Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 10

Hello Kitty

Two years into our relationship, in June 2014, Jack and I moved into an apartment that was far too big for two people and far too adult for two twentysomethings. It was a new build, four bedrooms with an elevator that opened right into a foyer that smelled of freshly constructed everything. It was exactly the kind of place my parents had always rolled their eyes at—uniform faucets, sleek bathtubs, subway tile selected by some corporate interior designer. The floors were brand-new oak, lacquered a pale gray, and the windows were confusing to open, the kind of fresh efficiency that actually makes things harder. In the fourth bedroom, Jack spent months building out a professional studio, a project he’d forgotten to alert the neighbors about, and so we spent a lot of time asking forgiveness rather than permission from the tidy, corporate couple who lived upstairs. One day, clearly at wit’s end with the drilling and sanding, the man—a fit fiftysomething with a crew cut—beat on the fire door that led to the staircase, yelling, “ANSWER YOUR GODDAMNED DOOR RIGHT THIS FUCKING SECOND.”

When I opened it, his face with red with rage. He yelled at me about permits and noise control and respect until I was sobbing, “Please, I’m sorry.” I called Jack in hysterics, who emailed him immediately: “I’m really sorry about the noise but that doesn’t mean you can scream at my girlfriend. She cried, if you must know!” We must have seemed, to all of these people nearing retirement who had spent their lives working their way up the property ladder, like kids standing on each other’s shoulders wearing trench coats, pretending to be part of the adult world.

By this point, I was deep into shooting season four, and as my scrappy fictional alter ego attended grad school in Iowa—something I’d always fantasized about but now seemed unlikely to happen—I was pooling my resources with my rock star boyfriend to move into our Barbie Dreamhouse. Instagram had just released its “direct message” feature, and a few days before we moved, we tried it on each other:

“Marry me?” I wrote.

“Baby first,” he responded. “Baby in 2015, married in 2016.”

Job? Check. Apartment? Check. Husband and baby daddy? Check.

Only occasionally did I think about what other people my age must be doing, but it would hit me at odd times. My brother told me about a group of anarchists who all shared an apartment in Rotterdam without heat and fucked one another’s partners regularly but forgave one another with ease. I heard from a college friend who was traveling through South Asia with only a sleeping bag and a toothbrush.

At an art book fair with my father, I watched a couple my age share a taco and fight, both of them in ripped jean shorts. As their volume raised—something about which of two parties they’d been invited to that night they’d attend, and whether they could go to both—my eyes filled with tears, as though I were watching a film of what my life could have been.

But when I tried to explain it to my father, I sounded delusional and petulant, like someone who wanted to be able to have every version of my life happening in tandem, with no understanding of the immense privileges of the version I had. And that’s probably just what I was—after all, I was only twenty-seven.

Shooting days were long, and Jack was touring, so it seemed inevitable that a “white glove service” would pack our things from my little apartment in Mansion House and make sure they arrived safely at our new home. On our last day in my first apartment, I awoke at five a.m. , dressing for work in the dark as I always did to avoid waking Jack, trying not to knock anything down. That day, it was all packed and unloaded just a few blocks away, and at two a.m. , I arrived home from a location shoot upstate, used the fancy new fob to access our elevator, and emerged into an apartment where I could see the darkened forms of things I knew I owned but could not recognize. Crawling into our new king-size bed beside a sleeping Jack, I began to weep.

“What is it?” he asked groggily, reaching a sleepy arm over me with concern.

I was crying so hard that it was almost impossible to get the words out. “I…miss…Gilbert.” Gilbert, the Mansion House’s longtime doorman, who had been a casual confidant since my college house-sitting days, when I had nothing to do and nowhere to be so I would sit with him for hours by the front door, chatting shit. He made snide comments about the number of boyfriends he’d met over the past five years, rattled my packages to try and determine their contents, snarled at my dog, and told me that without Jesus I’d never be whole. Once, he ate my Thai delivery instead of alerting me that it had arrived. But he was one of those daily facts, the kind of friend you realize is situational and that—your situation having changed, permanently—will now cease to be someone you know.

“You can always visit, baby. He’s two blocks away,” Jack said. But when would I have the time?

