Famesick by Lena Dunham review – when celebrity causes side-effects | Autobiography and memoir
TOt the tip of final 12 months, Netflix launched Too Much – 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 primarily based on the couple’s backstory. It felt, to many critics, like second-screen fare, decidedly Lena Dunham-lite. Was this actually the identical one that had given us the spiky, self-absorbed world of Girls, the millennial Sex and the City full with brutal situationships, poisonous besties and, er, one of many primary 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Famesick sheds nearly all of the Richard Curtis-isms to seek out that outdated, controversy-courting Dunham alive and – if not precisely effectively – then studying to deal with it.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 Kind of Girl was revealed in 2014) charts the power sickness and seemingly never-ending stress that got here to outline her 20s and 30s after she had snagged her personal HBO sequence aged simply 24. The afflictions described throughout its 400 pages embrace – though they don’t seem to be restricted to – OCD, colitis, the connective tissue dysfunction Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, endometriosis, early menopause, PTSD and dependancy to each opioids and benzodiazepines. At one level, Dunham unintentionally units herself on fireplace; At one other, she panics about how Vogue will cowl up the impetigo on her face, “a waterfall of golden blisters, turning a sickly green as they dry.” The guide is scattergun and generally missing in self-awareness (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 may conceivably rip by in a weekend.
Dunham’s well being would not initially dominate, however – like a power 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 was snaking” – surviving on vitality drinks and food regimen dietary supplements on the set of Girls – to her use of, and later dependence on, Klonopin, “on and off, for years, like a lover I wasn’t particularly attached to, could take or leave.” There’s a horrifying retelling of an episode by which Dunham punctures her eardrum with a cotton bud that may go on to encourage a plotline on Girls. As Famesick continues, the damage feels nearly trivial when in comparison with Dunham’s fixed gynaecological points, or the run-in with a health care provider that brings again long-buried, “sickly waves” of reminiscences of being sexually abused by a babysitter. The darkness more and more creeps into the celebrity 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 in and out of Dunham’s life, like bit-part gamers in a TV present. The two that stand out are her former long-term associate, musician Jack Antonoff, and her Girls co-star Adam Driver, neither of whom come out of Famesick significantly 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, usually offended man who could not have been doing a lot performing in Girls: “I remember doing a fight scene with Adam… when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer – until finally, Adam screamed, ‘FUCKING SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE FUCK UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.'” Once the present had wrapped, the pair by no means spoke once more.
The women of Girls are described in loving however hazardous phrases, other than Jemima Kirke – “part Lolita, part Keith Richards” – who’s faithfully drawn in a approach that possibly solely a childhood pal could possibly be. The feminine friendship that actually propels her by the making of the present, it seems, is one with its producer Jenni Konner, who morphs from finest pal to acquaintance and again to stranger because the guide nears its finish. There is a lot happening right here that it appears like there’s scarcely house for Dunham to adequately clarify the episode that noticed her and Konner put out an announcement in 2017 defending Girls author Murray Miller towards sexual assault allegations (denied by Miller) made by actor Aurora Perrineau. But, the place she does handle it, her sense of disgrace and the sensation she could have harakiri-ed her profession is obvious: “I did not decide to kill myself,” she writes, “but I did think it was time to die.” Similarly, she apologies to anybody alarmed by her description in Not That Kind of Girl 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 guide: “Had you told me I’d still be getting those comments 11 years later, I would have downed the rest of the bottle of pills and chosen that plane as my final resting place.”
Dunham would not all the time make it simple to really feel sorry for her, although. There are huge and small moments the place her decision-making appears questionable – frequently transferring 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 approach 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 listing of recognitions).
And but, there’s an honesty and a fluency to her prose that makes her exhausting to dismiss. Illness, she writes, “wasn’t just a town I was passing through, but a city that I was going to pay taxes in”; when Girls first took off, it was “a miracle to me that I managed to speak cogently about the work, when I had to tell my feet to walk.” On parenthood, and a failed spherical of IVF, she is at her most truthful: “The irony is that knowing I cannot have a child – my ability to accept that and move on – may be the only reason I deserve to be anyone’s parent at all. I think I finally have something to teach someone.”
Towards the tip of Famesick, Dunham meets Felber, and the London period that impressed Too Much begins. Met Gala invitations fall away and mates’ weddings populate her calendar as an alternative. It’s simple to see now why she wrote that sequence, and retreated into one thing much less jagged than the truth of her personal previous decade. But it is clear – in Famesick as in Girls – that Dunham is ready to write in regards to the painful elements of life in a approach that feels each intimate and common. Perhaps the actual horror of this guide (devoted to, amongst others, Sharon Tate, Whitney Houston, Caroline Flack and Liam Payne) is not a lot that celebrity could make you sick. Rather, it is that no quantity of fame or cash can maintain you protected as soon as it does.
