Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 11

Goodbye Tour

It was season six, and we were scrambling to get ten episodes of what we hoped would be historically great content in the can. It was one of those extra hot New York summers that always smells vaguely like old sushi, and we couldn’t seem to shake disaster—bad weather, locations catching fire overnight, actors losing their voices or their minds. Plus, it seemed my body—arguably the most essential body to the show’s success—had finally come apart at the seams. I was a worn teddy bear, holding on for years until finally, one day, all the stuffing comes pouring out. Somehow, no matter how hard life had gotten, making the show itself had always had a lightness, a joy. Now it was like a nightmare vacation, the kind that starts with food poisoning and ends with someone in jail framed for drug trafficking.

For five seasons, I had sustained myself on green tea, a constantly changing diet (“What aren’t you eating this week?” my aunt would ask), and high-grade adrenaline. But none of these substances seemed to do their jobs anymore. I walked hunched over, protecting my belly like a wounded animal. Pain tugged at my face, creating a perma-frown. My hair fell out in patches. The break in filming to have surgery from Dr. Seckin had been meant to solve all of this, but every good effect was negated by the cost of returning to work four days later.

Klonopin had been in my life, on and off, for years, like a lover I wasn’t particularly attached to, could take or leave. It had gotten me through some rough episodes, but the moment I stopped needing it, I would dispense with it, disliking the dulling effect it had on my emotions and creativity. But a rotating cocktail of pharmaceuticals had become the newest part of the care and feeding of Lena, a cure-all, it seemed: for my pain, for the pressure, and perhaps—because they seemed to make me lighter, more tolerable—for the growing divide between how Jenni and I felt about our lives and each other.

Jenni’s stress was real. We had insurance to haggle with, a crew to pay even on the days I couldn’t show up. The shoot couldn’t just grind to a halt because my ability to handle it had. And so, even with puckered blue holes in my stomach, there I was throwing myself headfirst into a sex scene or so. Twenty-three-year-old me thought it would be cool to create a television character who embraced her imperfect body. Thirty-year-old me was trapped in hers.

The cursed season continued when, three weeks after my surgery, I shattered my right elbow on set. How did I shatter my right elbow, you ask? I would love to say I was doing my own stunts or fighting off a wandering pussy-grabber. But in fact, Adam Driver was having a lightsaber fight with a nine-year-old boy, using a curtain rod in the hardware store we were filming at and, scurrying around him in an attempt not to be struck—let’s be honest, I always scurried around him whether he was holding a saber or not—I tripped on my flip-flop and went flying, landing hard on my wrist. I had lost bone density from the extended courses of hormone blockers, and the reverberation from the fall shattered my elbow. My prop pregnant belly was the only thing that saved my face from hitting the floor. It’s likely the only time in history that falling on a pregnant stomach has ever been good for anyone.

An ambulance took me to the ER. It was the hottest day of the summer, and their X-ray machine had somehow jammed. I waited another hour for a second X-ray, but they said that nobody would be able to read it until nine p.m. Waiting for the results would mean losing another day, and we had already lost at least eight, and so it was suggested that we wrap the elbow and I return to work—I was, at this point, convinced it was just “jammed.” And so I did, my arm throbbing. That night, Adam and I filmed our last scene together as Hannah and Adam—a goodbye in a Brooklyn diner over split pea soup.

The crew seemed genuinely moved by the tears shed. In fact, I sort of amazed myself by what I was able to produce, especially since Adam and I had barely spoken in three years, for reasons I could not explain and didn’t really want to analyze. I can only thank my swollen arm, hanging limply under the table, for the realistic portrayal of leaving your first love. Who knows? Maybe I was crying for the show, my actual first love. All I know is that between takes, we kept crying, eyes locked. It felt, for just a moment, like he was saying sorry. Maybe I was, too—for never knowing how to manage him, what he needed, how to avoid making his face contort with frustration and rage.

As I sat there, eyes locked with Adam’s and weeping, one of our camera operators whispered to me, “Lena, I’m looking at that elbow—it’s broken, babe.”