My mother has always expressed her love through interiors. Whatever she couldn’t say, whatever hug she couldn’t return or mood she couldn’t shake, she created spaces that told me she saw me. Like in fifth grade, when we did a bedroom shake-up at our loft in an effort at creating some privacy for everyone. My parents moved into a plywood structure by the front windows and Cyrus into my loft bed, and my mother converted the small bedroom she and my father had slept in for years into my first “big girl” room. For days, she refused me entry, explaining I could only see it when it was finished. A minimalist by nature, chic and understated, she often clashed with me over taste—I loved, still love, pink and leopard, glitter and trash. She wore white jeans and ballet flats, coveted midcentury tables and thick tortoiseshell barrettes. She thought my taste was crass and uninspired, and encouraged me to understand the magic of saying more with less.

But when she opened the door to my new room, I gasped at the beauty: Each of the four walls had been painted a different pastel—purple, blue, yellow, and pink—and in the corner was a blue blow-up chair from the Delia’s catalog I had been circling with lust for months. She had hand-glued the lampshades with hundreds of downy white feathers and nested several sequined pillows onto a purple duvet. On one bedside table was a candle in the shape of a slice of honeydew melon; on the other, a pink portable television from the 1970s, hardly bigger than an alarm clock. And above the bed, a poster of the cast of Friends, a show so meaningful to me that I toted a Café Perk–themed trivia book in my schoolbag. In that moment, I knew that no matter our differences—the ways in which my intensity, need, and social unease concerned and confused her—she really and truly saw me.

And now she was at it again—carefully unloading her collection of delft china in our new kitchen, hanging our mugs from hooks on a pegboard, leaning art and fluffing our throw pillows. But I could see something in her eyes as she assessed her work—she couldn’t make sense of the space. She was usually so intuitive, but the place didn’t feel alive to her. Maybe it was the aggressive newness of it, the sleek affectless quality. Or maybe she didn’t understand what to make of the people who lived there.

She would often ask me, when Jack was gone for long stretches, whether he had checked in. “Of course, he texts all the time,” I’d tell her.

“But do you chat on the phone? Check in about plans? Your father’s mom used to think it was crazy how often I called him, but that’s having a partner.”

“I trust him to do his thing, and he trusts me,” I explained. “I don’t need the kind of closeness you and Papa have; it seems exhausting.”

“Oh,” she said, almost hurt. “That makes me a little bit sad.”

I had my first endometriosis surgery in the fall of 2014. Knee-deep in scandal, I almost felt relief that I would soon be forced to pause and have the blessed vacation of anesthesia. In a surgery center in Hollywood, Jack and Jenni sat by my bed as I was given the first intravenous push of medication to calm me. They filmed me as I described what I saw—a tennis court, tidy and green, on which everyone I loved was congregated and playing a vigorous game.

The surgery was performed by a comfortingly boundaryless man of “grandpa age.” He had been my gynecologist since I’d arrived in LA—there was no city where I spent more than three days in which I did not have a gynecologist. He was introduced to me by Jenni, who said he was cozy, which as we now know was a buzzword for me. (He also, I quickly learned, would prescribe almost anything, like heavy sedatives to “calm the vagina down so you can have sex and not get all tense.”) He referred to sex as “schtupping” and a Pap smear as “a bagel and a schmear.” None of this would endear him to me now, but at the time, I needed someone who would make what I was experiencing feel more casual, less like an emergency, and more like the time I ate too many latkes at Aunt Helene’s house and had to lie down in cousin Heidi’s Mickey Mouse–themed bedroom to recover.

When I awoke from surgery and asked what he’d found, he simply informed me, “You were all gunked up in there.” He had taken out my appendix, which was gnarled and twisted and looked like a candy cane of tissue (after these events, the best part is when they show you the photos of your insides, pink and foreign, witchy and endless). The appendix was sent to the lab, which found signs of long-term low-grade infection, and he had ablated the endometrial lesions on the spot. He performed a hysterosalpingogram, an X-ray procedure meant to detect blockages in the fallopian tubes.

Back at the Sunset Tower, I spent four days on Percocet with Jack, watching the first season of The Affair and whispering tearily, “Please don’t cheat on me, even though I’m all gunked up in there and people are calling me a pedophile?” I was told that showering was allowed, but that I needed to cover my midsection in Saran Wrap. The kitchen staff sent up a roll on a silver tray.

Cleared after surgery, I decided to hurl myself into a glow-up—privately, I was sick of feeling exhausted and inflamed, and publicly, I was sick of being referred to as flabby and unfortunate, of memes in which my body was compared to a Thanksgiving turkey or a tube of Pillsbury dough. At the time, Jenni was very involved with the Tracy Anderson Method, a Gwyneth Paltrow–backed fitness regime that involves two full hours a day of expendable time and even more expendable income. Tracy herself ensured me that she would oversee a change in my body so complete that, in a year’s time, I’d hardly recognize myself (little did she know, that schism had already occurred).

