Famesick (4*)

Before I knew Lena Dunham had a memoir in the works, I re-watched "Girls" to see if it held up.  IMHO few shows ever has been as entertaining and I laughed as much as I had a decade earlier, even though I'm now almost 50 years older than all of the principals. No matter what the era, our twenties are an eventful period when we're finally navigating life as adults and everything seems to have a heightened significance as we smooth off our rough edges in bed, at leisure and at work.  Hannah Horvath remains completely relatable, if just as fucked up in so many ways, but aren't we all?

Dunham's comic, brutally frank take on sex particularly interested me in 2010 in part because I'd never seen it on television before, but also because it reminded me of what I had been doing in Chasing Rapture, a blog I had begun in my late 40s, shortly before 9/11. If none of my hook-ups became emotionally satisfying relationships, I could at least treat them as funny stories to tell publicly, using the internet.  Dunham did the same thing, literally exposing herself on HBO before an audience of nearly a million people who watched each "Girls" episode when it aired on Sunday nights.  Twitter functioned as the national water cooler and everybody had an opinion, in part because Dunham herself--a body type that would have been shamed by the "Sex and the City" women--was so polarizing.

I thought she was the bravest, funniest woman in the world.  I still do, although I wouldn't trade places with her for a second.

Famesick begins with her college years at Oberlin and chronicles her meteoric rise in show biz after the successful screening of Tiny Furniture, her independent film, at South by Southwest.  It was a real family affair: in addition to Dunham herself, the cast included her mother, her now trans brother and Jemima Kirke, her high school bestie, and she shot the film in her parents' Tribeca apartment (from the outset of her career, Dunham ignored boundaries, inexorably to her peril).  Her double-edged characterizations of mom and Kirke demonstrate why gossiping on the phone with Dunham, if not actually hanging out with her, must be such a blast. 

This was, after all, the woman who told me not to hold her hand on the way to fifth grade because it would only increase my social isolation.

[Jemima Kirke] was my muse. She had always been the person I aspired to behave like—part Lolita, part Keith Richards, with a healthy dose of indie sleaze and a haughty sense of manners about very specific things like being late.

Just weeks after SXSW, Dunham is on a plane to Hollywood.  For the next hundred or so pages, her LOL prose--which describes every domestic and professional detail of her supercharged ascent to white hot fame--feels like a vicarious joyride with an occasional yellow light warning her to slow down.

Ti picked me up at the airport. Our first stop was Lemonade, a restaurant I wanted to go to because it was frequented by the cast of The Hills. Our next stop was his apartment, a dank single room up a steep set of stairs in the hills of Los Feliz, where—like so many men before him—he slept with only a coverless duvet and a Pulp Fiction poster.

Dunham with help from Judd Apatow and Jenji Kohan, a mentor, wrote and directed "Girls," which became a phenomenon shortly before her 26th birthday.  She acted in it, too, for not all that much money given the scope of her responsibilities and the pressures of nurturing a creative baby that bewitched the chattering class.  

Some actors joke that they work for free, and what they’re really paid for is the press. I’d say that I worked for free every second, and what I was paid for was everything I lost by doing that.

Dunham bonds with Kohan like Super Glue and while Kohan, a generation older with young children, is key to the success of the show they co-run for all six seasons, she inevitably prioritizes production and her compensation over Dunham's mental and physical health. This is, after all, Hollywood, and Dunham comes to realize that exploitation and manipulation had crept into their highly simpatico relationship, too.

Part of Taylor Swift's appeal has been writing oblique lyrics inspired by her love life. Dunham, a friend, goes the very explicit route with Jack Antonoff who comes off a lot better in these pages than his obvious stand-in did on Too Much, Dunham's Netflix show earlier this year.  They're introduced by the musician's sister.

I kept thinking, Is this what a date with a real person feels like? I had the sense that this was the prize I was being given for every encounter that had left me bruised and bleeding, every boy and man who had used my body like a cum sock, the reward for patience and hard work, a sign that things were really and truly coming into alignment.

But when their fairy-tale relationship begins to fall apart, mostly due to her exhaustion and health problems, she detours into coy, declining to identify the person she seems to be blaming, at least initially. 

