Famesick by Lena Dunham: book review
I've never seen Girls. Okay, well, that's a lie. I've seen like six episodes, but I haven't seen it in its entirety. I started it one summer while I was sick and then I wasn't sick anymore and my life got busy. Come May, I will watch Girls in its entirety. But I know a lot about the show. All of my friends are obsessed with it. I've been told I'm a Shosh Sun, Manie Moon, and Hannah Rising. I don't yet know enough to understand if that should be offensive. They have an episode to reference for everything. I also randomly watched an interview with Dunham a few months ago and then watched a couple more. I was deeply invested in a conversation about a show I'd never seen, so of course, I was going to read Famesick. I put a library hold on it when the book was announced. It was delivered to me while I was in a pub, in the middle of a conversation about Lena Dunham.
So that's the frame I went into this book with.
In this second memoir, Dunham chronicles her life from the advent of Girls onwards. She traces a handful of threads up to the present day in this 400 page book. There's the creation of Girls and the making of the show over the years which centrally figures in her relationship with Jenni Konner, her co-showrunner, her longtime romantic relationship with Jack Antonoff in its entirety (powerpoint and all), her relationship with her body and the worsening chronic health struggles she's faced through her career, and her relationship to her parents who continued holding a full-time place in her life well into her adulthood. Towards the end of the book, she dives into a couple smaller relationships she's had, how they intersected with her recovery, and gives a glimpse at some of the creative projects she completed since. There's also a segment that addresses the previous memoir. I was wondering if this would come up because when I got on the internet around 2016, Lena Dunham was regarded as untouchably horrible and pretty flatly, a child molester. When I finally saw the excerpt from her book years later, I thought of myself oh, all this over that? Was it maybe not the smartest thing to commit to paper in a world that already views you completely ungenerously, no. Was it what the keyboard warriors of the late 2010s made it out to me to be, also no. It's been funny to watch the Lena Dunham revival as Girls has once again become must-watch television with a new generation. I'm not saying that Dunham hasn't made her share of bad and questionable choices, but that's also a part of life, and I'm glad that maybe we've reached a point of being able to afford a little nuance.
The book is incredibly strong and entertaining. It is at its best combining heart, the analysis of hindsight, and wild, entertaining stories that shed insight on the juicy behind the scenes that people come to the book to get. This is what makes up the first half. Dunham's whirlwind description of going from having luck with her short film Tiny Furniture to suddenly being handed the keys to the HBO kingdom is the stuff that creative dreams are made of. This period establishes important information about Dunham's relationship with and dependency on her parents as well as the beginning of her relationship with Jenni. For a long time, she's on fire creatively. She has major wins and is enamored with this new life she's unlocked. I loved reading about her relationship with Jemima, and the will-they-won't-they segment about Adam Driver was fascinating. All of this then coincides with her meeting Jack Antonoff and their relationship beginning. Dunham has a particular skill for writing about the men that come through her life. Her pen is glaringly, brutally honest, but there's also always a tenderness, even when they're doing things that are objectively wrong, where you can see that she tries to understand where they're coming from, what's motivating the behaviors from all sides. I always thought this was a writerly impulse, to try to see everyone multidimensionally, but I'm realizing that's not universally true. It is a treat she offers the reader here. There's been some discourse about the information she's revealed about people and things she's dredged up, but I don't think anything she shares in done in a salacious manner in the slightest. It is all deeply human, considered, and important to building the story of the time. It's not her fault that the book was inevitably going to be ripped apart for tabloid headlines. If we start censoring art based on that possibility, we really are in trouble. I guess I come from the Taylor Swift school of: if you didn't want to be written about like that, you should've behaved better...
