in her personal proper.
“That’s really helpful feedback,” says Dunham. “At the time, I thought I’m giving [Antonoff and Konner] all of me. Everything that I have to give is yours and what more can I do?” Looking again, she understands this was a class error. “That’s an essential misunderstanding of what the other person is asking of you.”
She lives in London, now, on the opposite facet not solely of these first 10 years of fame, however of the horrible well being issues that got here with them. Dunham was in nearly fixed ache in the course of the last seasons of Girls, due to a number of ovarian cysts from endometriosis and the undiagnosed Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. She had many unresolved, exploratory surgical procedures, culminating within the hysterectomy on the age of 31 that despatched her into menopause. She developed a dependency on Klonopin, an anti-anxiousness drug, that she places down to lax prescribing by a physician and that she overcame after a stint in rehab. In one horrific scene, a physician offers her an excruciating, guide pelvic examination and bursts a blood-crammed cyst. In one other, a physician removes 37 lesions from her bladder, liver, belly wall, and backbone. He tells her he doesn’t even understand how she’s been strolling.
These elements of the memoir are astonishing and have been the toughest to write, she says, not least as a result of they coincided with her relationship with Antonoff. The pair met in 2012 and after a whirlwind romance, moved in collectively and issues quickly deteriorated – Antonoff, on tour together with his band, Bleachers, was barely round and when he was, wasn’t useful. “He spent a lot of time telling me about the kind of person I was, and it wasn’t the good kind,” she writes. After her hysterectomy, he sauntered into the hospital two hours late bearing a bunch of “bodega flowers”, mumbling an apology and saying he had texted to see if they may watch for him. From the e book: “‘Yeah,’ my father said, looking like he was considering grievous bodily harm for the first time in his life. ‘Surgery is like a train, not a tour bus. You either make it, or you don’t.’”She got higher. She break up up with Antonoff. After a interval of burnout, somebody despatched her the pilot for a brand new HBO present known as Industry to see if she had any concepts about who might direct it. It was a lightbulb second; Dunham, in determined want of a change, supplied to direct it, flew to the UK, and the shoot – which concerned heaps of beautiful younger actors who reminded her of how she had been earlier than fame fell on her head like a home – felt like a renewal. She met her husband. She made the film Catherine Called Birdy – an ideal movie, for my part – and then the semi-autobiographical TV present, Too Much. She has a number of tasks within the works with her manufacturing firm and its cope with Netflix.
London has been good for her, she says, not least as a result of she thinks British ladies age otherwise. “They lean into their eccentricity as they get older. And it’s not just artistic people – it’s a woman who you see walking her dog on the road in the countryside in funny boots. It’s very different in New York, where I feel like I grew up with women who had a lot more agita about ageing. It’s really cool to get older with [the British model] as an influence.”
Being with Dunham has been a steep studying curve for Felber, in the meantime, who isn’t a creature of Hollywood however of north London. “When I first met my husband, he was just a British boy who had not been engaged in all of the feminist dialogue I had, and when I said something like, ‘You know, there are things about my job that are really hard as a woman’, he said, ‘Well, it’s hard to be a person.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘Never say that to me again. Never. Do not even try it.’ And now he starts everything with, ‘Well, you know, as a woman in Hollywood …’”
Felber has additionally had to make changes round Dunham’s closeness with her mother and father. “He’s like, ‘You cannot talk to your parents on speaker phone once we’re in bed for the night. Four of us in the bed! You’ve gotta take those calls out in the hall.’”
She is pleased, she says, and has been in an important place for effectively over half a decade. What does that imply?
“It means that when things come up, I’m capable of handling them. I’m capable of expressing my own needs, boundaries, requirements. I get to work regularly yet not in a way that breaks me down. I have amazing, really supportive people around me. It makes me sad sometimes that it required such a big reshuffle. I guess what I wanted to capture in the book was: right life, wrong time,” she pauses. “If Girls had all appeared when I was a fully formed person, at 33, I would’ve understood how to handle that work, that place, those gifts, those people in a different way. But it was, basically, that I got everything I could’ve dreamed of at a time when I had no ability to handle it. And it required a rebuilding, and I’m very happy with where I landed, and very lucky. That’s just life, I guess.”
