Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 12

Hostage Situation

If I’m asked to remember the year after Girls ended, I can recall scenes, major characters, maybe some snippets of dialogue—but the plot evades me. It’s only now, almost a decade later, that I understand the thematic thrust—the things that had been painful but suppressed, uncomfortable but tightly managed, were suddenly overpowering me. I had been sure that the show ending was what would finally allow me to heal. Healing, at that point, meant that I would no longer be existing in conflict with my reality—my primary relationships ( Jack and Jenni), my combative dynamic with my own public avatar, the constant tug-of-war with my body. I would, I thought, use the time and space to bring all of this to heel, like a traumatized pit bull with a tendency to pull on its leash. But without the superstructure of the show, I had time—all sorts of time—and no new skills, only fewer distractions.

I know I hit the ground running just a day or so after Girls wrapped, campaigning for Hillary Clinton in more American states than I’d ever been to in my life. (And I know now, I wish I’d just posted a Bernie sign in my window instead.)

I know that the Internet had become, once and for all, a place where I was absolutely guaranteed to find pages and pages daily of abjectly cruel messages, things the meanest teenager wouldn’t even say to the most deserving mother. But I seemed unable not to open a portal to it every day, hoping—like a child who had heard a fairy tale and began to believe in magic beans—that something might have changed overnight. It seems to me, looking back, that I thought the cure to such widespread disdain—some of it personal, some of it political, a lot of the result of toxicity breeding only more toxicity—was not to show less of myself, but to show more, as if revealing myself down to the guts would allow for some kind of renewed understanding. I was, in hindsight, just begging—and what are we humans better at than averting our eyes from a beggar?

I know that once Trump was elected, I continued to fight as if it were a job I’d been assigned, as if I were some kind of elected general in a feminist military. No matter that the majority of this fighting happened on Instagram in the form of disjointed prose poetry about abstract ideas of autonomy, or occasionally, in a pussy hat. I know that people who loved me asked me why I couldn’t seem to lay the sword down, and that I didn’t have a very good answer, that I often spoke in full paragraphs that employed the cadence of activism but, were someone to really attempt to investigate, amounted to a weak mewl of “justice for me.”

I know that we promoted the final season and, unsure how to dress my emaciated, foreign body, I took my cues from pop stars and anime characters. In the photos from this time, my eye shadow is shades of hot pink, yellow, baby blue; my skirts are short and my heels are high; my eyes are hollow, and I’d stopped trying to greet anyone with a smile, sure that any display of pleasure would simply be used as the lead photograph under a headline that managed to twist the expression into something vaguely demented, menacing.

I know I fainted at the Met Gala after another surgery and had to find my way out of the museum through its bowels. A security guard met me at the emergency room to collect my jewelry. Jack didn’t come home, because he was in the studio with Pink, and anyway, he had told me it was too soon, and the implication was that if I wasn’t going to listen to him, then he didn’t have to disrupt his life to handle the consequences. He wasn’t wrong, insofar as there was right and there was wrong, and I tended to assume that I was wrong anyway. Leaving the hospital a few days after the ball, my father carrying my gown in a massive trash bag, I saw my own face on the lobby television with a chyron below it, reading: “Lena Dunham Rushed to the Hospital From 2017 Met Gala.” My father looked at it, looked at me, and didn’t say anything except, “Well, that happened.”

I know I wasn’t really eating, except white rolls with thick slabs of butter from the bodega downstairs and bottles of green tea, which don’t count as food because they’re a beverage. I know I weighed what I weighed in seventh grade.

I know that after the Met Gala collapse, I stopped leaving the house, just in time for the summer.

Unsure what was left to do, I announced I was taking a “break,” with the gravitas of someone holding public office, when all I’d really been doing was writing stilted short stories and promoting the conclusion of the show. A break could have meant a moment to touch down with my life—cook healthful meals, sit on the dock of a lake and let the sun warm my limbs, spend time with friends in a way the show hadn’t allowed. But instead, I stopped dead in my tracks.

