#98: Lena Dunham, you will always be famous (I hope)
Lena's new memoir is all I want to talk about this week
Death by Consumption
4/14/26 - 4/20/26
I spent most of last week in Miami for work, my first time ever in Florida. I was a bit unsure about the whole thing — we’ve all heard the stories of whatever the hell goes on down there — but within 3 hours of arrival I was texting everyone in my phone, “Should we move to Miami?” I found the place surprisingly charming, a little bit like someone had combined LA’s sun with New York’s attitude and tossed in Vegas’s scam-based economy. It’s a tropical playground for lunatics, and everyone seemed to carry themselves with an air of being in on the secret to happiness (which appears to just be paying for plastic surgery with crypto). After only a few days, Miami had so thoroughly infested my brain that, when I saw an elementary school’s flag at half-mast, my first thought was, “Is that for Clavicular’s overdose?” I still don’t know if it was for him or someone else, but I like to think it was. Worried about him! And, before we begin, just a programming note: this is the first of four weeks’ worth of possibly weird emails, as I’ll be traveling for a month for mostly work reasons. Hopefully these emails will still arrive on schedule, but as to what I’ll be consuming and where, no one knows. Exciting!
This week: I gobbled up Lena Dunham’s delicious new memoir, I loved Caity Weaver’s big new article about free bread, I read about the damage rich Russians are doing to London, and I watched two movies about star-crossed lovers,
Famesick: A Memoir, by Lena Dunham (2026) — hardcover
I’ve heard rumors of Lena Dunham’s memoir being difficult to track down in Brooklyn bookstores, which feels like a joke Lena would write about herself. Thankfully, when the book dropped I was down in Miami, where no one can read, so I had ample copies to choose from. I only realized once it was too late that I should have bought out the entire stock and started a clandestine book-running business, illegally trafficking Lena Dunham memoirs up the coast from Coconut Grove to Carroll Gardens. I could have made millions!
Anyway, we’re here to discuss the new memoir by Lena Dunham, a woman you have probably heard of and probably have strong feelings about, though you’re also probably not sure why you have such strong feelings about her, or where they even came from. And, as the book makes clear, Lena’s also not sure why you feel so strongly about her! This memoir is part of her attempt to answer that question for herself, as it tells the story of her life before, during, and after Girls.
I tore through the book, inhaling it in hundred-page binges at a time, unable to stop. Her writing remains as sharp and brilliant as it was on the first day of Girls, walking the knife’s edge between heartfelt and cynical. The book is full of drama as she takes us through the whirlwind past 20 years of her life — from making her first indie film and, somehow, being handed the reins to a prestige HBO show in her early 20s, to superstardom, to becoming the most hated woman on the internet, to her twisted relationship with Jack Antonoff, through her chronic illness and unraveling mental health and drug addiction, to falling completely out of Hollywood, and slowly trying to make her way back to something resembling sanity. It would be a wild story told by anyone, but in Lena’s singular voice it’s something closer to genius. She really, truly is, as she ironically foretold all those years ago, a voice of a generation.
On its surface, the most exciting part of the book — and what’s getting all the press, which surely Lena anticipated as she wrote this — is the celebrity gossip she peppers throughout, scattering it like she’s tossing feed to pigs in a trough (in a way, she is). There’s the Adam Driver stuff, of course, where she basically confirms he’s as obnoxiously self-involved and intense as he seems; and the Jack Antonoff stuff, who actually comes off fine, all things considered — he mostly seems like a young guy caught up in fame whose heart was in the right place but wasn’t ready for all the drama that surrounds Lena and didn’t have the guts to extricate himself. (But let’s hope Margaret Qualley never gets sick.)
But the most thrilling part is when she casually drops a big name out of nowhere, using a celebrity’s presence as set dressing, to show how fucking surreal her life became. When literally anyone else would use euphemisms to hide the identity of whoever they’re talking about — even when the story isn’t negative about that celebrity — Lena isn’t afraid to name names. She might actually be the last celebrity, in a post-Kathy Griffin world, to still be willing to name names, in fact. She knows that’s what we’re here for, and she knows how to put on a great show. Take, for example, the time she has a panic attack at the Met Gala, and there’s Maggie Gyllenhaal standing over her in the bathroom saying, “I know, this place is so overwhelming.” We don’t need to know it was Maggie who said that, but it sure is nice to be let in on the secret.