Jack was still in the studio with the singer, who seemed to me both very young and impossibly mature, so even-keeled and focused that it made me want to throw my toys out of my pram.

An internet search based on other very specific clues provided by a disingenuous Dunham confirms that it's Lorde who, according to Antonoff, is more interested in making music than befriending his significant other of five years.  Ouch!

Nevertheless, Antonoff's comment reinforces what may very well explain why Dunham has struggled so much with her relationships, both male and female.  It's the same bugaboo that afflicts all of us:  our parents.  No one will ever love Lena as much as her father who, in spite of his devotion to his daughter, paints cartoonish images of genitalia, a fact that Dunham herself calls out.  And while her mother, a proud artist in her own right, is fiercely protective, tenderness doesn't appear to be in her maternal toolbox which may explain why Dunham adores Nora Ephron, a mentor who didn't need anything from her.  Has anyone ever written so lovingly of Carl Bernstein?

I won't deny that I enjoyed reading about Dunham career blast-off a lot more than the accounts of her painful and debilitating health problems. 

At this point, I was starting to understand that illness wasn’t just a town I was passing through, but a city that I was going to pay taxes in. They were still hoping for the occasionally fragile girl with the random rashes and shitty periods they’d agreed to love. Nobody understood how much pain that girl was already withstanding from the minute she started walking. Not even me.

But even the really bad stuff is compelling and occasionally evokes a laugh.  For privacy reasons, she checks into a plastic surgery center specializing in labiaplasty for yet another gynecological procedure that provides no relief.  It's decorated with purple sofas.

I felt as though I were working at a New Orleans brothel, passing time before the next john arrived.

When Dunham pleads with one top-notch doctor to perform a hysterectomy, his sexism apparently outweighs his judgment, which also makes me wonder why she never seemed to consult any female gynecologists.

“No. Inside the uterus is the woman herself. Her spirit. Her passion. It is like reaching inside and yanking out her very soul. I have seen it before my eyes—women change into people they do not recognize. I cannot do this to you.”

She also mines her stint in rehab for opiate and Klonopin addiction in a way that Ephron, who insisted "everything is copy" would have admired

[A young woman in rehab] also felt strongly that the [Pink] song was by an addict about addiction; it felt cruel to tell her its producer [Jack Anonoff] was actually scared that MDMA would drain his spinal fluid. 

As soon as we sat down, I realized I was starving. In fact, I’d been starving since the day the drugs started to leave my body, and now, most nights, I padded down to the kitchen and made myself an array of quite frankly shocking snacks. Fiber One cereal with goat yogurt and dried prunes. (I never want to feel the way I did on opiates again, and that’s all I’m going to say here about taking a shit.) 

Even when staring down the possibility that she won't be able to conceive a genetically-related child--something she's always wanted--through IVF treatments Dunham's nose for irony never fails her:

With a gay donor, I was “a user of fresh homosexual sperm” with “FDA-ineligible” jizz. (I didn’t know this when I chose my donor: If you find a hetero art school kid with a ketamine addiction, drag him off the street, and convince him to say he’s dating you, you’re congratulated. If you carefully select an accomplished gay friend of child-rearing age, you are taking a risk that the reproductive authorities won’t sign off on.)

Just guessing, but I'd put my money on Bill Clegg as that gay donor, whom she acknowledges as her literary agent (it's easy to imagine them clicking at a 12-step meeting) and who wrote his own memoir about recovery from addiction, which also became the basis of Keep The Lights On, a terrific film, written and directed by his former lover.    With a potential literary pedigree like that, the failure to fertilize Dunham's eggs is the world's loss as much as hers.

In an odd coincidence, Dunham published this memoir the same year that the centenary of Marilyn Monroe is being celebrated.  Here's what that earlier icon, just as smart and needy, had to say about celebrity in her last interview, published 23 years before Dunham took her first breath.

“Fame isn’t everything,” she said in 1962. “It warms you a bit. But that warming is temporary. It’s like caviar. It’s good to have caviar, but if you had it every damn day, you know?” She laughed. “Too much caviar.”

By the end of Famesick Dunham--who already has outlived Monroe by four years in spite of all the anguish her body and a rabidly judgmental internet have caused her--is finally laying off the caviar if not the candor.  

Good for her.