Someone else walked my dogs. Someone else did my laundry. My boyfriend was locked in the back room with the teen pop star, whose needs seemed as massive and complex as my own, and who called me “Aunt Lena” when I hobbled into the kitchen with my walker to grab another bottle of green tea.

One day I returned home from a bone density test to find her sprawled across our sectional couch, weeping into Jack’s lap as he told her that “your teens are for experimenting” in a tone so comforting, it almost brought tears to my eyes. It had been so long since he’d spoken to me with that kind of expansive generosity.

One night, as he was sitting in the bathtub brushing his teeth, I suggested that perhaps their closeness was striking an odd note, that she wanted something from him that he couldn’t give—or maybe it was just the way that they received my presence, like a ghost, like two fifth-grade bullies pretending not to notice the object of their scorn: “Did you hear something?” “No, nothing.”

Jack turned to me, curled like a kidney bean in the water I’d been draining and replenishing for hours, and said, “You’re just mad because she doesn’t want to be your friend.” And he was right.

People whose relationships are failing have a few options—if they’re not ready to call it, they can either have a baby or redecorate. When I suggested the first—after all, I’d been told that time could be running down on my biological clock—Jack explained the myriad of things that would have to change before he would consider having a child with me. We started therapy, where he looked at our shrink and said, “I can’t imagine us breaking up, but it’s also very hard to imagine being with her forever,” and I nodded agreeably, having told myself before the session that whatever he said, I would respond with a curiosity and openness that reminded him just how angelic he had found me in the first few years of our relationship, how accepting and exceptional.

“Does this resonate for you, Lena?” the therapist asked. Jack and I were on opposite sides of her brown velvet couch, framed by massive wooden sculptures of primitive men and women with crudely carved erections and high, fertile bosoms.

“Everything he says is right,” I said, my voice as high as Shirley Temple’s.

So, with baby making out for now, we decided we would redecorate. I was just about strong enough to supervise it, and the dining table became HQ, a home for endless paint chips and swatches of brocade, brochures for blackout shades and auction catalogs. All day, I buzzed in people who measured corners and windowsills, bed frames and bathtubs.

Jack and I still technically shared a bed, but we never saw each other. He was locked in a literally soundproofed room, and I was trapped in a figuratively soundproofed one. We had fought the whole winter, the kinds of fights that keep you up all night. (“You never let me sleep!” I shrieked one night, in child’s pose, weeping into the fitted sheet.) He stormed to the kitchen. I grabbed his leg. He told me I was hard work to love, a job that no one else would ever want. I punched the wall, then yelled at him because it hurt. He thought I was avoiding his family, and I thought I had given myself over to them completely, erasing massive facets of my personality (hating the beach, hating organized fun, needing at least six hours a day of quiet) to make it work. At this point, his sister had moved into our guest room while her apartment was being repainted and never left. When I brought out a box and asked her to please fill it with the personal detritus she’d left in the common areas, he accused me of creating a hostile environment. My parents, on the other hand, had given up on the idea of spending time with us after Jack had announced, the previous Christmas, that he was physically allergic to something in their home that could not be identified but caused alarming sinus pressure. He spent a lot of time telling me about the kind of person I was, and it wasn’t the good kind.

Looking back, it’s hard to understand why two people with seemingly endless options, financial freedom, and almost nothing that they still enjoyed doing together besides talking shit about the occasional third party would not simply break up. We were acting like we had six school-aged children we were in danger of losing custody of should we end the relationship. But one of the last things we still shared was the sense that our ability to keep the relationship going was directly proportional to our inherent goodness. Jack had always placed a heavy premium on the idea of being a good guy. He held on to his high school friends. He made a big deal out of birthdays and anniversaries. He did charity and responded to messages from fans. These were things that good guys did. Things good guys did not do? Breaking up with their long-term girlfriend as her health devolved with seemingly no help in sight.