Or there’s this insane exchange with Barbara Walters:
“There’s a lot to talk about in this show,” she said backstage. “I mean, anal sex in the first episode.”
“Do you mean sex from behind?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “Anal sex.”
I still think about this all the time — who told Barbara Walters that the only kind of sex you could have from behind was anal? What had her twenties looked like as a result?
Lena, for all her faults, has always been brutally honest — which, let’s be honest ourselves, seems to have caused a good amount of the problems in her life — and she extends that trait to evaluating her own life. She’s merciless towards everyone in the book, but most of all towards herself. As a result, when she says cruel things about the people in her life, it doesn’t feel like malicious score-settling, because she’ll always turn that magnifying glass on herself, and worse. Her most brutal feelings seem reserved for Jenni Konner, her one-time business partner and Girls co-showrunner, who Lena portrays as a cold-eyed Hollywood shark, desperate for success and willing to squeeze every last drop out of Lena before discarding her, spent. (In possibly the most brutal moment of the entire book, after Lena has just left rehab and is struggling to get back into a normal working routine while still battling drug addiction and severe chronic illness, Lena suggests she might need to take some more time off before getting back into work, and Jenni sneers: “Or you could take the rest of the year off. Two years, even. And then I guess my kids can just pay for their own college education.” Yikes!) (But, if I can be messy for a second, I really would like a Jenni Konner memoir about these exact same years, please.)
But it’s not all score-settling and drama: there are far more moments of genuine beauty and tenderness in this, and the deeper we got, the more I was surprised by how emotional I got by the end. This woman is very hard on herself, in a way that can be uncomfortably familiar at times. I didn’t expect Lena Dunham’s gossipy little memoir to have some actually usable self-help aspects to it, but here we are! Lena has always contained multitudes, and Famesick is, if nothing else, a welcome reminder that she’s always been one of the most talented writers we have.
Between all the shit-talking and drama, this book is full of gorgeous little gems of brilliant writing, like the way Lena introduces us to Girls costar Jemima Kirke:
Jemima Kirke, the one friend in high school who had seen me as more than a comic sidekick, had recently surfaced from a rehab in Florida and come back into my life like a summer rainstorm, sudden and pleasingly violent. Although she had never acted beyond a few Stella Adler classes taken out of boredom, I knew her beauty—so disarming it stopped men in the street, and especially when we were thirteen—was enough to make her presence onscreen work. She was more luminous now—freshly sober, pleasingly curvy—than she’d been when she was the most luminous girl in high school, and it slapped me across the face: She was my muse.
Imagine being written about like that! I’d tattoo it across my entire back — I mean, she had “come back into my life like a summer rainstorm, sudden and pleasingly violent”? Come on!
No matter what crazy attention-grabbing shit Lena says, no matter how much I didn’t enjoy Too Much (let’s all just collectively forget about it, please), I’ll always be excited to watch or read whatever Lena writes next.
“I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America” by Caity Weaver — in The Atlantic
Lena Dunham is causing drama and a Caity Weaver article has gone viral: it must be 2014! You’ve probably already been sent this article by Caity (gift link here, which I stole from an unnamed publication — hopefully it works for you!) but if you were intimidated by its length, I promise you it is well worth your time. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry (really), you’ll have the time of your life! If you doubt me, please enjoy this tiny excerpt, a sampler platter of Caity’s writing, in which she describes the end of an elaborate multi-course dinner:
I am given a plate of Ibérico ham. It tastes exquisite: nutty, salty, rich. I force it down like I am eating packing peanuts. I notice that I have begun shivering slightly, probably because of the frosty Diet Cokes. “I love Diet Coke!” I write in my notes. Tendrils of conversation from other diners drift to my table. “This was such a good dinner!” one woman declares—a demented way to describe what has happened here tonight; this is dinner in the same way that Australia is an isle.