Part of the “Method” involved a phalanx of space heaters bringing the fitness studio up to a toasty ninety degrees, as we performed an hour of repetitive exercises with ankle weights, followed by a series of aerobic dances that had a jaunty, Keebler Elfish cadence.

In LA—no sooner had Jack and I moved in did I have to jump coasts to edit season four of Girls —I devoted my mornings to the Method and my evenings to admiring the results. My body was changing—my naturally high waist and thick hips replaced with a body more like a carrot. I couldn’t be sure how much of this was my obsessive devotion to the TA routine—always led by a chipper former Lakers Girl in a TA-branded sports bra—and how much was the nausea and discomfort that had never quite cleared after the surgery, the pain that I didn’t want to admit continued to dog me, making it hard to eat full meals, as a full stomach seemed to press against whatever was still raw inside me.

As is always the case, I could only keep the truth of the pain at bay for so long. I could build my “tiny muscles” for two hours a day, get into acro-yoga (where a bearded Jason Momoa look-alike hurled me through the air and twisted me like a balloon animal), but ultimately my body would always hit a wall. And four months after surgery, I wound up in the ER with a “bladder base” infection, my Aunt Bonnie and Jack’s mother each at one side of my gurney since Jack wouldn’t be home until well past midnight. I listened dutifully to the on-duty doctor’s suggestion that I pee after sex and avoid jeans, but this would be the first of many trips where I knew my problem went beyond the attending physician’s capacity or interests. Emergency rooms are, at the end of the day, for emergencies—and chronic pain may feel like an emergency, but it’s actually a complex web of intersecting factors that requires a level of time and interrogation that the emergency medical system is not designed to support.

The doctor who had performed the surgery had no good explanation for why I was still in so much pain—the surgery should have, he explained, removed the offending lesions. But he ultimately admitted that endometriosis was a progressive illness, and not every patient would receive the same amount of relief for the same length of time. And so he suggested a drug that suppresses hormone production. If endometriosis is a fire, estrogen is the match, and perhaps three months of these injections would ease the remaining lesions and prevent more from forming.

By this point, I had spent the entire winter doing what healthy women do—exercise with discipline and enthusiasm, eat small, thoughtful portions, meditate, and “schtup.” But on a trip with Jack’s band to Hawaii, I had ended up weeping on the floor of the bathroom as my period came, cramps overtaking my body in rolling spasms of pain, as Jack encouraged me to get up so that we could enjoy a trip on a glass-bottomed boat.

I’m not sure how long he asked, how hard I pushed, but I know the argument ended with me groaning, “Who the fuck wants to see what’s under the ocean, anyway?”

We were now heading into production of season five. I didn’t know how I would be able to perform at the necessary level while feeling the daily medley of sensations—stinging, throbbing, pulsing pain that shifted but never abated. I was bleeding three quarters of the month, clots so big at times that they floated out of me and bobbed to the surface of the bathtub like cherry tomatoes.

The fact that the book had been released only a few weeks before surgery and that I—or we, everyone in and around my orbit—was recovering from such an earthshaking and previously unimaginable invasion was never mentioned. I didn’t tell the doctor. The doctor didn’t ask me. I still felt, at this point, that to even invoke stress or psychological distress would be to reduce my symptoms to the purely psychological, and I’d be in danger of losing the only shield I had: a diagnosis.

Nobody talked about the complexity of the nervous system, the connection between stress and inflammation, the ability of physical pain to be compounded by emotional. Nobody said, “Maybe you just need a little bit of time.” The word trauma was never used, except perhaps by my therapist, whom I was becoming increasingly “just too busy” to see on a regular basis. I agreed to the estrogen-suppressing injections with the enthusiasm of a bullied teen accepting a free nose job. Please, thank you, yes.

What he didn’t tell me—what they never tell you—were all the other things the drug did. Side effects include, but are not limited to: “Redness, blistering, peeling, or loosening of the skin, including inside the mouth…Change in sex drive or performance…Hot flashes…Joint pain…Increased thirst or amount of urine, unusual weakness or fatigue, blurry vision…Skin rash, itching, hives, swelling of the face, lips, tongue, or throat…”

Other side effects of having this medication in my body: uncontrollable weeping while listening to the Hamilton soundtrack on repeat…a conviction that everyone you encounter finds you either irritating or repulsive…mistrust of people you once thought you knew…persistent thoughts of one’s own demise and who would even care…an inability to have sex without flashing back to episodes of previous trauma…slapping yourself in the face, over and over, when your boyfriend tells you you’re making it hard to love you…

For the duration of Girls, my uncle had been dying. My father’s brother, three years younger, physically identical except for the elaborately preppy way he dressed and his unyielding interest in fiscal conservatism and recreational squash. Still, since my father is my comfort object, it would only stand to reason that the person who most resembled him—apart from his voting record—would be an essential part of the constellation of safety.

