Millennials are finally old.
A New York Times op-ed declared that the generation’s “task now is figuring out how to age gracefully into this next phase of the generational life cycle.” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2024 that the generation born between roughly the early 1980s and mid-1990s is entering midlife even wealthier than their baby boomer and Generation X predecessors. New York City’s first millennial mayor is stamping his hyper-earnest progressivism on a global financial metropolis.
It’s only natural, then, that filmmaker and Girls creator Lena Dunham — the Michael Jordan of the gushy millennial overshare — has published a second memoir that screams “I am attempting to age gracefully” as much as her first effort, 2014’s Not That Kind of Girl, screamed “I am America’s It Girl and you will listen to my anecdotes about selling Gwyneth Paltrow baby clothes.”
Famesick is more linear than that book, picking up just before her ascent to national stardom and carrying her through a VH1 Behind the Music-style procession of triumph, failure, addiction, heartbreak, and renewal. The book is shot through with grief, for (among many other things) her friendship with Girls collaborator Jenni Konner, her high-profile relationship with hitmaker Jack Antonoff, her inability to bear a child after an excruciating hysterectomy, and, yes, her deeply unfair treatment at the hands of both the celebrity media complex and the viral hivemind that has cluelessly dogged her for years.
The chapters describing the making of Girls provide a welcome behind-the-scenes look at one of the century’s true lightning-in-a-bottle cultural moments, including Judd Apatow’s avuncular sponsorship of the project (from the acknowledgments: “I think it’s finally time to share that my grandma found you sexy”), the studio magic required to film the show’s explicit sex scenes (lots of tape, in sensitive places), and her difficult, sexually charged relationship with Adam Driver, whom the show launched to megastardom. (One of the memoir’s more sour moments comes when Dunham repeatedly brings up, with a schoolmarmish, or, it must be said, millennial-ish finger wag, an incident during rehearsal when he threw a chair; one would think the daughter of two downtown New York artists would be more familiar with Method acting.)
Most of the book, however, revolves around what has become her decadeslong struggle with chronic pain and illness, and the attendant Klonopin addiction it required her to kick. Repeatedly, she describes television shoots, photo shoots, vacations, and intimate moments interrupted by symptoms of her endometriosis and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, to which she was tipped off by the rare, actually-helpful internet comment from a fan who matched her symptoms to the diagnosis. Whatever one’s view of the polarizing Dunham, you wouldn’t wish this kind of pain and exhaustion on your worst enemy. With plangent simplicity, she describes not just the condition’s physical discomfort but the way in which it alienated her from her closest loved ones.
In that manner, as a straightforward memoir of illness and recovery, the book is a qualified success. Its best chapter describes her experience in rehab, which could, or possibly should, have been a memoir unto itself. As a work by Lena Dunham, on the other hand, it falls far short. At her strongest, Dunham is a writer of powerful insight, candor, even sometimes poetry: While Girls was television and therefore a more collaborative endeavor, her 2022 feature film (and auteur showcase) Sharp Stick was (appropriately) pointed and heartfelt. She’s proven to be a skilled essayist, as well. True Dunhamites will inevitably point critics to her powerful Criterion Collection essay about The Big Chill and the awesome power of imagining your parents in their youth.
While the prose in Famesick is mostly drab and drained of life by comparison, Dunham’s greatest sin (and the greatest of all for a celebrity tell-all) is a lack of candor. A passage where she expresses her regret over, and her excuses for, a public letter in defense of a friend accused of sexual assault is written in such a vague manner as to be nearly unintelligible. Her references to her relationship with her brother — whom, when he was still her sister, she wrote about with such extreme candor in Not That Kind of Girl that it caused a preposterous tempest-in-a-teapot national controversy — are muted and canny. She is palpably not speaking her mind about Antonoff’s much-rumored relationship with pop starlet Lorde.
MAGAZINE: CHUCK KLOSTERMAN PROBES THE MEANING OF FOOTBALL
Some of that, surely, can be chalked up to the tact and newfound appreciation for privacy one gains in their late 30s as opposed to their brash 20s. But the new, comparatively mealy-mouthed Dunham in her confessional writing happens to overlap with her recent creative output. Dunham’s comeback as a TV auteur, last year’s Netflix original Too Much, was a cutesy, superficial romantic fantasy.
Here, the result is a neither-fish-nor-fowl quality that makes Famesick not dishy enough, but far too guarded to work as a journey into the dark reaches of the soul. This is not the millennial-pink Darkness Visible that it could have been. It doesn’t help matters that the prose is riddled with clunkers, including Dunham’s evocation of feeling like “I was in a car driving away from my own soul.” It’s possible that the events described in Famesick are simply too recent and too raw for Dunham to convincingly put them to paper, but that the tell-all mode is simply the only way she knows how to deal with them. In that case, as wanting as it is as a memoir, Famesick is an appropriate enough snapshot of a millennial grappling with middle age.
Derek Robertson is a writer in Brooklyn.