Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 17

The Return

I left the Center for Mind Control, as my father called it, on a Friday, two days before I turned thirty-two. My parents were in Jamaica, on what they described as a “much-needed” vacation, so a car service picked me up. At rehab, I was only able to email and make calls from a very in-demand landline, so on the drive home, my texts began to come through—I shut my eyes as the “where you been?” messages popped up—more than I could handle, but fewer than I thought there would be. I opened our family chain—the only one I could handle—to find message after message from my mother, all photos of my father—standing on the beach in long sleeves and pants, staring dourly out at the water, or sitting in front of a giant plate of fried conch, clearly unmoved. I knew that he couldn’t be present where he was because I was where I was. That was the link—if I wasn’t safe in my body, he couldn’t be in his. “How handsome is this man?” my mother texted the family thread, followed by a series of ocean-themed emojis. Later (“now that you’re stable”), my mother would admit that they had coincidentally found themselves staying at the same resort as Jack and his new girlfriend, a place we’d always talked about visiting with both of our families. “And the worst part is, they got the bungalow I was promised,” she said. After they left, my mother secured an upgrade to their room where, my father told me with some measure of pride, “I scrambled his Netflix queue.”

My brother was somewhere on the east side of Los Angeles, ignoring the onslaught of vacation messages. He was finally embarking on the life that he had made very clear—in a therapy session the designated rehab counselor had described as “dazzlingly articulate but not ultimately productive”—I had prevented him from starting. I’d had all kind of plans for what the session would involve—touching on shared trauma, asking why he hadn’t been more present for my long hospital stays—but God laughed as my brother decided to use the time, instead, to share all the ways that my public life had made me unreachable, boring, exhausting, and generally hard to be around. These were feelings I had long suspected but that he had never named—we are both an odd mix of confessional and conflict-avoidant—but now he was making his position clear. While my brother had been the first one to notice signs of my addiction, he was also the most repelled by them. It took years for him to explain that what I experienced as his uninterest, distance, occasional outbursts of profound disapproval, was actually terror. But unlike me, he was pushing back against the family code that nobody was going down alone. When I asked a more experienced sober person how I was going to convince my sibling that I was not, in fact, the person he thought I’d become—or, at the very least, didn’t want to be—they mentioned the idea of a “living amends.” A living amends, it seemed, was the idea of undertaking your new sober lifestyle, not only for yourself, but as a consistent measure of apology to those you have harmed. There would be no promise that they’d celebrate it, or me—and yet I’d continue on, living as that better person, whether my brother decided to like me or not. It sounded tiring, dreary, and necessary.

From rehab, I was driven straight into the city to watch my friends Matt and Carl get married at City Hall after thirteen years together. I was wearing leggings and a sweatshirt, because the “slacks” my mother packed no longer fit after a month of butter sandwiches. Most of us in attendance cried watching them kiss in their suits at City Hall, pink carnations in their breast pockets, but I skipped the lunch afterward because I needed to go to therapy. On my way out, one of the guests told me that leaving early was rude, and maybe she wasn’t wrong. But after I’d spent the last four weeks walking the quiet path back and forth from my room to the “healing arts center,” the city felt impossibly loud yet foreign, like there was it, and then there was me.

I still had half a milligram of Klonopin to wean myself off of, down from my rock bottom average of 4 mg. This may not sound like a lot—and it certainly didn’t to many of my rehab peers, one of whom (a twenty-three-year-old DJ, because they always are) said, “That’s nothing. You couldn’t just kick it in a weekend by the pool?” No, I could not. My remaining month of medication had been vacuum-packed into daily doses in a kind of medical advent calendar, which jangled in my purse as I walked the city.

I went from the wedding to therapy, then from therapy to a friend’s art opening—an effort at normalcy that proved futile when I told the first person who asked how I was that I’d been out of rehab for eight hours. I was looking for something that would feel like comfort—the therapist’s couch I’d done so many hours on, a cocktail party full of longtime acquaintances, the air mattress in Matt and Carl’s living room, where I tossed and turned that night.

