Lena Dunham Can’t Help Herself

The cocktail-napkin pitch has become a metonym for her career more broadly—evidence of either her breezy genius or the unacknowledged privilege that underpins it all. Except, Dunham writes in her new memoir Famesick, that story is bullshit. “I’d actually written it on my brother’s laptop, borrowed for the trip.” Dunham wants you to know that she understands her name ceased to be a precise identifier for her individual person long ago. She accepts that a life and legacy defined by those stories is the price she’s paid for fame. She gets it, she really does. But she wants you to know her side, too. Famesick is a granular, exhausting, 15-year-long account of her side, from her early days as an indie filmmaker in New York, her stay in rehab for a Klonopin addiction, to her new life in London with her husband, musician Luis Felber.