I, meanwhile, had decided early on that retaining the love of a good guy was the ultimate sign that I was not the toxic, detestable creature that huge swaths of the Internet saw me as. They could say what they wanted, but did they have a playful, witty, desirable life partner who stood by them through thick and thin? Fuck Golden Globes, or talk show appearances, or people writing “I DON’T CARE WHAT ANYONE SAYS, I RIDE FOR YOU QUEEN.” Jack’s love was the ultimate sign of my worth.

This isn’t to say that we didn’t love each other. It’s taken years for me to be able to tap back into the easy rapport we shared, the sense of being known without having to say very much, the sweetness we could show each other, even—and maybe especially—after the biggest battles. It says a lot that during the last few years of our relationship, as life became harder and harder for both of us, it didn’t once occur to me—until the moment it finally happened—that either of us would divest from this union. It seemed that the biggest thing we now had in common was the shared sense that neither of us deserved to be happy.

But with summer 2017, as I took to bed and stopped fighting, came a reprieve. We were tired, and so we silently agreed to a truce while the weather was nice.

After the last surgery, I had never quite gotten my normal gait back, and there was the walker my assistant had obediently purchased from CVS, standing sentinel over our bed. Embarrassed by it, I used it as a clothing rack, with bikini tops purchased in fits of fantasy hanging off its bars like wilted roses. I didn’t use my office anymore. Instead, I’d turned it into a habitat for a pair of hedgehogs I purchased off Craigslist from a man who showed up at our apartment with a backpack full of them. I picked a big one and a little one, Margaret and Elizabeth, but soon it became clear that Margaret bit and Elizabeth only hid, and so I renamed them—Good One and Bad One.

I became obsessed with their health and mood, trolling an online board for “hedgie lovers.” Did they make eye contact? Were their spines drooping? Why wouldn’t they just relax in the polar fleece pouch I had purchased for them, like the hedgehogs I saw in videos from Japan, who loved to take bubble baths?

Every night, one of us would somberly say, “It’s time to tuck the hogs in” and troop back to their cage, where I’d reach beneath the heat lamp for the resistant one and hold it close to my face. Jack would cradle the other in his shirt with the rapt smile he displayed in pictures of himself as a toddler. In those moments, my chest ached with love for him, and I thought about the way he would someday cradle a child, if only I could show him I was worth having one with.

What else did we do that summer? I think we crate-trained our poodles. I know I dyed my hair red, then shaved it, but I’m not certain how or where either happened. We definitely went to a crystal store in Bushwick, where I purchased a crownlike headband of purple quartz and jade eggs to secretly place beneath our bed and sofa to promote sexual unity that never happened. Occasionally, one of the eggs would roll into public view and I’d run after it, shyly shoving it back where I’d hidden it in the first place.

And I remember the summer’s smell. The house was full of potions and lotions, organic beauty products that promised not to disrupt my endocrine system, cleaning solution made only with vinegar and oranges, a candle that simply said Relax . I smeared myself in tinctures and tonics and slipped between the sheets to read novels about women in pain.

There was a very specific kind of light—pale pink light cast across the salmon bedroom from the gold chandelier with red glass beads dripping from it, the start and end of the redecoration job that I had not—in the end—had the energy and drive to pull off. I padded to and from the window, tried to eat an avocado, and spent hours on the phone with people I wasn’t close to.

Occasionally, someone would interrupt—Jack’s mother, my father, our housekeeper, dropping off a cup of tea or asking where the iron was kept. Rarely Jack. Never Jack.

We didn’t fight, but we only shared the essentials, usually over text message.

“Your food is here,” or “I’m too tired for dinner just fend for yourself,” or “I love you. I just wanted you to know I love you so much and I’m so grateful.”

Once, he left his phone by the bed. Unlike mine, it lit up with texts—one after the other after the other. I was too scared to look at the names.