As his Parkinson’s disease worsened at a speed that shocked doctors—it turned out not to be Parkinson’s at all, but an alarming hybrid of Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease called multiple system atrophy—I began traveling to see him every weekend I was on the East Coast. When we were shooting, we usually wrapped late on Friday nights and, on Saturday mornings, I would book a car to New Haven, sleeping with my head against the window until I arrived. My father met me there, and we’d spend a few hours with my uncle—all he could manage at that point.

I would disembark and stand a moment in front of the big white door on his imposing brick house, breathing deeply to prepare for what I was about to see. I had never sat with somebody who knew that they would die. I was too young to remember my mother’s best friend Jimmy in the hospital with AIDS. My grandparents had all slipped away suddenly. My uncle was not only dying, but paralyzed, with nowhere to go and nothing else to think about as he watched and rewatched his favorite John Wayne movies. He was an early adopter of Taylor Swift—a Swiftie from album #1. He thought Vanessa Hudgens didn’t get enough credit as an actress. He felt all this alongside the constant thrum of knowing he was leaving, and wanting to go.

One day I arrived to mayhem—nurses running, his wife issuing forceful commands, his daughter cowering. The living room was like a badly directed play. He was choking on a ham sandwich, a food chosen because of its softness and the ease with which it could be cut into micro-pieces and slip down his throat, as the ability to swallow was leaving him.

As the chaos continued—the nurse reaching down his throat, the suction machine employed—I felt a strong urge to sit down beside him and take his hand. He was a WASP—we didn’t express ourselves that way. But I decided today I would be Jewish. As they aspirated him, I clutched his fingers, stroked the inside of his wrist, didn’t try to hide the tears that were falling down my face.

I remembered being a little girl with him on the beach, when he was just a little older than I was then, so handsome in his Ray-Bans, telling me about the time my father sent him down a hill on a bicycle he didn’t know how to ride. He never learned, but insisted I did, chasing behind me, holding the back of the seat until I finally took off. I remembered sitting on his lap in a party dress. I remembered him tucking me into the twin bed at my grandmother’s house as a special treat. I remembered the time I dropped my ice-cream cone and he refused to get me another, because he believed children should learn lessons. I remembered when my father told him how fucking stupid that was, and they stormed into different rooms. I remembered his face in his kindergarten portrait, fat and blond, and his face as he argued in court downtown and my father and I went to watch, and he said the plaintiff was facing “bad karma should this case continue,” and how we clapped like it was a play.

I remembered all the ugly polar fleeces he had ever bought me, and the one lovely necklace.

“Are you scared?” I asked him, as the chaos subsided.

“Not really,” he told me, his voice so quiet I could barely catch it. “You know, all I used to do was work. It was my religion—I wanted more and more, to be better and better. When I got sick, I thought my life was over.”

“And it wasn’t?”

“It was just starting. Because if it hadn’t happened, I would never have stopped, and I would never have known just how much all of you love me.”

A few weeks into filming season five, my uncle had a heart attack and was placed on life support while we were on location upstate. It was my Aunt Bonnie—my mother’s sister, the tragedy-inured doctor with the great crisis voice—who called to tell me he was not going to make it out of this. Hysterical, I searched the hotel for Jenni, almost unable to see through the blurry veil of tears. I finally found her in the hotel bar, looking beautiful and alive as she knocked back whiskeys with the crew guys, and I felt like a disruptive ghost when I stood at the door, beckoning to her. “I have to get to him,” I said. “My father is there. If I drive now, I can be there by one a.m .”

She took me back to my room, where she told me that I couldn’t do anything tonight. It would make a lot more sense to wait until the morning, perhaps film a scene while we waited for news. She gave me two sleeping pills, and I wept until I felt them hit like a velvet curtain closing around me.

The next morning, my father called early, waking me from a druggy stupor. “I’m going to the hospital to get a sense of what’s happening. I’ll tell you when to head this way.”

