Say what you want about Lena Dunham—the woman bares all. Her body, in her semi-autobiographical HBO show Girls, which is what catapulted her to fame 14 years ago. And everything else in her new memoir, Famesick, which looks back on that time. In it, she meticulously describes every wart and bruise—and even an ill-fated Brazilian wax that left her with a “lumpy, pinkened, peeling pubis”—that haunted her while she bumbled through her 20s and 30s in the process of achieving her wildest dreams.
The higher that Dunham scaled Fame Mountain, the more unexplainably sick she became. She was dissociating while running lines with Adam Driver for her very own prestige television series, laid across the “cool marble floor in a sleek corporate bathroom” as Oprah Winfrey waited outside to say hello, and battled a migraine the first time that she had sex with her rock star boyfriend. She became addicted to the drug she took for anxiety, Klonopin. Dunham was getting it all and yet, simultaneously, falling apart.
The book is dedicated to all those wunderkinds who never tunneled out of that same addiction, chaos, and pressure to the other side: Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger, “and anyone else who was too Famesick to be cured.”
But none of those guys spent their 20s performing nude on television and then reading headlines immediately after, on tiny screens, analyzing the distribution of fat on their bodies. While Dunham’s earlier output defined the hyper-confessional style that ruled the 2010s, Famesick—which, full disclosure, I’m only about halfway through but loving—might define another one, and that’s when people who became famous under the microscope of the internet look back, aghast, at what happened to them, what people said about them, and what they’ve become.
