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Growing Up With Girls

Growing Up With “Girls”

Lena Dunham and her generation enter midlife

The New York premiere of Girls, 2012.

When Lena Dunham first met her future husband, she told him two things: “I was sick, and people did not like me. If he could be comfortable with those two immutable truths, then we could be together.”

These are two of the central themes that the writer, actor, and director explores in her new memoir, Famesick. An account of making the hit HBO series Girls, the book also considers the time that Dunham spent in rehab and hospitals shortly after wrapping the show’s final season. Notoriety and illness are the through lines in Dunham’s life, and in Famesick they are the perils that often accompanied her rewards. “Getting sick is not that different than getting more famous,” she writes. “It has a maddening circularity, and it’s also very hard to explain, even to the people closest to you. When you’re sick, one medication causes side effects that must be treated by another, more drastic drug.”

Lena Dunham is the Nora Ephron of the millennial generation: vulnerable, brash, and brassy. She’s a grand romantic living in a world of post-sincerity. Her first film, Tiny Furniture, mined the foibles and travails of being a young girl in search of love and experience. Her era-defining Girls expanded on the frustrations of millennial women trying to find love in a world of deadbeat men and to find stable work in an economy that was increasingly rigged against them. A grungier, trashier, bawdier version of Ephron’s rom-coms, Girls captured life in a New York City with more financial and economic and emotional pressures.

Famesick is Dunham’s latest effort to mine her early adult experiences for knowledge and humor, to look bracingly at her friendships, her loves, and her work and see what life lessons can be gleaned from them. If Dunham’s gift has always been to tenderly expose the underbelly of loneliness, of growing up and growing apart, Famesick is about what happens when you get older—when you stop being the youthful provocateur and become instead the grande dame for a generation struggling with midlife crises.

Each chapter of Famesick is named for an episode of Girls. The first, “I Get Ideas,” tells the story of Dunham’s early attempts at filmmaking shortly before she landed the HBO deal. After feverishly writing the script for Tiny Furniture, we are told, Dunham slammed it down in front of her mother, Laurie Simmons, a sculptor who’s an accomplished artist in her own right, and claimed it was a gift: something for the two of them to do together. The film proved to be a blurring of the lines between family members and colleagues, friends and coworkers, fiction and reality. Examining the painful dynamics of a young woman’s attempts to distinguish herself from parents with strong personalities, Tiny Furniture ended up featuring Dunham’s brother as well as a retinue of actors who were also her friends in real life, such as Jemima Kirke.

Praised for its razor-sharp wit and raw desperation, Tiny Furniture helped launch Dunham’s career. Soon she was meeting various producers in Hollywood to sell a TV series. Paired with the producer Jenni Konner, who quickly became her best friend, and the charismatic director Judd Apatow, Dunham found her transition from indie filmmaking to show-running an HBO series to be surprisingly smooth, at least at first: “I remember the boundless creativity that television seemed to allow…. If you wrote an abstract painting or a Bundt cake or a sports car into........

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