{"id":11715,"date":"2026-04-25T10:03:49","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T10:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/04\/25\/famesick-by-lena-dunham-health-hazards-of-the-hollywood-dream-machine-the-irish-times\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T10:03:49","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T10:03:49","slug":"famesick-by-lena-dunham-health-hazards-of-the-hollywood-dream-machine-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/04\/25\/famesick-by-lena-dunham-health-hazards-of-the-hollywood-dream-machine-the-irish-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Famesick by Lena Dunham: Health hazards of the Hollywood dream machine – The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Famesick, the new memoir by \u201cvoice of a generation\u201d Girls creator Lena Dunham<\/a>, 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 \u2013 reminded \u201cwe paid a lot for you, but we\u2019ll return you if you break\u201d. When the batteries run out, she\u2019s a problem, a narcissist, an addict and, to quote the coyly unnamed \u201cteen pop star\u201d Lena comes home one night to find weeping across her boyfriend\u2019s lap, \u201ca liability\u201d.
Fifty pages in, Dunham compares walking out on the set of Girls for the first time to Marie Antoinette \u201cmarching to the guillotine\u201d. It\u2019s 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\u2019s mouthiness generally fell under the clumsy millennial liberalism category rather than Antoinette\u2019s outright disdain didn\u2019t matter: at the peak of her fame, there were many people who wanted to see Dunham publicly shamed.
[ <\/span>Lena Dunham: \u2018I thought I could hear what a hideous cow I was and still feel I\u2019m essentially lovely\u2019Opens in new window<\/span><\/a> ]<\/span>
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\u2019t get satire when it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cfeminist snark\u201d, for the unretouched images, to \u201cprove\u201d that Vogue didn\u2019t care about their \u201cfat sister\u201d. The photos had actually been altered to disguise the stress-induced impetigo sores that had sprang up on Dunham\u2019s face overnight, but as Dunham reminds us: no one wants to hear about illness.
Her father offers perspective \u2013 \u201cDon\u2019t you get it?\u201d he says, \u201cYou\u2019ve won. You\u2019re only twenty-eight, and you\u2019ve been called a racist, a fat whore, an ignorant rich girl, and a child molester. What else is left? Nothing. You\u2019ve won\u201d \u2013 but Dunham\u2019s body kept the score. Behind the Met Galas, famous boyfriends and \u201cslow, ecstatic\u201d lunches with Nora Ephron, Dunham\u2019s health deteriorated. Her infamy rose, but so did her endometriosis<\/a> 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\u2019s being photographed on Brooklyn Bridge by Annie Leibovitz, a man takes his own life behind her \u2013 the shoot just continues, she says. In fact, it was delayed for hours, according to contemporary reports.
Many of Dunham\u2019s metaphors are financial, as if the insidious commerciality of Hollywood has not only damaged her body but warped her consciousness too: \u201cIllness,\u201d she writes, \u201cwasn\u2019t just a town I was passing through, but a city that I was going to pay taxes in.\u201d On the painful dissolution of her relationship with close friend and Girls co-writer Jenni Konner she writes: \u201cIt was impossible, just then, to understand that you can earn a whole bunch and then spend it just as quickly.\u201d
[ <\/span>Too Much review: This is the Netflix viral hit that everyone will be talking aboutOpens in new window<\/span><\/a> ]<\/span>
For all the sadness, betrayal and score-settling \u2013 and there\u2019s a lot \u2013 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: \u201cIf I\u2019d known I\u2019d only be thin and high so briefly, I would have appreciated both a lot more.\u201d
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. \u201cI wish I\u2019d just posted a Bernie sign in my window instead,\u201d Dunham writes regretfully of that time. Dunham knows her acute desire for approval is \u201crepellent\u201d, but after everything, who could blame her for wanting to be liked? The subtitle of Dunham\u2019s memoir could easily have been Marie Antoinette\u2019s last words as she approached the guillotine and stepped on her executioner\u2019s foot: \u201cPardon me sir, I did not do it on purpose.\u201d
Maija Makela is a writer from Galway<\/i>
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\u00a9 2026 The Irish Times DAC<\/p>\n

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Famesick, the new memoir by \u201cvoice of a generation\u201d 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 \u2013 reminded \u201cwe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11716,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11715","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}