He was right. We got the call from the ER at one a.m. to confirm, by which point the elbow had swelled to the size of a grapefruit, and the next morning, a very sexy sports medicine doctor had to extract excess blood and pus with a needle, then outfit me with a sling that I wore whenever I wasn’t onscreen. I stopped washing my hair for the rest of the summer and just let the women in the hair and makeup trailer do it for me.

A week later, just as set finally began to stabilize, my mother called to let me know that my grandmother—my tiny, judgmental, ninety-six-year-old Jewish grandmother—was hovering near death. This wasn’t the first time that the alarm had been sounded for Dorothy Simmons, but I was willing to take it seriously when I received an image of her with her dentures out, something her overwhelming vanity would never allow if she had an ounce of fight left in her. I informed the producers that yet again, I was going to have to leave set. I didn’t know for how long. Until my grandma died. And Simmons women don’t love doing things on schedule. At this point, empathy was no longer on offer. It felt more like a collective sigh, as if I’d announced that the dog ate my homework.

My mother, her sisters, my cousins, and I all assembled in the Battery Park apartment we had rented for my grandmother’s golden years. (I had rented it, actually, after a family dispute about cash flow, during which Jack had admonished me, “What the fuck are you doing? You can’t spend that kind of money. You’re not a rapper.”)

The apartment was small but elegant, with massive windows facing the Hudson River. It was basically a fish tank in which to keep a very spoiled anorexic and a miniaturized version of the Great Neck life she knew—her bedroom set, her china, her treadmill—with a chic view, a restaurant downstairs, and blowouts on call. My grandmother was a woman with both highly specific taste and an absence of any clear needs. If something looked and smelled upscale enough, she didn’t bother to poke around or ask for more. We had tried an old-age home, but she deemed the amenities trash and the company pathetic.

My grandmother was a born-and-bred, live-free-or-die anorexic. It almost couldn’t be called an eating disorder, because there was never any other order to things. From the moment she was born, she had “a weak stomach,” and the lives of everyone around her—from her doting six-four husband to her three naturally pear-shaped daughters—was figuring out when, how, and if Dottie would consume food. She actually called it “taking” food. As in “I took a little salami,” or “I took some shrimp.” When she liked it, she’d nod and smile, and everyone nodded and smiled with her, like she was a dog that had learned a neat trick.

I was always hungry in her house, even though the fridge was full. There was never anything I wanted. It was the same with her hugs. And her conversation. Her accent—that thick Long Island brogue—and her red-framed glasses like Sally Jessy Raphael’s, and her bleached biscuit of hair, and her tiny bird bones were all that I truly knew of her. Once, in college, I brought a video camera to her house to tape her discussing her most moving recollections. All I learned was that her mother had a pet monkey as a child.

I knew that the part of my mother that seemed to cave in on herself a bit every time she had to put on a swimsuit was her mother speaking from within her. And I knew the part of my mother that pinched her own fat in the mirror, and got me gym memberships I didn’t ask for, and made games out of us going on diets together as if a sweet potato were a bonding activity—that was her mother, too.

So when it came time for my grandmother to die, I honestly didn’t know what to feel except some relief that my arm could sit in its sling for longer than forty-five minutes without someone knocking on my trailer door and saying, “Ready, Miss D.” It hurt so fucking much, taking it in and out of the sling all day, trying to smile and give notes to cast and crew and engage people. It mattered to me to be bright, to be cheerful and kind. It mattered to me to lead with dignity. It mattered so much that I refused a cast.

So immediately upon entering my grandmother’s apartment, I popped three Percocet, and when my Aunt Bonnie asked who wanted a chance to spend some alone time with grandma in the bedroom, I raised my one good hand.

Dusk was just falling over downtown Manhattan. Dorothy Trussell Simmons—all seventy-three remaining pounds of her—was propped up in a hospital bed, her toothless jaw hanging slack. She wore silk pajamas, her dime-thick wrists curled in on themselves. I couldn’t help but imagine how pleased she might be with her own current dimensions.