I felt much clearer on where I could not go than where I could, where I would no longer feel safe than where I’d find comfort. Off limits were the entirety of Brooklyn Heights, where Jack was living in our old apartment and—it seemed likely—not spending his nights alone. I had called him several times from rehab, before he wrote back, “Sorry, had a bunch of festival dates, it’s been crazy!” I had been forced to impress upon him the severity of the situation—“Please, it’ll take five minutes”—but when he finally called, I began to weep the moment I heard his voice, taking significantly longer than the promised time just to collect myself. Pre-rehab, we had kept in continual touch—sometimes playful, sometimes accusatory, sometimes logistical—but the weighted blanket of medication had kept any of it from feeling particularly emotional. Now that I was sober, it would take months for me to be able to hear his voice without bursting into tears, the way I had when my parents called on the cafeteria phone at sleepaway camp until the counselors suggested that perhaps news from home was actually not helping me to settle in.

There was my parents’ apartment, where I had done my hibernating with Nick for that long winter, and I had been relieved beyond belief when they told me that they would be putting it up for sale soon. When I asked why, my father said, “I saw a guy with a fuckin’ monocle at the Whole Foods; this place sucks!” How much my lost weekend there had put a damper on the place for them, I could not know.

I would have to return one more time—not to their apartment, but to the one upstairs, where Nick was still installed. He hadn’t asked me any questions, since my release day, about where I was, what I was doing, or whether I was coming home. When I asked him if I could meet him there on Saturday, he said, “Come by after one? Just cleaning up a little for your home sweet home.” I would have done almost anything imaginable to avoid the coming conversation—I couldn’t tell if I was afraid, repulsed with myself, or a heady combination of the two. As I took a taxi to Williamsburg, I ticked through—as if for comfort—all of the things I had gotten through in the past year that certainly had to be harder than this.

In my last conversation with Dr. Mark, it had finally become clear to me—after avoiding the topic since my arrival at rehab—that I did not, in fact, have a devoted, supportive “fiancé” but a profoundly alcoholic fuck buddy, the only person for whom my being totally out of my gourd on pills had been a positive, because it left me too deadened and self-obsessed to notice that almost nothing about his life—his habits, his story, or his time management—added up. The story I had told myself about Nick—that a love from a younger, purer time had ridden in on a white horse to show me what it meant to be loved during the darkest days in my life—was just that, a story. I can’t speak to what Nick felt for me—if he was as desperate, scared, and confused as I was, it may have felt a lot like love. It may have contained moments of real beauty, but it was also dense with the relief of not being discovered. Maybe he was just thrilled to have a free place to live. Looking back at who I’d been—at who I was still, in all the ways that counted—it was hard to imagine someone falling for that girl hook, line, and sinker. But maybe that’s what I had to tell myself so I wouldn’t feel so guilty about sending him jogging back into the night.

I rode the elevator up to the apartment where Nick and I had planned to live. He had said he would be home cleaning at one, but I sat in the kitchen alone, waiting for him, studying the jagged shapes in the recycling bags but not having the heart to check them for the bottles I knew were inside. He arrived at 2:15, drenched in sweat, looking like a stranger to me.

He grabbed me around the waist and laid his head in the crook of my neck. I couldn’t tell if I was imagining it or his breathing was anxious and jagged. I pulled back and looked at him, touched the cheek he had shaved that morning as part of his “nothing to see here, folks” show. I had never known him as myself, and he had never known me as anything but a shaky, affirming outline of a person he hoped might save him. It took many years for me to understand that I hadn’t picked him up, spun him around, and dropped him back where I’d found him because I was a cold-hearted monster with a hunger for cis hetero blood. Once we started, I didn’t know how to stop—not just because it felt good, but because I was afraid of him. At first, that was likely part of the appeal. I had been actively flirting with death when I searched him out. Some part of me, the last shred of common sense that remained in the place we don’t have words for, knew things I couldn’t name. But as he wept there in the kitchen as I told him I’d be leaving, that he had two weeks to find a new place but I’d be gone, he didn’t look scary. He looked like a little boy, the little boy who had been my friend when I didn’t have many of those.

Jenni told me that I didn’t have to come back to work immediately. In fact, she encouraged me not to. “It’s not a fun set,” she said, as if fun were on my mind. “I can’t explain why. It just isn’t. Sometimes good ingredients still make a bad soup.”

