‘Famesick’: In her new memoir, Lena Dunham makes us laugh about a dream job turned brutal nightmare

During the final season of Lena Dunham’s acclaimed comedy drama series, Girls, the character she plays, Hannah Horvath, says her ambition as a writer is to make people laugh about painful things. In real life, this is exactly what Dunham has achieved with her second memoir, Famesick which opens with a prime example.

“It’s very hard to remember a time – aside from brief flashes of adrenaline on a set or a date or at a fashion party where people are inadvertently dressed like kids in a school play about Greek gods – when being in my body didn’t feel like towing a wrecked car across town at midnight,” she writes.

A searingly funny, bare-hearted exploration of the cost of success, Dunham’s book charts her meteoric rise as a young screenwriter, director and actor with brutal honesty.

Smart, sassy and highly entertaining, Famesick is ultimately a painfully astute analysis of the ways a dream job can morph into a perilous nightmare. Particularly for someone who is neurodivergent, barely out of college, emotionally dependent on their parents and suffering from a rare, undiagnosed chronic disease.

Throughout the first decade of her glittering career, Dunham balanced precariously between adulation and critical attacks. Her intelligent, sharply observed humour defined her public and professional image,...

Read more