The book only centers the making and dynamics of Girls-world for the early seasons; after around season 3, the show is really only talked about in passing, summarized and then somewhat unceremoniously dropped from the plot of the memoir. This is because Dunham's chronic illnesses worsen during this period, and her life becomes far more focused on the intense amounts of pain she's in than anything else. Just as she blends the two main themes in the title, she creates a bridge in the book in a similar fashion. The first half is heavily focused on the fame, and after telling the stories of that early era of her career, it begins to morph into essays more explicitly about fame. The effects of how people talked about her online, the way that people in her personal life either forgot about her entirely or wanted to use her, not knowing who you could trust even among the people you came up with, and reflections on some of the major controversies like the memoir. Dunham is blunt and as honest as one can be when writing about herself. Of course, there will be bias in how things are addressed, but no one expects anything less out of a biography written by the person who lived it. This section that heavily contemplates the isolation and alienation of fame then bleeds into the section of the book that dives into the physical breakdown of her body and the countless surgeries she had that led to the pharmaceuticals addiction that ultimately lands her in rehab. Much of the experience of being sick is like being famous. Suddenly, no one understands your life; you become isolated and alienated. The back half of the book gets into the self-destructive behaviors, particularly in relationships, that stemmed from trying to feel even a trace of control when as her body is failing her and the empty promises of the doctors aren't coming true. It's all extremely real.
This section does ask interesting questions, from what I've seen in the online discourse and how Dunham prefaces certain sections herself, about what is explanation for actions versus what is making an excuse. In this section, she addresses the letter she published in the immediate wake of a surgery defending a producer against allegations of sexual assault, a choice she makes clear she regrets but also talks around in the book much more so than she does in interviews. I think the context here is important and is somewhat the point of living memoirs like this. To be able to explain what wasn't known at the time and allow people to draw their own conclusions.
When the framework of Girls is gone, though, the book, much like I'd imagine Dunham's actual life, begins to drift somewhat aimlessly. Her longterm relationship ends, the story bounces through different procedures and recovery periods, she works on Industry, she oscillates between trying to work and taking intentional time off, she sleeps with men who aren't in a good place either and don't have the capacity to treat her well, she isn't very nice to herself. The book becomes somewhat harder to follow and stay engaged with in this soup. I completely understand why everything is there—it just simply stops working as well as a piece of literature past a certain point. Which is kind of true of every 400 page book, fiction or nonfiction. At a certain length, stories tend to get unwieldy. But I didn't mind. It starts so strong, and even as my interest waned, she still had many important, interesting things to say. Dunham is a good writer and incredibly introspective.
I found a lot to deeply relate to here as an artist dealing with chronic health issues myself. I'm still thinking about her description of how her will and drive to work and create was directly fought by her physical body. How she'd push herself at work to the point where her body would knock her right back on her ass, and she'd have to take time to recover regardless of what she, or the people around her, wanted to do. She does a great job of articulating how hard it is to be held back by your physical body in ways that doctors either can't or aren't interested in helping (despite Dunham having access to far more medical intervention than the average person struggling with endometriosis) when the people around you don't have the same limitations. She writes about the absolutely soul destroying aspect of this well and how it does lead to lashing out at times. None of it is pretty, but it is incredibly honest, and I found it cathartic to see someone as accomplished as Dunham render this on the page.
The dynamics of her relationships are also super interesting, particularly with Jenni Konner. Their relationship ran far deeper than work to being true best friends. Dunham writes about how some of their best times were together but also that Konner could be horrible to her and exploit their age difference in unfair ways. As someone who was in a similar work-friend-age dynamic at one point, this was incredibly interesting to see explored on the page and in relation to the sticky nature of female friendships being heightened by their particular situation. Her relationship with her parents is also fascinating as both her approach to life and their approach to parenting facilitates a very dependent relationship well into her adulthood. This makes a lot of sense considering how difficult fame makes it to form truly dependable relationships, that having willing parents would create a sort of co-dependency or a family relationship that doesn't evolve. Dunham recently said she's realized how lucky she is to have parents that she's truly friends with and that everyone doesn't always get that, which is very true. It's a very vulnerable thing to give a deep insight into, however.
I enjoyed my time listening to Dunham narrate Famesick and ultimately found that she came to a truly moving, compelling, interesting place with every topic she decided to tackle. While there's some good celebrity gossip for those of us that are ephemerally curious, it is clear that the heart of the book lies much deeper.
Overall: 4.5
More on Reading, Writing, and Me:
Comments
Post a Comment