How Famesick made me famehungry

Lena Dunham is still a voice of a generation.

Like every woman of a certain age, enamoured by a certain era, I’m reading Famesick.

Well, listening to. I can’t help but think about what every Girls character would think about that.

Hannah, a literary purist, but ultimately lazy (pro-audiobook).

Jessa, thinks the differentiation is stupid, but can never keep hold of AirPods long enough to finish an audiobook (pro-book-book).

Being able to assess my choices through the lens of fictional characters, imagined more than a decade ago, is a testament to Lena Dunham’s sharp observation and unique ability to bring character complexity to life.

In Famesick, she analyses her rise and fall, and rise again, and all the trauma in between.

I told a man I was reading it:

‘Who’s that?’

‘Lena Dunham? She wrote Girls? Dated Jack Antonoff? Critiqued for being fat, even though in hindsight that was insane?’

‘Hmm, I think I can kinda see her.’

To me, the idea you wouldn’t know who Lena Dunham is is like saying you’ve never heard a Strokes song. If you are a millennial, she was simply unavoidable.

A dream for the press, thanks to her divisive persona, the public loved her, hated her, vilified her, blamed her, then loved her again. The woman is her own microclimate, sentiment changing like the weather.

While Lena couldn’t seem to stay out of controversy, I truly believe much of her hatred and criticism stemmed from being a smart woman and a celebrity in a non-conventional celebrity body.

Someone on X said, “The problem with Lena Dunham is she wants to be loved as an icon & can’t appreciate being hated as a prophet. The icon is loved then quickly forgotten. The prophet is hated & exiled & reduced to eating locust in the desert but you die vindicated”.

God forbid a girl want to be liked for her personality, while being admired for her genius.

But what is it about her work exactly? For me, it’s the power to capture a feeling. To hold up a mirror to a generation and say, “This is what’s wrong with you, but don’t worry, this is what’s wrong with everyone. Enjoy it!”

I was 24 when Girls first aired, which meant I was living in the same timeline as its core characters, and to an extent, I still am. I loved it, I still do.

But like a lot of great work, it fires up a distinct jealousy in me. A feeling of wasted potential, of urgency to do something of note.

The idea that someone my age had written, directed, and starred in something so profoundly unique and relatable was the singularly most fucking annoying thing to happen to me in 2012.

And that’s saying a lot, considering I had just graduated from five years of law school and couldn’t get so much as an email reply for a job.

There’s no obscure sorrow quite like ‘that could’ve been me’ – particularly when the failings are completely your own.

I feel it about writers. I feel it about influencers. I feel it about business owners. I’m sure there’s a tiny group of people who feel it about me.

There’s so much grief in possibility.

But one of the things people admire so much about Lena is her candour, particularly when it comes to her own mistakes. And while I try to be forgiving of my own failings, I do need to be honest: that *could not* have been me.

It’s not the New York of it all, or the access to artistic parents and friends of friends. It is quite simply that I just don’t do what I want to be known for. Or certainly not with enough consistency and tenacity to make an impact.

This, ironically, is the most consistent thread of the Girls series, included in Lena’s original pitch:

They know they want to be successful long before they know what they want to be successful at.

And echoed by Jessa’s scathing line:

You used to have ideas. Now all you do is browse the internet.

Not doing the thing is fine at 24. But when not doing the thing still pains you at 37, reading a whole memoir about doing the thing by someone who did it, despite some completely insane obstacles, is equal parts sickening and inspiring.

Sometimes I wish I could come out of my body and violently shake myself for not grabbing the opportunity to thrive with both hands. I missed the blog era boom. I’m currently missing the Substack boom by publishing so rarely. Books are en vogue, but I’ve never really done anything about that.

The universe keeps lining up home runs for me while I sidequest to get a hot dog.

I’m super busy! I’ve had stuff going on! Pandemic, grief, etc., etc.

But what we see in Famesick is that Lena was battling a ferocious illness that left her in crippling pain. She struggled through some of the darkest events, and the kind that you only realise caused trauma a few years later. She lost family members. She was cancelled, she was held up on a pedestal. She feared being toppled because so many people relied on her being on top of her game.

She still showed up.

As Lena reflects on what it cost her to be a voice of a generation, it leaves many of us wondering whether we could still try.

And I know some of you reading this might be thinking, you are doing absolutely fine, what failings?. But as we see in Famesick, it is only our own values, standards, and actions we have to make peace with. To quote another cion, Joan Didion:

To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves

I might not have the experience, talent, or voice to be the prophet Lena Dunham, but I can no longer go to bed at night and see the ghosts of unfinished drafts behind my closed eyes.