“Hello, Grandma,” I cooed. I touched her face, tentatively at first and then with gusto, the way I had as a little girl. The skin was still papery and soft, as I remembered it. “Hello, Grandma. Hello, beautiful.”

There was another bed—her real bed, her life bed—beside the hospital bed, and I lay down, close enough so that I could curl my body against hers and take her cooling hand in mine. The high from the pills was just starting to hit, and it made the night falling—a normal occurrence and one I ignored daily—take on a symbolic magic. Transitions. Exits. Patterns. The shiny, curved buildings of this soulless and ahistoric neighborhood reflected the searing orange sun as it disappeared for the night, replaced with the flickering blue of a thousand flat-screen HDTVs. I pet my grandma’s hand. I whispered secrets to her. I texted a few people to let them know how heavy her breath sounded, the way it rattled in the tight cage of her chest. I hadn’t yet learned that if you don’t share what’s happening as it’s happening, it can still be happening.

I thought she would die there with me then. Somewhere in my brain, so scrambled that I now possessed a logic all my own, I believed that she would feel my presence as her unspoken favorite and let herself go. “It’s all right, Grandma,” I said. “You’re safe. You can go to Grandpa. We love you. We’re here.”

But she didn’t die that night. Or the next morning. Or the next night. We spent three days in that apartment, in a kind of vigil turned sleepover party. My cousin Jenna and I occupied the bed next to her, braiding and unbraiding each other’s hair, talking about diets and sex and money and our mothers’ poor communication skills.

And in the living room, my mother and her sisters put Post-its on objects, claiming them or pledging them to Goodwill. They ate candy corn from a bulk foods store and relived ancient arguments and got their Long Island accents back in manic bursts. Sometimes their eyes glistened with tears as they talked robotically about logistics, but they never cried.

Finally, Aunt Bonnie announced it was time to increase the morphine. “We’re going to take turns giving it to her, girls, so we can all be involved.”

My mother stared at her mother. She tried to think of something to do. A few years earlier, during another death scare, she had encouraged me to tell my grandmother that Jack and I were engaged. I had resisted then, as my mother implored, “She wants to know you’re safe; a little white lie won’t hurt anyone.” (They had told her worse ones in the last five years, sure that she would keel over at the slightest bit of bad news—like that her dog Maggie was still alive with her ex-housekeeper Ruth in Queens, or that her grandson wasn’t dead of an overdose, but rather was “traveling.”)

But now, I relented.

“Grandma,” I offered. “Remember Jack? We’re getting married, just like I told you.”

He FaceTimed in from the recording studio in our apartment, where he was ensconced with a teen pop star I was too oblivious to be jealous of, smiling good-naturedly, saying, “It’s true, Dottie. I’ll take good care of her.”

I moved the diamond ring he had given me to my left hand. After all, it looked like an engagement ring and smelled like an engagement ring but for many, many reasons was not an engagement ring.

And, ladles and gentlebeans, she opened her eyes. She looked at me. And she said, clear as her voice on my childhood answering machine asking us to please pick up the phone I know you’re home, “Is that a diamond?”

Those were Dorothy Simmons’s last words.

She was buried the following Tuesday, next to her husband of sixty years, in a beautiful plot in Forest Hills, Queens. I wore my sling at the funeral and only got out of the car to say my eulogy because it was so hot, then drove back to set to find that yet another location was on fire. The smoke was thick and, as it mixed with the unavoidable scent of fish and the painkillers in my empty stomach, I vomited in a trash can while Adam read the revised lines for our upcoming scene, pretending not to notice.

I was mending as best I could, though I would call my father every morning and compare the experience of getting through the season to army-crawling in mud on my stomach, unsure of the distance to safety.

“You’re almost there, kid,” he’d say, but he didn’t sound so sure.