I spoke to the producers, who eased me to the conclusion that since things were in limbo, there was no reason not to shoot the scene that was scheduled for that morning. Never mind that my eyes welled with tears every time the camera cut, that my phone service was patchy at the house in the woods, that I didn’t want to be there. We finished the scene around one p.m., and I called for an update, walking down the road to access a signal. “He’s gone,” my father said. “But he knew how you felt.” I climbed into my teamster’s car and headed toward my father—the thought of his smell, of his T-shirt under his long-sleeved shirt under his button-down, was the only thing keeping me upright, and we reached our house at the same time, stopping in the driveway to hold each other. “This is a tough one, kid,” he said. “This is a really tough one.”

I had warned the producers, as the season started, that were anything to happen to my uncle, I would need some time. A few weeks, I said, to be with my family.

Of course, everyone said. But when the time came, three days was all we could “make work.” At least the costume designer located me a funeral dress, a sleeveless black Theory midlength with a bias-cut skirt, ballet flats. The service was held in the church in Old Lyme, in front of the state fairgrounds where my uncle had derived so much pleasure from watching us eat funnel cake and ride the Ferris wheel in endless loops. I spoke about him in my funeral costume. “As a lawyer, his greatest belief was the idea that things could be reasonable and fair, but some things are just so terribly unfair.” My uncle, who had never so much as placed his lips on a joint. My uncle, who was so racked with guilt that after cheating on his first wife, he announced it to the whole family one day later. My uncle, who laughed so fucking hard every time I made a joke about taking it from behind, then pretended he hadn’t. My uncle, who looked just like my father, and his father before him, and the world felt less and less safe now that only one of them was left.

Looking back, this—leaving the bosom of my grieving family to head back to a place where my grief meant very little—sowed the first seeds of resentment toward the job I loved so much, the sense that being a good little soldier had started to cost me much more than I had in my wallet.

“So tell them you can’t go back,” my father said. “Tell them you need to be here with us.”

“I tried,” I said.

“So just say it out loud, what’s really going on,” he said. “It’s better for us to just be honest: They don’t give a shit.”

The next year, I turned thirty, the first birthday where my uncle didn’t buy me something alarming from a shop with a Martha’s Vineyard chic motif—a belt covered in pink whales, or a half-zip sport top that wasn’t right for a girl who took the elevator one floor. It was an odd and lonely birthday, thirty—my party was massive; there were speeches from Jenni and Jack and my mother, who did a long and not very funny riff about trying to wake me up on a day off.

Around that time, in the spring of 2016, I was offered an award from the Endometriosis Foundation of America, an honor offered to virtually anyone with a vague public platform who had ever uttered a public word about their faulty uterine lining. At that point, talking about your reproductive health was really not in vogue—the first time I wrote about the diagnosis, I received several phone calls from iconic female celebrities who wanted to share their own stories, ones they hadn’t dared to share because of their bone-deep understanding that their success was predicated on a seemingly invincible, reliable, and sleek body.

The gala was surprisingly tasteful—no ovary bouquets or pussy pasta—and more glamorous than expected. Allison Williams, who remains one of the most polite, reliable, and morally correct people I’ve ever known—like Marnie, actually, but without the lack of social consciousness or destructive sexual appetites—came and introduced me, speaking so movingly about my experience that it brought me to tears. It wasn’t just her words, which were elegant and heartfelt, but the sense that despite all the hiding, the gritted teeth and forced smiles, she had witnessed what was happening and held it with such kindness.

My mother was another story. Our relationship—which had always had a level of volatility that was commensurate with the level of love—had moved into a new phase, one that was much more alarming than the screaming fights we had a tendency to start across the kitchen: an icy chill. Constant daily contact was replaced with plans for coffee, polite inquiries about how the other’s week was going, the occasional photo of a pair of boots on sale. My father tried to name the issues—Jack’s family was so close that it didn’t leave room for him to mesh with ours (the idea of a shared gathering was as appealing to my father as sleeping at Rikers Island for the night—it’s nothing personal, he’s just against unity in all forms). She was still angry at me for leaving our tour of India a week early three years prior, which I blamed on side effects of malaria medication and she blamed on me being a selfish whore.

The biggest issue, and the hardest one for us to name, was my career: not just the challenges I was facing, but its impact on her sense of her own legacy, something that mattered to her in the same ferocious way that early female aviators took to the sky without regard for whether they would live or die. Her art had always been her religion, the one thing I knew I could not touch, change, inform, or be more essential than. And now I was the story.