I had missed the first month of production on Camping, the miniseries we were making for HBO, but the panicked updates that came from those around her—her boyfriend saying, “I do hope you get well, but this has been very hard on her”—convinced me that if she could just see me, feel my presence, know that I was still the same little genius who had solved so many unsolvable problems before, then she would start speaking to me like she knew me again. Her tone on email had vacillated from soothing, encouraging me to use the time and space to get well, to panicked, asking me to do a quick pass on pages that weren’t working. Sometimes she responded to emails with affectionate inside jokes, and sometimes she didn’t respond for days. Even on her birthday, when I sent her a Cartier Love bracelet, the kind that comes with a little solid gold screwdriver so you can take it on and off, her message was curt: “Thanks. That was really nice.”

I hadn’t told very many people that I was in rehab. Jemima knew—like my mother, she sent slippers, burgundy leather ones with a note that read “quitting is for losers.” A smattering of safe friends who had loved me when I was as down as I could go and would be thrilled to know that I was someplace safe. I avoided telling Hollywood types, save my relatively new agent, Bryan, who comforted me when I asked him if he felt like he’d bought a faulty microwave. “Honey, I’d trust you less if you were pretending you were all right,” he told me, and for a moment I felt brave.

But everyone else was getting varied stories: Writer’s retreat. Trauma treatment center. Some time off in the country. As they said in Victorian England, “taking the air.”

Jenni told me I didn’t have to come back—which was likely code for “please don’t”—but the fact was, I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

And so I flew back to Los Angeles. That morning, I dressed for the airport with care, in an oversize cashmere sweater and expensive crêpe de chine slacks. And, when I finally arrived back to a silent home in Los Angeles, the fridge was stocked with Erewhon glass bottles of juice and alkaline water and pre-chopped carrot sticks by an assistant who knew an extraordinary amount about my medical history but whom I had only met twice. That night, I opened my bedside drawer looking for a pen, and all that was in it was a vibrator I’d ordered on Postmates, some of Nick’s weed left over in a grinder, and a photo strip of a friend making out with Daniel Day-Lewis’s son.

The next day, I went to the set of Camping, the show I had been working on at night from my room in the manor house. I wandered around like a transfer student. The place had already established its rituals and hierarchy without me: People had claimed their director’s chairs around video village, established ornate inside jokes, and figured out what they liked to have for lunch. Nobody ignored me. In fact, they took great pains to make me feel like I had missed both everything (“We’re having a ball!”) and nothing (“There’s still so much left to do!”). But I was clearly an outsider, a day-player joining a company of actors who had been riffing together for years, and despite my name at the top of the call sheet, I behaved as meekly as an intern.

The show was about, well, camping. We’d decided to do a remake of a brilliant British comedy by the great Julia Davis—an idea that, to be fair, was suggested to me by Zadie Smith (so please, if you didn’t enjoy it, take it up with one of our greatest living writers). And because it was about camping, we had to shoot it outdoors at a location called the Disney Ranch in Santa Clarita, amid miles of dry brush that necessitated an on-staff snake wrangler and the purchase of a pair of hiking boots. Every day was a misery of mosquito bites and sunburns, sweaty butt cracks and limp ponytails. It was a keen reminder to write what you know (the indoors) and not what you hate (everything else).

Jenni, for the most part, avoided looking me in the eye. Whenever we were left alone together, she was antsy and distracted, like she was scanning the room for exits. My desperate desire for her approval must have been repellent, and I reminded myself every morning to act cool, to not be needy, to be—as I was trying to be for my brother—a “living amends.” Somewhere between my getting sick and losing my mind, Jenni had lost her patience with me, but it seemed that if I could just be healthy with an intact mind, I had a reasonable chance at coming back. She might be cold for a while, or uninterested in my company. She might not laugh at my jokes—and who could blame her? As far as I was concerned, in the time since Girls ended, I had failed and failed and failed some more, and the result of that failure might be an extended period of probation. It was how I took the punishment that would determine my future. If I whined, cried, got a summer cold, that was bad. But if I could take it, like a frat boy who swallows the goldfish because he knows it will ultimately earn him a house full of brothers-for-life, then maybe I had a chance—not just with Jenni, but in this business, in this world. And so I practiced the same coping methods that I’d been working with for years, repeating comforting phrases to myself in OCD-inspired sets of eight, like a naughty child assigned to write the same phrase again and again on the blackboard. She doesn’t hate you and she wants you to be well. She doesn’t hate you and she wants you to be well. She doesn’t hate you and she wants you to be well. She doesn’t hate you and she wants you to be well.