But as we neared the end of episode eight of a ten-episode season, the pain in my gut returned, different now. Describing the vicissitudes of pain is an exhausting exercise—what makes each pain unique and why. It makes you feel crazy to look that deep inside yourself, like you’ve gone so far inward, you might never emerge. But you know it when you feel it, and while that old pain was diffuse and granular, like infinite shards of glass scattered inside me, this was more ominous, like a balloon slowly expanding in my gut, pressing everything else out of its way. All I could do was rock back and forth in the bathtub, trying to stay out of the way of Jack and the young singer.

I went back to my Dr. Seckin, and he identified a large hemorrhagic cyst, which he suggested we measure daily as it threatened to burst. More painkillers. More bed rest. More missed work. In order to grant the time needed and cover the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would take to put the crew on pause, to rebook the locations, the show’s insurance company required that I see an “unbiased” doctor—someone who was not my primary physician—to confirm the diagnosis. I didn’t understand, and still don’t, why my own doctor’s ultrasound and notes were not enough, but this is what I was told, and I wanted to be a good girl. That’s the crux of it: Through it all, I always wanted to be a good girl.

Our producer Ilene, that wonderful broad with the can-do of Bob the Builder and the attitude of Carmela Soprano, accompanied me to my appointment in Midtown. I’ll always remember what I was wearing, because I loved it so much until that day: a green linen apron dress with lacquered buttons that had been sent to me as a gift by a young Canadian designer, made specifically to my measurements. It fit me like a glove, and I paired it with some baby blue suede clogs and a choker of cheery white lace daisies. I wore round black sunglasses that said Hollywood on the frame.

The doctor rushed into the exam room where Ilene and I were waiting—he was nondescript, approaching middle age. Through the funhouse mirror of trauma, he sounded a bit like Elmo, but I know that’s not true. He told me he was late because he was attending to a fibroid in a woman “so fat that she didn’t even realize that she had a mass the size of a goddamned watermelon inside of her.” I didn’t know how he wanted me to react.

He asked me about my illness history. He told me that everything I’d tried should have worked by now. He told me things I knew to be false about my own disease, but I smiled and nodded because I needed to get back to bed, and he was the only person who could approve that. Then he told me that he had no ultrasound machine that day—it was in another office for the afternoon—and so he would have to feel for the cyst by hand.

What happens next can be remembered only in pieces, the way that trauma is perceived as thumbnail images rather than complete files. What I remember is one, then two, then three fingers probing me, clawing deeper and deeper, and then a pain so sharp that my legs shook like a current was being run through them. “Ow,” I whispered. Then louder. “Ow.” It’s all I could say, all I could think. How humiliating.

Irritated, he said, “I have to find this so you can get what you want, now don’t I? So let’s shush up.”

A single tear rolled down my cheek—if I’d been on camera, it would have been perfection. But I wasn’t, which also meant I would never be able to truly impress upon anyone else the magnitude of what had happened.

“Please stop,” I begged. “Please, please stop.”

He didn’t stop, even when I begged. He only stopped when he was finished.

And when he did, it was like he’d snapped out of a trance. He nodded—it was clear, I suppose, from my response that something was wrong. Nobody is that good an actor.

I stared down at my clogs in the stirrups, the ones I would never be able to wear again.

He signed off on my insurance days.

By the time I got home, I knew something was very wrong. I called Jack home from a dinner out because I couldn’t get out of the tub on my own. He took me to the hospital, where they confirmed my cyst had burst, and my abdomen was filling with blood.

Nobody had to tell me it had been ruptured by the exam. I knew that’s what had happened. I had felt it. I only told my surgeon. He got angry, but he got angry the way a director would get angry if a producer fucked with their film cut. It was an outcome that he was meant to be controlling, a problem that he was meant to be solving, a body that he was meant to be fixing.

I was immediately placed on a drip of IV Dilaudid. Anyone who tells you they don’t enjoy a drip of IV Dilaudid is either a saint or a fucking liar, because it’s basically just heroin that a nice lady gives you, sanitary and on a schedule. I had experienced it before, but in short bursts, never more than a day at a time after surgery. But this surgery proved more complex—it involved sewing my ovaries to my upper abdominal wall with two small stitches, so that they would not become adhered by the blood that remained—and I was kept in the hospital for almost a week.

