Review of Famesick by Lena Dunham

The creator of the series Girls explores the details of her years of physical and emotional turmoil, which happened concurrently with her rise to fame. Her pain and the mysterious sources of her frequent agony affected every aspect of her life, and Dunham doesn't shy away from bringing the reader into her inner circle of discomfort, worry, insecurity, and suffering.

In her new memoir, the creator of the series Girls explores the years in which she went from an unkown to a well-known writer, director, producer, and actor.

She shares professional and personal tradeoffs, her frequent inability to balance the breakneck speed of her work and maintain creativity, and a painful, often problematic host of illnesses and physical isssues that plagued her and affected each aspect of her life.

Through years of various mysterious, excruciating, debilitating ailments, conditions, and limitations, Dunham tries to overcome her own blood, vomit, addiction to pills, and interminable hospital stays in order to put her work first. But in doing so, she realizes she is losing sight of her identity, her emotional connection to her life, and her ability to sustain most of her relationships.

I was struck by the author's transparency. Dunham doesn't shy away from tracking her insecurities, including those about her friends' intentions and potential financial gain from association with her. She digs into uncomfortable, ongoing traumas and discord, bringing the reader into her extended periods of pain, worry, and suffering, while most of the time she is unaware of the causes of her physical distress--and the mental agony it causes.

Ultimately she considers her trajectory, the destructive forces of fame, and seems to come to a more solid understanding of herself, what is meaningful to her--and, eventually, of the underlying conditions that caused so many intermingling, complicated, agonizing times in her life.

I listened to an audiobook library version of this title through Libby.

Other Memoirs You Might Like

You might also want to check out these Bossy reviews of other celebrity memoirs or these lists of favorite memoirs the years I read them: this one and also this one.