I actually can’t believe magazines are still willing to pay for pieces like this: big, experimental, demanding financially but also demanding the audience actually sits with it. Only Caity Weaver could take a goofy article about what restaurant gives you the best free bread and turn it into a much-needed shot of adrenaline to the heart of the journalism business. Those of us who worked email desk jobs in the early aughts already owe Caity Weaver so much, for all the times she’d drop some new, brilliant, hilarious piece of writing over at Gawker right as we were hitting the 3pm witching hour, and now she’s done it again at a time when our entire nation truly needed it most.
God’s Own Country (2017) — on Criterion
Finally sat my ass down and watched Josh O’Connor’s first big gay yearning film, the one that kicked off his big gay yearning career. This was beautiful and sweet and really made me want to put on a cozy knit sweater and sleep next to a fireplace in the Yorkshire hills. If you want to feel beautifully heartbroken for an evening, this is the one! I think this Josh O’Connor fella might be one to watch…
Frankie & Johnny (1991) — on Apple TV
Did you know there’s a Garry Marshall romcom starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer (with Nathan Lane as her gay best friend!)? And that Al plays an ex-con working as a line cook at a diner, who falls in love with a waitress? And that it’s based on a stage play that starred F. Murray Abraham and Kathy Bates?? And that the movie is even more insane than I could even describe? First of all, Michelle Pfeiffer is supposed to be so unattractive that no one would even think of dating her, which… sure! But thankfully Al Pacino can see through Michelle Pfeiffer’s hag exterior to her heart of gold, even though both of them are kind of just assholes. The end of the movie is particularly shocking, the way legitimate trauma is introduced in practically the final line of the film, as if it’s a punchline, but the entire tone of the movie is manic and nonsensical, so it also somehow kind of works?
This is mostly due to the sheer charm of the stars, plus Garry Marshall’s incredible direction. Movies these days really don’t have the texture this film has. The settings feel lived-in, the scenes feel a little messy and almost unscripted, and every little side character feels like a slightly crazy New Yorker who just wandered onto set and Garry just kept the camera rolling. This movie is very, very strange, but that’s where it’s charm lies.
London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, by Patrick Radden Keefe (2026) — hardcover
This book, an expansion of this article, takes the story of Zac, a young man whose mysterious death may have been linked to the criminal underworld, and uses it to explore the financial and criminal ties of modern London. It’s fascinating and well-told — Patrick Radden Keefe excels at clearly explaining wildly complicated systems (his previous books have been on the Troubles in Ireland, the opioid crisis, and the NSA, among others). When I picture Patrick Radden Keefe’s apartment, I’m imagining every single wall covered in red yarn tracking a different criminal conspiracy.
Because this is the London crime world, there are so many wild characters. There’s a guy named “Indian Dave” who may or may not be named Dave or even Indian. There’s a guy just called The Muscle, who is, predictably, huge and terrifying and very hard to kill. There’s Mickey McAvoy, who stole millions of pounds’ worth of gold bars from a Brink’s-Mat truck and still insists on his innocence despite having two dogs named Brinks and Mat. And caught up in it all is a completely normal middle-class family, wondering how they got in this mess.
The only real slight I have to the book is that Radden Keefe feels like he got a little too close to the family, and as a result doesn’t dig as deeply into matters that may have felt too sensitive to the parents. There’s a random three-page section, in which he briefly explores some evidence that suggests Zac may have been involved with some of these people in a potentially gay or bisexual way, but it’s discarded as quickly as it’s picked up. I get it — the situation is unimaginably horrific for his parents, and it really doesn’t seem like there’s any way to get any solid answers out of the still-living gangsters involved, so why push past the point of comfort if it won’t lead anywhere — but there are many areas I wanted more detail in! Still, that’s a good problem to have, wanting more out of a book, so this isn’t a real complaint.
Mostly, I’m left with more questions than I went in with, but I know two things for sure: the first is that watching your child grow up into an adult who makes their own choices, for better or worse, sounds like an absolutely terrifying experience; and the second is that London is spiritually evil.