A few weeks into the shoot, I decided to take in an elderly dog named Bowie, a thirteen-year-old Yorkie with cataracts and a broken leg that had never reset, so it dangled like a second tail. She had belonged to a sober friend in LA who was overwhelmed by two small babies and unable to keep up with the ornate rituals involved in keeping Bowie alive. She needed three pills a day and eye drops every morning. She could only eat soft grilled chicken. She demanded to sleep on the bed, but at night she often wandered the house like a dementia patient. While you were encouraged not to make big decisions early in sobriety—“no pets, only plants”—I had felt a kinship with the animal since the day I’d seen her cowering in a corner, staring blankly at my friend’s toddler like she’d had her frontal lobe removed. Something about her spoke to me. It wasn’t that she was particularly cute—she had something of the Frankenstein’s monster about her. She wasn’t sweet—it was only her toothlessness that prevented her from taking chunks out of my hand. But there was something about her—the haunted look in her eyes, the endless circular health issues, the fact that she had so many reasons to roll over and die but she was still fighting—that made sense to me. The idea of making myself essential to a creature that had as little to recommend her as I did felt, if not noble, then necessary.

Bowie couldn’t be left alone. She was blind, was unused to her tripod status, and had a tendency to wander and find herself stuck in a corner, butting up against the wall again and again as if she were looking for a tiny door. She liked—or at least tolerated—being toted, like one of the dogs Paris Hilton would bring to nightclubs in the early 2000s. Unsure of what else to do, I brought her with me to set, carrying her around like a purse with eyes, setting her on my director’s chair, and ruffling the graying strawlike fur behind her ears.

That afternoon, Jenni took me aside in the trailer. “I don’t know if you should be bringing a dog to set,” she said. “It feels a little bit…unserious. You know, considering everything else.”

After that, I paid for a dog sitter, explaining to them that she was to remain in their line of sight at all times. I bought Bowie a pair of tiny pink cat’s-eye sunglasses so that we could sit outside on the weekends and stare blankly together.

If New York had felt too loud, then Los Angeles felt too bright. It was as if someone had turned on the buzzing fluorescents in my mind and then ripped the switch off the wall. On Friday of my first week back, just a few hours from wrap time, I made something up about needing to check in with my psychiatrist, then left to see my friend Lesley, a longtime sober heroin addict, at her house in Los Feliz. While I didn’t yet have much of a sense of what sober people did or how they did it, I wanted to be around people who seemed to be making a sober life work.

Lesley’s place was a wallpapered haven she shared with her sweet Dockers-wearing comedian husband and their beaming doughy baby. I had known Lesley in her previous incarnation, which was as a messy New York party girl who rolled with a crew of gleefully sadistic Vice magazine boys. But to look at her now, married in a Spanish-style three-bedroom, her adoring husband blending baby food by hand, you’d never have known it.

Lesley was a dozen years sober but took a hit of Juul every thirty seconds. She was the mother of an infant but wore low-slung bell bottoms with vintage turtlenecks, showing a tanned strip of still-flat belly. She let the gray in her hair show, and her arms were dotted with vintage-inspired patchwork tattoos. At her wedding, she had worn a ’70s minidress and massive white Reeboks, smoking outside in her veil just after the ceremony. In short, she made kicking your drug problem look not just possible, but cool as hell.

I dressed carefully for game night at her place, in a white oxford shirtdress and ankle boots, hair in two messy buns, tingling with the Spidey sense that some form of distraction was waiting just over my horizon.

When I arrived, her newborn daughter was already sleeping. Lesley fiddled with the baby monitor and poured me a Diet Coke, asking how rehab had treated me as casually as if she were wondering how I liked the latest Paul Thomas Anderson movie. She clambered around her kitchen, telling me a story about how much she had masturbated the week she was kicking heroin and how off-putting it had been for the religious anorexic sharing her room at the treatment facility.