I was high as a kite, but I was also mounting a quiet but powerful trauma response. Every day, the producers checked in to see when I’d be ready to return to work. I sat, stoned and staring at my blinking computer screen. The season finale was due. I wrote scenes that made no sense. Shoshanna went to a hippie commune. Hannah got lost on a hike. Adam found an orange tabby kitten.

My mother encouraged me to put down my phone and computer—“You’re in no position!”—but I wanted to “be a soldier,” and so I answered the phone whenever it rang, explained the intricacies of where my ovaries were positioned and when they might be unstitched, when my catheter would be removed. But inside I was experiencing an unfamiliar emotion. I was used to self-doubt, a sense of wild alienation, suspecting that others may deeply misunderstand me, etc. But I am not used to anger.

And this was rage, wild and free. Who had allowed this man to touch me and, in the process, rip my fucking insides to shreds? Who in corporate had approved this ? And who the fuck had the gall to rush me back to work afterward?

When I was a little kid, my parents went to Paris and left me with a twentysomething named Flavia. That night, I awoke covered in fat red welts all over my butt, between my legs, and down to the insides of my ankles, mysterious in their origin, an early iteration of the mysteries that had always plagued me. She threw me in my stroller and rushed me to the nearest ER, and I can still remember being taken to a small room, laid on a table that felt impossibly high, while a male doctor with a ponytail and a short stumpy woman with dark hair on her face shined a light in my butt and vagina. This formed into a sense memory that, as a child, I called “hospital feeling” that I now recognize as disassociation. Hospital feeling could come on unbidden, and the only solution I knew of was to chug cold white grape juice.

“HOSPITAL FEELING!” I would yell, and my parents would respond like we were running drills—grabbing the sippy cup, filling it at record speed. After a few gulps, the feeling would dissipate—my chest would expand; the air in the room would settle.

There was another experience, one that was much harder to locate but was always hovering in the background—a year or so after the hives, we spent three months as a family in Italy so that my father could experiment with glassblowing. I have mostly tender memories of this time—three of us to a bed in a little palazzo, playing in the fountain and eating thick slices of focaccia—but there was something else. A babysitter my mother had hired. A green-tiled bathtub. Fingers inside me. One, maybe two. Maybe three.

I told my mother. She responded swiftly, as she always had—whether my middle school drama teacher was berating me or a friend was excluding me or I needed a new pair of jeans. The babysitter was fired. The story was over. She didn’t bring it up until I asked her, well into my teens, “Why do I feel like I was molested?”

She still wasn’t sure, she said.

All of this—the flashlight, the fingers, the green tiles—were coming back in sickly waves.

And now, even high on medical-grade narcotics—God’s best grape juice—I could not fight hospital feeling.

On the sixth day of my hospital stay, I got a rash. I was given Benadryl along with Dilaudid through my IV, and the combination proved too powerful—it broke whatever dam had been in place that—however compromised—had remained to hold back the floodgates of trauma and rage. After sending some random texts to people I barely knew (“Hello Jason! How are you feeling!? I am not so well!”), I called Jenni. Girls producer. Partner in work and crime. Best friend. I don’t remember what I said, except I was angry. I was angry like a lawyer, and I tried to explain that they weren’t just doing this to any woman—they were doing this to the woman who had given them everything. I felt righteous and powerful and small and feeble as I repeated, like a mantra:

“Nobody protected me. Nobody protected me then, and nobody’s protecting me now.”

There was a pause on the line. For a moment, I wondered if I’d won, if she would cry at the beauty of my bravery in the face of this invasion.

“This is too much for me,” she said slowly and clearly, as if for an audience of lip readers. “You should be talking to your mother or a therapist about this. Please take the weekend to figure out what you need. I have to be with my family.”

