At the top of final yr, Netflix launched Too A lot – a sickly, indie-sleaze romcom about an American transplant who falls for a troubled British muso. It was created by Lena Dunham and her musician husband Luis Felber, and apparently loosely based mostly on the couple’s backstory. It felt, to many critics, like second-screen fare, decidedly Lena Dunham-lite. Was this actually the identical one who had given us the spiky, self-absorbed world of Women, the millennial Intercourse and the Metropolis full with brutal situationships, poisonous besties and, er, one of many essential characters unintentionally smoking crack?
Famesick sheds nearly all of the Richard Curtis-isms to seek out that outdated, controversy-courting Dunham alive and – if not precisely effectively – then studying to deal with it. Her second memoir (Not That Form of Lady was printed in 2014) charts the persistent sickness and seemingly endless stress that got here to outline her 20s and 30s after she had snagged her personal HBO collection aged simply 24. The afflictions described throughout its 400 pages embrace – although are usually not restricted to – OCD, colitis, the connective tissue dysfunction Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, endometriosis, early menopause, PTSD and habit to each opioids and benzodiazepines. At one level, Dunham unintentionally units herself on hearth; at one other, she panics about how Vogue will cowl up the impetigo on her face, “a waterfall of golden blisters, turning a sickly inexperienced as they dried”. The e-book is scattergun and typically missing in self consciousness (who cares that Dunham needed to give her designer booties up, like contraband, when she entered rehab?). It’s additionally undeniably frank and exhaustive: a lifetime of remedy condensed into one thing you might conceivably rip by means of in a weekend.
Dunham’s well being doesn’t initially dominate, however – like a persistent sickness itself – it slowly and quietly turns into the main target. She describes all of it in unvarnished however terrifying style, from the digestive tract she had handled “like a clogged drain I used to be snaking” – surviving on power drinks and weight loss program dietary supplements on the set of Women – to her use of, and later dependence on, Klonopin, “on and off, for years, like a lover I wasn’t notably hooked up to, might take or depart”. There’s a horrifying retelling of an episode through which Dunham punctures her eardrum with a cotton bud that might go on to encourage a plotline on Women. As Famesick continues, the harm feels nearly trivial when in comparison with Dunham’s fixed gynaecological points, or the run-in with a physician that brings again long-buried, “sickly waves” of reminiscences of being sexually abused by a babysitter. The darkness more and more creeps into the superstar world she continues to inhabit, as with the Met Gala that Dunham attended in 2018 whereas on launch from rehab, “wan and haunted … champagne I couldn’t drink circulating like a joke I wasn’t in on”.
Many inappropriate males stroll out and in of Dunham’s life, like bit-part gamers in a TV present. The 2 that stand out are her former longterm accomplice, musician Jack Antonoff, and her Women co-star Adam Driver, neither of whom come out of Famesick notably effectively. Antonoff lavishes her with tchotchkes and guarantees of marriage and kids, earlier than – as Dunham tells it – slowly tiring of her medical points and drug dependency. Driver, in the meantime, seems as an allegedly unpredictable, typically offended man who might not have been doing a lot appearing in Women: “I bear in mind doing a combat scene with Adam … once I opened my mouth, all that got here out was a stammer – till lastly, Adam screamed, ‘FUCKING SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair on the wall subsequent to me. ‘WAKE THE FUCK UP,’ he advised me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.’” As soon as the present had wrapped, the pair by no means spoke once more.
The women of Women are described in loving however hazier phrases, aside from Jemima Kirke – “half Lolita, half Keith Richards” – who’s faithfully drawn in a means that perhaps solely a childhood good friend could possibly be. The feminine friendship that actually propels her by means of the making of the present, it seems, is one with its producer Jenni Konner, who morphs from finest good friend to acquaintance and again to stranger because the e-book nears its finish. There’s a lot happening right here that it looks like there’s scarcely area for Dunham to adequately clarify the episode that noticed her and Konner put out a press release in 2017 defending Women author Murray Miller in opposition to sexual assault allegations (denied by Miller) made by actor Aurora Perrineau. However, the place she does deal with it, her sense of disgrace and the sensation she might have harakiri-ed her profession is obvious: “I didn’t determine to kill myself,” she writes, “however I did suppose it was time to die.” Equally, she apologises to anybody alarmed by her description in Not That Form of Lady of touching her sibling’s genitals as a baby, though she does suppose that some noticed it as a chance to take her down. She writes about coping with the ensuing on-line furore within the midst of a visit to the Netherlands to advertise the e-book: “Had you advised me I’d nonetheless be getting these feedback 11 years later, I might have downed the remainder of the bottle of drugs and chosen that aircraft as my remaining resting place”.
Dunham doesn’t at all times make it straightforward to really feel sorry for her, although. There are moments massive and small the place her decision-making appears questionable – frequently shifting home, passing up profession alternatives when she desperately wanted them, deciding to hold a blind, ailing canine round in a tote on a TV set. Elsewhere, weighty names are dropped – from Oprah to Nora Ephron – in a means that sucks the oxygen out of the opposite phrases on the web page (see additionally: pointless cameos for a pre-fame Safdie brothers and “TayTay” – Taylor Swift – that includes in a protracted, lengthy checklist of acknowledgements).
And but, there’s an honesty and a fluency to her prose that makes her onerous to dismiss. Sickness, she writes, “wasn’t only a city I used to be passing by means of, however a metropolis that I used to be going to pay taxes in”; when Women first took off, it was “a miracle to me that I managed to talk cogently concerning the work, once I needed to inform my ft to stroll”. On parenthood, and a failed spherical of IVF, she is at her most truthful: “The irony is that realizing I can’t have a baby – my potential to just accept that and transfer on – stands out as the solely purpose I should be anybody’s father or mother in any respect. I feel I lastly have one thing to show any individual.”
In direction of the top of Famesick, Dunham meets Felber, and the London period that impressed Too A lot begins. Met Gala invitations fall away and pals’ weddings populate her calendar as a substitute. It’s straightforward to see now why she wrote that collection, and retreated into one thing much less jagged than the truth of her personal previous decade. However it’s clear –in Famesick as in Women – that Dunham is ready to write concerning the painful elements of life in a means that feels each intimate and common. Maybe the true horror of this e-book (devoted to, amongst others, Sharon Tate, Whitney Houston, Caroline Flack and Liam Payne) isn’t a lot that superstar could make you sick. Slightly, it’s that no quantity of fame or cash can maintain you secure as soon as it does.