We never discussed it. To name this would be to cop to an ugly emotion, directed at an even uglier target—her own child. Neither of us had the words to explain that multiple things could be true at once: She could be proud of me, worried, and also maddened that her entire professional life and legacy had now been yoked to her child’s. I could feel empathy for how that affected her, and also feel sad that the incredible effort I’d made to make her proud was met with a constant low-level shrug. But to express any of this skillfully would only be possible with the kind of high-level, egoless communication that rarely defines the mother-daughter bond. As a result, we had both stopped assuming that the other one wished us well. We could no longer rely on the other’s good intentions, which I’ve learned is the hardest thing to come back from. We had gone from being spicy allies to performatively polite enemies, afraid to give the other any ammunition by expressing our own vulnerability.

I could see how the distance between us pained my father. The entire constellation of his life—studio, wife, children—had to work in synchronicity for anything like peace to be felt. If two of the three were in conflict, it was apocalyptic. Still, every conversation ended in someone feeling slighted by the form the apology took.

It came to a head at the Endometriosis Ball, when the seating arrangement—one I hadn’t planned, but also hadn’t inquired about or double-checked—left my mother feeling like an unwanted third or fourth wheel. Things like that have always mattered to her, and I’ve always been dismissive of them, unsure how—in a world with so much real pain—anything having to do with a gala could hurt. As I gave my speech—which was working up to a heartfelt thesis about how my mother had been the rock through my illness—I saw her get up from her chair, so violently that it clattered, and walk out into the night.

She had lent me her ring that night, one she had purchased on our ill-fated trip to India, at the gem palace in Jaipur. For the next two weeks, as our standoff continued, and each of us waited for the apology we felt we deserved, I kept the ring on my finger, staring at it, talking to it. As I walked through Brooklyn, I felt the very geography had changed: I am a person who doesn’t speak to my mother, I thought, over and over again, unable to square the events that had landed us here with their outcome.

My father called me every day, covertly from the second line in his studio. It felt as if we were having an affair. “Is she mentioning me?” I would ask. “Does she know we’re talking?” His voice had a heaviness I had only ever heard after the death of his mother.

“I don’t know, babe. You each have your story.”

Finally, on day fifteen, a text came through from my mother (never saved in my phone as “mama” or “mom” but instead and only by her given name of Laurie Simmons): It was a photo of Joan Crawford and her daughter, posed for the camera in a false expression of familial joy. After that, a lion with its cub in its mouth. Then, a gorilla carrying her baby on her back. She’s the funniest fucking person in the world.

“Do you still love me?” I asked.

“Yes.”

It had been decided, in a conversation with HBO right after completing season five, that season six was where we would stop. It was hard to imagine we had reached the point where such a conversation would be necessary—it had all moved so fast, in one way—and on the other hand, I was as exhausted as Jude Law trying to make his way home in Cold Mountain, unable to understand how to find his way back from a war that had left everything changed.

I can’t remember which of us said that six seemed like the right number of seasons. Maybe it was Judd, who felt strongly about not overstaying our welcome. Maybe it was Jenni and Ilene, who both felt that as we neared thirty, the thrust of the show would change. It’s hard to imagine it was me, only because I had so much trouble at that point asking for much of anything, but I know that when it came to a creative request about which I felt strongly, I was always able to find a bravery that was lost on me in day-to-day logistics. And I knew, insofar as I knew anything, that if we didn’t stop soon, this thing I had given my life to would cease to have the creative clarity and specificity that gave it value. And what a shame it would have been, to have surrendered myself so totally to an effort that failed.

As season six began, the pain seemed to multiply even more, like some science-fiction creature with iterative powers. How was it possible, I wondered, for something so bad to just keep getting worse? It’s worth noting that I had never done the one thing that might have actually clarified what was going on for me: paused. Instead, I accepted whatever was offered—birth control, two more surgeries to handle ruptured cysts that didn’t “resolve” on their own, an IUD that I swore I could feel and that made it hard to sit, the hormone suppression—with the express intention of getting the fuck back to work. I was a yo-yo bouncing in one direction, a dog trained to sniff out one target, a very strong magnet.

At the Endometriosis Ball, I had been introduced to Dr. Tamer Seckin, a surgeon known for working on the cutting edge of endometriosis research. Despite the black-tie setting, he immediately asked about my treatment plan. I had an ablation surgery, I explained. A cyst removed and another ablation. Three courses of hormone-suppressing medication.

“That drug,” he said in his thick Turkish accent. “A killer of the feminine soul.”

Ablation, he explained, was no longer the preferred method for removing endo. Instead of removing the lesions entirely—and therefore, the inflammatory tissue—it simply created new scar tissue. Excision, done not with a robot head but a skilled hand, was the way.