“Yooo,” we heard from the foyer.

“Come the fuck in, dirtbag!” Lesley shouted. “It’s just Nathan [as I will call him],” she assured me.

I knew who Nathan was because, almost a decade before, he had been Lesley’s boyfriend for a tortured seven months. At the time, he was the guitarist in a vaguely successful punk group she had been a fan of, and she’d focused on nabbing him the same way she would have once focused on scoring her next hit. At the time, Lesley and I were both recent New York transplants to LA: she, the successful sex columnist known for expletive-laden rants, and me, the twenty-four-year-old showrunner of Girls. She was living with Nathan and eight or so other roommates in a ramshackle house in Eagle Rock, where they used trash bags as curtains and slept until four. At the time, they were a winning example of the kind of indie sleaze excess we all considered sexy. But apparently it was too much, even for them; he had finally broken up with her for good after a fight in which he refused to let her set an alarm, making her late for her first day of work, and she broke his TV, then called him so many times that he ended up needing to change phone numbers.

But somehow, they’d let bygones be bygones. Lesley, believe it or not, had already been sober for over a decade when she broke that television (sober and sane are not, after all, the same thing). But now Nathan was newly sober as well, and came over every Friday for games and pizza and to gingerly bounce Lesley’s daughter on his knee. I had never actually seen Nathan in person, and when he walked in, I was struck by his height (anyone over six feet seems tall if your father is five foot seven) and his thick head of shiny black hair, which swooped across his right eye like the hot boy from the original Bad News Bears. He wore black jeans and a corduroy coat, a Boogie Nights tee, and white Nike Dunks.

“Sup,” he said, after throwing a brotherly arm over Lesley’s shoulder. He looked like the bad boys I had chased down Delancey Street every weekend of 2005, when I was still a virgin and trying hard to hide it. Jack, despite being a bad boy of the highest order, never actually looked like one—his aesthetic was more 1930s vaudeville performer or, on dressier occasions, ’80s accountant. It made him adorable and safe, despite his proximity to rock excess. By comparison, Nathan looked like he was about to crowd-surf into oblivion.

Nathan mostly ignored me for the first few hours of the night, as we played Trivial Pursuit and listened to Elvis records, until Lesley and her husband got up to check on their crying daughter, leaving us alone.

“So, whatcha been up to lately?” he asked, yawning. (A yawn during the first sentence of conversation: truly and historically bold.)

“Me? I, uh…well, I just got out of rehab last…month.” The truth with a dose of fiction, which was exactly the kind of truth I was currently interested in. But last month, as opposed to last week, I reasoned, sounded better—lord knows how much therapy I could have gotten since then. For all he knew, I was cured.

“Ah, chill,” he responded. “Was that cool?”

“Very. I got off Klonopin, and now I’m…uh…stressed? But also fun. I’m also a lot of fun.”

“Dude, I’m trying to get off lithium right now,” he said. “I was misdiagnosed as bipolar, whatever—and it’s a fuckin’ bitch.”

By the time Lesley returned and resumed shaking the dice, I had convinced him to give me his number so I could share a video of Kurt Cobain’s first girlfriend giving a tour of the art she made using his blood and hair.

When the night ended, he walked me to my Uber, and as I slid into the back, I saw him sprint for the big white band van he had parked around the corner. (“My bandmate moved to Mexico, so it’s all mine now,” he had told me at dinner, counting it on the list of blessings he still had to his name after an alcoholic bottom that involved moving back in with his mother and forgetting how to spell.)

From the car I texted, “You’re funny.” Jenni had always said to use as few words as possible in the art of seduction.

Our first date was a Liz Phair show at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Nathan and I met at the entrance at dusk, and we walked around looking at the graves of actors we vaguely knew of, and some people who had probably just appeared on an episode of Matlock and then gone gently into that good night. He didn’t try hard to make conversation, just sucked hard on his vape.

Earlier, I had asked him whether we should tell Lesley we were going to hang out. “I already did,” he wrote. “She says it’s chill.”

“Because I guess we’re going on a date?” I asked.

“Yes, we are,” he answered, with the kind of confidence that had always reduced the ignored ninth grader in me to a pile of aroused rubble. I was still, despite every ounce of acclaim and disclaim and the clear message that no relationship was going to save me, looking to be sublimated by someone’s attention.

