Famesick by Lena Dunham: Health hazards of the Hollywood dream machine – The Irish Times

Famesick, the new memoir by “voice of a generation” Girls creator Lena Dunham, weaves a familiar tale: a preternaturally talented, hard-working young woman finds herself thrust into the glittering talons of the Hollywood dream machine. She gets everything she ever wanted but is treated, the way young women are, like a commodity – reminded “we paid a lot for you, but we’ll return you if you break”. When the batteries run out, she’s a problem, a narcissist, an addict and, to quote the coyly unnamed “teen pop star” Lena comes home one night to find weeping across her boyfriend’s lap, “a liability”.
Fifty pages in, Dunham compares walking out on the set of Girls for the first time to Marie Antoinette “marching to the guillotine”. It’s a dramatic simile, the kind that appears frequently throughout her writing, but an apt one: both Dunham and Marie Antoinette were young women in the public eye, both were wealthy, reviled and had a tendency to say insensitive things. That Dunham’s mouthiness generally fell under the clumsy millennial liberalism category rather than Antoinette’s outright disdain didn’t matter: at the peak of her fame, there were many people who wanted to see Dunham publicly shamed.
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Girls, which is probably the funniest TV show of this century, was criticised for being too white, too myopic, too privileged (everything it set out to be, but people don’t get satire when it’s delivered by a woman). At her lowest ebb, far-right commentators accused her of paedophilia because of a throwaway remark on childhood curiosity about her younger sibling’s body. The left was no better: after Dunham appeared on the cover of Vogue, there was a bounty put out by Jezebel, that 2010s bastion of online “feminist snark”, for the unretouched images, to “prove” that Vogue didn’t care about their “fat sister”. The photos had actually been altered to disguise the stress-induced impetigo sores that had sprang up on Dunham’s face overnight, but as Dunham reminds us: no one wants to hear about illness.
Her father offers perspective – “Don’t you get it?” he says, “You’ve won. You’re only twenty-eight, and you’ve been called a racist, a fat whore, an ignorant rich girl, and a child molester. What else is left? Nothing. You’ve won” – but Dunham’s body kept the score. Behind the Met Galas, famous boyfriends and “slow, ecstatic” lunches with Nora Ephron, Dunham’s health deteriorated. Her infamy rose, but so did her endometriosis and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a painful connective tissue disorder that comes with a stacked bingo card of unpleasant co-morbidities.
Dunham draws a taut line between trauma and chronic illness, depicting with justified rage the corrosive way Hollywood treats its most profitable stars and the damage it enacts upon their minds and bodies.
Metaphors abound: at one point while attempting a new start in England, Dunham accidentally sets herself on fire while lighting a scented candle. Then when she’s being photographed on Brooklyn Bridge by Annie Leibovitz, a man takes his own life behind her – the shoot just continues, she says. In fact, it was delayed for hours, according to contemporary reports.
Many of Dunham’s metaphors are financial, as if the insidious commerciality of Hollywood has not only damaged her body but warped her consciousness too: “Illness,” she writes, “wasn’t just a town I was passing through, but a city that I was going to pay taxes in.” On the painful dissolution of her relationship with close friend and Girls co-writer Jenni Konner she writes: “It was impossible, just then, to understand that you can earn a whole bunch and then spend it just as quickly.”
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For all the sadness, betrayal and score-settling – and there’s a lot – Dunham maintains her sense of humour. After gaining weight in rehab to kick her Judy Garland-style pill habit she developed to keep working, she writes: “If I’d known I’d only be thin and high so briefly, I would have appreciated both a lot more.”
Famesick makes clear that the public shaming of Dunham was a case of blatant misogyny and mass transference: somehow this one slightly annoying but ultimately well-meaning young comedian was made to answer for everything that went wrong with Hillary Clinton and the liberal girlbossification of feminism. “I wish I’d just posted a Bernie sign in my window instead,” Dunham writes regretfully of that time. Dunham knows her acute desire for approval is “repellent”, but after everything, who could blame her for wanting to be liked? The subtitle of Dunham’s memoir could easily have been Marie Antoinette’s last words as she approached the guillotine and stepped on her executioner’s foot: “Pardon me sir, I did not do it on purpose.”
Maija Makela is a writer from Galway
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