A month into shooting season six, I was shooting a simple scene that required nothing of me but that I rise from a couch and head for a bed. Between the two stops, no less than six feet apart, I collapsed—avoiding the floor only when our longtime assistant director swooped in to catch me, his past as a high school sports star on full display. I was sent home to rest for the afternoon, but found myself unable to rise again, and so I called Dr. Seckin at his office.

A fellow Brooklyn Heights resident, he asked that I meet him on a bench on the Promenade. It felt like a spy thriller, meeting at the dead drop location, and he said, “I will only operate if you tell me this is what you want and need.”

“I can’t live like this,” I told him. “Please help me.” I wasn’t sure how hard I had to push, how much I had to prove. But by that night, he had me safely ensconced in a room at Lenox Hill—the one where they filmed Charlotte after she delivered her baby on Sex and the City, the hospital’s VIP patient coordinator cheerily told me. It was the first of many trips I would take there as “Ruth Stein.”

That night, I slept peacefully—the promise of imminent help, of a moment of rest, of IV narcotics delivered every four hours, coloring everything rosy. Jack and his sister decorated the room with a hopeful felt flag with my name on it and a garland of paper roses, and left me to sleep. The next morning at five a.m. , I was wheeled down to the operating room, where Dr. Seckin pressed his hand in mine and said, “I will try.”

When I woke up from surgery, Jack was standing by the gurney, along with my parents and Jenni. They told me I’d done so well, been so brave—then hung back while Jack followed as they wheeled me to the recovery bay.

It was an understatement to say that we hadn’t been connecting. I was unable to have sex, unable to engage in playful banter, and work—and Jenni—seemed to be the only places I could invest real time and care, the little bit that I had to give. On the other hand, his career was flourishing, and he was rarely home, hadn’t been there to witness the pain, only to send the occasional blandly reassuring text. I could sense that he felt sure that my illness was as much a matter of refusing to try as anything else, that perhaps he thought I’d found a loophole for doing exactly what I wanted to anyway—hide in bed, away from the needs and thoughts and requirements of the outside world.

“It takes two people,” my father had warned me again and again. “And you have to make choices that bring you together, not keep you apart. If no one’s willing to make those choices…”

“Did they find anything?” I asked Jack, once we were safely behind a curtain in the recovery bay. That’s what I always asked when it was done. It never occurred to me to be afraid of what they would find—only what they wouldn’t. Was it possible that after all these months of pain, interruption, and desperation, they’d say, “We split her open and actually, it looks just like a Lisa Frank cartoon in there! It’s all unicorns and roses! SHE. IS. A. LIAR.”

“Yeah,” he said, removing his glasses as his face crumpled. “The doctor removed thirty-seven lesions. From your bladder, your liver, your abdominal wall, your spine. He said he doesn’t know how you’ve even been…walking.” He bent over me then—my puffy blue surgical cap still on, foggy from propofol, swaddled in heated blankets—and he wept. Long, heaving sobs. Maybe it was the relief that comes from someone you love waking up after anesthesia. Maybe it was a flood of empathy. But in his cries, what I heard was, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Sorry, I thought, that he hadn’t taken me more seriously. The doctor’s words had alerted him to the irrefutable truth of my pain, and he couldn’t bear having ignored it.

But what I hear now, ten years later, is: “I’m so sorry you have to live with this. And I’m so sorry that I can’t.”

Getting sick is not that different than getting more famous. 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. If you’ve publicly fucked up before, you have to be careful all the time not to reignite a dormant story, to have past mistakes create future discomfort.

And just as my body seemed to ooze—tears, blood—so did my mind seem to be uncontrollable and bilious. I was having more trouble than ever identifying who I was meant to be—what to weigh in on, where I was needed—and also identifying what ailed me.

Getting sicker, coupled with my complete inability to handle celebrity with the focus and control that so many others seemed capable of, only made me feel I had more to prove. Yes, to the public, but especially to Jenni, who I felt had invested a significant portion of her adult life in me—months away from her children in order to be there to cheer me through the making of the show. Whenever I faltered publicly, it was this investment I thought about—when would she consider it a failed project, or tire of me altogether? I had already been working as if a fiery dragon were chasing me—running, running, toward what, I could not say. But I began to add projects, as many as could fit—Jenni joked I would take a job at the post office if they were hiring.

