Lena Dunham's memoir, "Famesick," is finally out on Tuesday, and the writer-actress has been tantalizing us with some of the explosive revelations in various interviews. The creator of HBO's "Girls" and Netflix's "Too Much" goes into intricate detail about becoming a TV superstar at just 25 in the memoir, along with navigating intense criticism around her body, her ideas, battling extensive health issues, and meeting her now-husband, Luis Felber, after moving to London around five years ago.
In an article with The Guardian released over the weekend, Dunham explains feeling like she and her "Girls" co-stars—including Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, and Zosia Mamet—were "lambs to the slaughter" upon the series' 2012 release. Now 39, Dunham says she soon learned the pitfalls of reading what people have to say on social media. "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," she says. "And I didn't 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."
The Guardian describes "two central love stories in the book." One is with Jack Antonoff, the indie artist and famed music producer whose recent collaborators include Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter, and who is now married to Margaret Qualley. The pair dated and lived together for five years until 2017. Dunham explores the decline of that relationship, such as his being late to the hospital after she had undergone a grueling hysterectomy following a battle with endometriosis.
The other relationship explored in "Famesick" is Dunham's tumultuous team-up with Jenni Konner, her ex-producing partner who was assigned to Dunham by HBO as a mentor when she first started working on "Girls." "My female relationships have always been very deep and very complicated, and very romantic," Dunham tells The Guardian.
Some of the more shocking extracts from "Famesick" include Dunham's recounting of working with the now-Oscar-nominated Adam Driver, who "Girls" fans know played Hannah Horvath's on-off love interest, Adam Sackler, for all six seasons of the show. He is described in the interview as "spectacularly rude to her," per Dunham's book, having once hurled a chair at the wall next to her, punched a hole in his trailer wall, and screamed in her face. "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,'" Dunham says. "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."
"I have lots of amazing men in my life," she continues. "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?"
Among some of the lighter moments is Dunham's being "in a great place for well over half a decade" now and her appreciation for how British women age. "They lean into their eccentricity as they get older. And it’s not just artistic people—it’s a woman you see walking her dog on the road in the countryside in funny boots," she says. "It’s very different in New York, where I feel like I grew up with women who had a lot more agita about aging. It’s really cool to get older with [the British model] as an influence."
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