Lena Dunham’s New Memoir Is Coming, & We Are Sat

Lena Dunham shot to fame back in the early 2010s when her TV series about the lives of young women living in NYC was commissioned by HBO and became one of the most talked about, watched, and generally adored shows of the decade.

Girls was special. A series about love, heartache, and growing up, it starred Dunham herself and an ensemble cast that perfectly depicted the narcissism and neuroses of the millennial generation.

It catapulted her into the world of celebrity, leaving fans eager for more and everybody else anxious to see what she would say next – painful and totally out of touch or not.

Since Gils ended, Lena has largely remained out of the limelight. The recent release of her Netflix series, Too Much, ended that period of quiet and now her name has returned to the online lexicon, her voice matured and keen for something new to say.

This week she announced her newest piece of work, a memoir detailing her experiences in Hollywood and the notoriety that came with it.

Entitled Famesick, the book follows her life and the changes it endured after her pilot got picked up. Written over a seven year period, Lena writes on addiction, illness, and what she learned all throughout her 20s – at the height of her fame.

 

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On Instagram, she said: “When I first began this book, I’d been out of rehab for 30 days. I was in the cloud of delirium that comes with new sobriety — the world was suddenly so LOUD, and I thought that meant I knew what I was hearing.

“If you’d told me then that the writing process would take me through the next seven years, I probably would have ripped up my contract and chucked my laptop in the tub. Throughout my twenties, writing was all pure immediacy. I’d have an experience, put some version of it through the filter of fantasy, and it would be playing on television six months later. Writing was how I processed as it was happening. I hadn’t lived enough life to deal with it in retrospect.

“I didn’t understand the value of time — to heal us, to make sense of where we’ve been, to actually change the patterns we keep replaying in our work and our art. The gift this book has given me over the last seven years was that it was always there. No matter what changed — my location, my body, my mind — there was a constant: this place I could go to try and make sense of the story.

“When we finally set a publication date for Famesick, I felt something like grief. One of my steadiest companions was leaving. But it’s time. And I’m so excited to be able to tell you, in the best way I know how, about:

• years of impossible magic and years I thought I wouldn’t survive
• illness and addiction and heartbreak
• the lessons I no longer feel ashamed of having had to learn.”

 

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She goes on:

“Famesick is, ostensibly, about the years 2010–2020 — a decade in which my life changed profoundly and permanently, in which nearly every strand of my DNA reconstituted itself. But it’s also about illness as teacher, body as tattletale, our societal relationship to women on the edge, and the conditions that create art vs. the conditions that create happiness.

“(Also: being in Hollywood while watching from the sidelines, like a goth girl at the cheerleader’s slumber party, wondering if she can call her mom from the landline without being overheard.) It’s about me — but whenever I write about me, I hope, deeply, that it’s also about you.”

Famesick lands on shelves next April, and it’s safe to say – I will be sat.