It was after season five that Jenni and I started Lenny Letter. A hybrid of our names, a paean to best-friendship, it was a newsletter with a bubbly feminist voice. Part Lilith Fair, part Girlboss, it was written from the perspective of two relatable BFFs from different generations who do it all, and do it together. Thanks to some high-profile early contributions from people like Alicia Keys, Kesha, and Jennifer Lawrence, we very quickly became a full-fledged business, one that required a near-constant output of material (and many more opportunities to feed a hungry, angry Internet).

Jenni placed her ex-husband in charge of the business side of things. As Jenni’s and my business interests aligned more and more, we ceased to have our own “teams.” We had started working with the same lawyer, the same agent, the same business manager, and the same “doctor” with whom Gwyneth Paltrow had coined the term conscious uncoupling.

Our Lenny Letter CEO told us what was required of us, and it was in support of the newsletter that I found myself one afternoon at the Hearst Media advertiser’s conference in an understated button-down (a genre of garment that is, almost certainly, wrong for me). It was a show-and-tell for potential advertisers, giving a sense of the kind of relationships “Hearst talent” had formed with corporations. I was speaking in collaboration with General Electric—something about feminism and scientific progress, which is basically an unused joke from 30 Rock.

Have you ever met Oprah? I haven’t. Well, I could have, at the Hearst Media advertiser’s conference—but I was throwing up for that entire day. Why was I throwing up? It’s hard to say—I’d like to blame food poisoning, extreme physical pain, or even medication misuse. But the likely truth is that I was throwing up because I didn’t, in fact, want to meet Oprah. Not right then. And that’s something I will have to live with until the day I die, and maybe even after, depending on what you believe.

Why was I meeting Oprah? Well, that wasn’t totally clear. A few years earlier, while doing publicity for my book, I had been invited to join her on the couch for Super Soul Sunday, an invitation that I kept in my pocket like a spare hundred-dollar bill, a little sign of value I could hold and touch, until it was revoked three weeks later “for scheduling reasons.” Even after Oprah “fell through,” I still walked around with a spring in my step—I may not have been a person who met Oprah, but I was a person who almost met Oprah, and that was good enough for me.

And that day, at the Hearst Media advertiser’s conference, we were set to share a stage with the lady herself.

We had joined forces with Hearst Media—the very publishers of O, The Oprah Magazine —to “expand our offerings” and “scale the vision” of our newsletter. What did any of this mean? Fuck if I know: When I had proposed the newsletter, I had thought of it as a place to recommend nightgowns and interview eccentric older women who had chosen to spend their final years in the English countryside breeding Maine Coon cats. I wanted to publish fiction and ornate illustrations, like a Gertrude Stein salon in digital space. Now the pressure was on to “stand for something” and, even more, to help recoup their investment in us. It was a requirement I had squarely resisted since college, when my first Facebook group was called “Political Correctness is Totally Gay.”

But the thing about standing for something? It’s very tempting, because it makes you feel important. And, as someone who has quit highly addictive drugs, I can tell you: Feeling important is even harder to kick. And that’s why, when Hearst Media told us that we had the future of feminism in the palms of our collective hands if we could only get Lenny readers to click on more of our integrated General Electric marketing, I believed them.

And this is how I ended up at Hearst’s Advertising Week presentation in business casual with a “twist,” my hair askew. But I barely made it on and off the stage. Instead, as I lay across the cool marble floor in a sleek corporate bathroom, wondering if and when I’d be able to get up again, a publicist ran in announcing, “Let’s grab Oprah! She’s about to leave, and she would love to say hi.”

“I can’t,” I gurgled and retched. Jenni was comforting me from behind, a hand on my back, then antsy, then gone. I lay there until I heard the crowd thin and the people come to collect the banquet tables and folding chairs. A lot crossed my mind during those hours: What the fuck did I think I was doing? Why did the modern world ask that every artist be a businessperson and every woman be a mogul? What would it take for me to be happy? What did I imagine when I imagined safety? What did it mean that I didn’t know anymore?

But did I regret not meeting Oprah? Not for a second. Because you know what’s worse than not meeting Oprah? Faking it for Oprah. I would never fucking dare.

Lenny never scaled. In fact, we barely broke even. Other newsletters wanted it more, other female founders did what had to be done, and I started spending more and more time in bed, writing fan fiction about Brittany Murphy’s death and chatting on the phone with strangers—women I met online whose chronic illness also defined their lives. In a project we planned to turn into a Lenny series, I interviewed them, dozens of them—about how they spent their days, their medical neglect and trauma, the things they needed and the things they didn’t get. I still have all these interviews, recordings labeled tidily in a folder, but I never wrote the articles.

I wasn’t interviewing them to “scale” my media company.

I was interviewing them to survive.