That day, I was told I could go home. They offered me painkillers to get me through the next few days and, sick to my core about how revolted Jenni must have been by me and my Dilaudid logic, I refused them. If I was going to be good for anyone next week, I’d better just take Advil and be that soldier.

At home, I curled up on the daybed in my office and slept for sixteen hours. I woke up well after dark, feeling like I’d been bucked off a horse at the rodeo. I also felt something else, something less sharp but more unsettling: like worms were crawling all over my body, like they’d laid eggs just under the surface of my skin. I dragged myself to the bathroom, chugged water from the tap, and lurched toward the living room. There, I found Jack watching Game of Thrones in a prone position.

I clung to him like a koala the whole weekend, looking at his face and crying, “I’ve made so many mistakes, and I just don’t want to lose you. Please, give me a chance to be better.”

“Lee. Lee, it’s okay.” He let me hold him like that for a long time. He’d never stayed so still for so long.

On the third day, I finally called the psychopharmacologist. I had spent two nights weeping into the hair on the back of Jack’s neck, wondering if I deserved to live, while my legs kicked unbidden. As I explained to her what had happened—the surgery, the medications, the flashbacks—she asked me, “Do you know anything about opiate withdrawal?”

The words made me feel dirty and secretive. Opiate withdrawal? Wasn’t that for St. Mark’s junkies, nodding out as they huddled on stoops in the rain, itching for a fix?

No, I told her, I didn’t know shit about shit. She suggested a milligram of Klonopin every six hours for the next week: “Then let’s check back in.”

That was another moment when things could have gone one way, and they went another. Instead of making it through three more shaky days, I signed up for an addiction that would carry me through almost two more confounding years. They never do tell you the side effects.

Within forty minutes, the Klonopin lifted it all like it was never there. I convincingly apologized to Jenni—bad mix of meds! Weird vibes! I was able to forget about the Elmo-voiced doctor and his fingers, and hospital feeling became a relic of childhood again. I never stopped to think that it was all a bit too easy, that these feelings might make a return visit at an even less-opportune moment.

One by one, we wrapped out cast members. First Zosia, then Alex, then Jemima, then Adam. On his last night, we rode home together in the same van—something we never did, despite the fact that he and his wife had moved directly across the street from Jack and me, so close that I could see them watching TV at night. In the car, he held my hand in silence. When we reached our block, he took me in his arms. I let him kiss my cheek, my forehead. “I know we’ve had our hard moments, that we are really different people. I’m sorry if the way I am ever wasn’t good for…the way you are.” I didn’t know how else to say it.

“It was just as it needed to be,” he said, sounding like a Jedi (maybe he’d picked up a few tricks). “I hope you know I’ll always love you.”

He got out of the van. I stayed, motionless, wondering if this moment, this reckoning, meant we had a different kind of future ahead of us. Who knows—maybe I’d write him new parts. We would tell new stories. We would laugh at the way things had been, and smile at the way they were now.

But I never heard from him again.

When it came time for the final day of the Girls shoot, everyone was a wreck. Over the last six years, we had formed a sort of makeshift family. And most of these people had been on enough jobs to know that they’re more like college than they are like marriage—you graduate and, while you may always share a deep fondness, you’ll never be that close again.

We’d done so much wrapping, so much clapping, and now it was just Allison and me—one last scene, alone in Upstate New York, handling the gorgeous pair of crying twins who portrayed Hannah’s son, Grover. (“Which is the nice one?” Allison asked, one of the only moments I’ve heard her be snarky in her entire thank-you-note-writing life.)

After Allison finished, she stayed for my final scene—a pantsless walk home, in the dark. She went out like she came in: naked from the waist down.

When we finished, Allison was standing behind the camera, weeping. She looked so beautiful and so young, like she had the day I met her—before the designer separates, or the brand deals, or the Oscar de la Renta wedding dress with “3D organza flowers.” Just a kid. I hugged her, wept into her hair, and slipped into my car before anyone else could find me.