Lena Dunham’s ‘Famesick’ Suffers From Literary Disorder

‘Famesick: A Memoir’By Lena Dunham Random House, 416 pagesAnyone picking up “Famesick” might be forgiven for asking a pertinent question: what happened to Lena Dunham? When she published her first memoir, “Not That Kind of Girl,” in 2014, aged 28, she was the creator of the hottest relationship show on television, the zeitgeist-baiting “Girls,”and one of TIME’s hundred most influential people in the world. By rights, she should have gone on to be the female, 21st century equivalent of Woody Allen, only without all those pesky sexual assault allegations hanging over her. But whaddya know, Dunham decided to make jokes in “Not That Kind of Girl” about interfering with her younger brother Cyrus’s genitals and how she wrote, apropos of interfering with her baby sister’s genitals, that “Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.”Dunham wasn’t cancelled, exactly, but her career and reputation plummeted. After “Girls” finished in 2017, she struggled to find similarly successful projects. Her would-be comeback show, last year’s “Too Much,” attracted decidedly mixed reviews from critics who felt that casting Megan Stalter as the Dunham stand-in, a loud, obnoxious American throwing her not-inconsiderable weight around in London after a painful break-up, was less a meta-commentary on the perils of fame and more simple avoidance of the fact that Dunham had gone from being the toast of the industry to its whipping girl in a remarkably short space of time.“Famesick,” then, might have been subtitled “Am I Too Much?” It is a curious combination of self-lacerating therapy-speak and celebrity memoir, interspersed with the kind of A-list gossip that gets picked up in every review and news feature and thereby gives an intriguing but largely unexceptional book a guaranteed place in the bestseller lists. You know the kind of title that it’s going to be from the dedication page alone, when Dunham puts herself in the company of dead-before-their-time icons including Amy Winehouse, Jean Seberg and Janis Joplin, “and anyone else who was too Famesick to be cured.” Dunham, we understand, was one of the lucky ones. She was lured in by that shallow beast, celebrity, but escaped alive before it could eat her whole. “Famesick” is her reflection on how it all went wrong, and what she learnt from it.The book begins stiffly, in self-consciously literary style, that “My name is Lena Dunham. That’s the name my mother gave me— and, as is the case in many of the most successful marriages, my father had little choice in the matter.” Nobody is buying “Famesick” for awkward Austen pastiche, and thankfully Dunham soon ditches this in favor of blunt home truths, writing that “my relationship to fame, notoriety, and at times infamy has often been a toxic one.” This is a more focused, less scattershot and altogether more somber read than “Not That Kind of Girl,” which openly acknowledges Dunham’s mental and physical health struggles over the past decade.At one point, Dunham writes “getting sick is not that different from getting more famous.” While most people would rather have a life in the public spotlight with all that that entails — money, fame, adulation, good-looking partners — than have a chronic illness, the key throughline of “Famesick” is the comparison of Dunham’s declining health with her equally declining career. This is the kind of book where she concludes that “I’ve been sober for almost eight years now. It’s been almost nine since my uterus came out. It’s been seven since the first ovary was removed, three since the second.” Oddly, her attempted comeback with “Too Much”doesn’t even warrant a mention, as if she is already bored of it — or, more appropriately, sick of her standing as a public figure.‘Famesick’ by Lena Dunham. Random HouseIt is this dichotomy that lies at the heart of Famesick and makes it a queasy read. Dunham was all but cancelled several years ago, with a fair amount of gleeful misogyny directed at her because she wasn’t conventionally pretty, or thin, came from a privileged background and dared to create a hip HBO show that picked up as many detractors as it did fans. “Girls” also made a star out of Adam Driver, who does not emerge well from these pages; Dunham writes of his audition that Driver was “all ears and nose, gangly and pigeon- toed, lurching toward the audition chair like a reanimated corpse in a silent film.” (She can certainly coin a phrase.)The dynamic between them, on and off screen, is one where Driver broods, behaves recklessly and surprisingly – the word “feral” is used – and occasionally offers tendresse. She writes “I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering if Adam liked me. He could be short- tempered and verbally aggressive, condescending and physically imposing. He could also be protective, loving even.” They nearly sleep together — he tells her that “I’m warning you, if I come up, I’m not leaving this time” — but Dunham refuses to let him into her apartment and, a month later, Driver informs her of his engagement. They no longer speak.Still, the Byronic Driver is a saint compared to Dunham’s ex Jack Antonoff, the Taylor Swift hitmaker, who she dated between 2012 and 2017. There are persistent internet rumors, even down to a viral PowerPoint presentation, that Antonoff cheated on Dunham with the pop star Lorde, and she writes here that he was “ensconced with a teen pop star I was too oblivious to be jealous of.” The “teen pop star” referred to Dunham as “Aunt Lena”, and the writer, struggling with some of her many health issues, which, after a while, begin to seem psychosomatic, buried herself in angst-ridden misery.“Famesick” must be viewed as the cathartic therapy-friendly means of exorcising these demons. To an extent, it works; if you were already a fan of Dunham’s, you will feel that you have been given a privileged insight into her complex mind. Yet to the uninitiated, this often witty but highly self-indulgent collection of musings, bitching and woe-is-me tidings feels like a stopgap. There will, undoubtedly, be a third memoir in a decade or so, and let us hope — for Dunham’s sake, and for ours — that it’s a good deal more upbeat than this.

Lena Dunham’s ‘Famesick’ Suffers From Literary Disorder

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