Sunday book pick: Fame, chronic illness and Hollywood dreamland in Lena Dunham’s memoir, ‘Famesick’

“The triad of illness, trauma, and addiction was more than I had been able to bear. Everything that had happened publicly was harder than I let on. But it was real. It could be clearly laid out on a timeline, like in a history book or a true crime podcast. I always struggled physically, but my symptoms, which seemed diffuse, were never collated into a diagnosis, especially in a world where the pain of girls and women is dismissed. Stress has a measurable effect on autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, and worsened my physical symptoms, so ironically making Girls – arguably the best thing that had ever happened to me, but also the hardest I had ever worked – only served to make me sicker. But by this point, my responsibilities made taking the time to get well seemingly impossible.”

Lena Dunham’s Girls was for millennials what Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City was for Gen X. However, unlike SATC, where NYC was the mecca of high fashion and brunch dates, Girls offered a more realistic view of bad job markets, matchbox apartments, and measly salaries in this devilishly expensive city. Dunham’s character Hannah Horvath aspires to be a writer but there’s little opportunity to make a living unless one...

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