We sat next to each other on the risers as Liz played Exile in Guyville, an album I knew every word to, although instead of singing along, I nodded my head.

Nathan’s and my knees brushed. I looked down at his long, lean leg and my short, chubby one. During the worst of the last year or so, I’d been as thin as I’d ever hoped I could be but too sad to enjoy it. But since rehab started, I had gained about thirty pounds, thanks to my new penchant for midnight butter sandwiches, which was artfully concealed by a schoolgirl dress with multiple Peter Pan collars. I hadn’t ever really worried about whether Nick found me sexy. We were like two animals, circling each other, sniffing, humping at random and bedding down in a burrow at night. This was the first time, since that date with Jack almost seven years ago, that I’d really wondered whether someone found me beautiful, or maybe just palatable. Perhaps exactly good enough which, if I’d taken any time to look inward, was exactly how I felt about the guy vaping next to me.

Afterward, we sat in Canter’s Deli on Fairfax, drinking tea and talking about our shared experience of addiction. He still smoked weed. I didn’t. He was angry at the people who hadn’t supported him when he was a mess. I was trying hard not to be—tiptoeing around Jenni, resisting the urge to call my brother daily and beg him to come over and just sit next to me. But I could see in front of me someone with whom I could pass the time with ease—he laughed at my jokes, seemed to find my presence equally calming and exhilarating. Outside in the neon glow of the sleaziest twenty-four-hour restaurant in LA, we kissed, perfunctory and anxious, and I got into a car.

He texted a few minutes later:

“If I were still drinking I would have followed you home and gone fuckin’ crazy on you, dude.”

“If I were still a pill head,” I wrote, “I would have let you.”

Two days later, on my sofa with all the lamps on, he went crazy on me, and I let him. I had forgotten how awkward the first time could be. My first time with Nick, I had been euphoric with rebellion and class-A narcotics. Now I was shaking like a leaf as he pulled my jumpsuit down to my waist and took my breasts in his mouth. We fucked for what felt like hours—he told me his lithium made it hard for him to cum, and so I took it on like a dare, hopping from position to position until I was out of breath. I told him I had no uterus, and he seemed to think that was enough protection for us both.

But as I lay there afterward, I knew—in the terrible way we know things, deep in our stomachs—that I shouldn’t be where I was. Not because he wasn’t nice, or handsome, or a totally appropriate sex partner for somebody. Not because he didn’t make me giggle. Not because his hair wasn’t an incredible example of human evolution. But because I had nothing to offer. I was tapped out, drained, emotionally mined until all the oil dried up and the drillers had moved on to a new continent.

For the next month, we saw each other casually. We walked to coffee with my hobbling, cloudy-eyed new old dog before a night shoot and kissed in the parking lot, not sure where to put our hands because we were both holding iced teas. We had sex on random weeknights like people without anywhere to be the next morning; texted each other GIFs of rappers we liked. I didn’t stop to ponder why my most recent relationships had been with men who were roundly jobless, vaguely houseless (though at least this one was sober). If I had, I wouldn’t have liked what I’d learned—that some part of me still wanted to feel important, impressive, powerful. What I had might not be enough for the people who had loved me when I was at the top, but it was more than you usually had when you hit rock bottom. “That’s sick, dude,” he said, when I told him I owned my home.

But no amount of sunshine or making out in the Whole Foods parking lot or iced coffee with agave could flip a switch and clean up the mess I had left behind. It didn’t matter how many AA meetings I folded chairs at, how many hug lines I joined, or how many mandatory attendance cards I checked at the Narcotics Anonymous meeting in North Hollywood. I could take in a needy dog, accept midnight calls from hysterical girls with zero days sober, write thoughtful emails to people whose weddings and baby showers I had missed during the time when time stood still. But nothing was fixed—not really—and that could keep me up until five a.m. , when I finally crashed out and into sleep, rattling awake with the sunshine and a feeling that something was not right and might never be again.

Back in New York, Nick had finally moved out and left the keys with the doorman. The place, my mother reported, was filthy—the bathtub full of vodka bottles, food rotting in the fridge. I tried to explain myself, tried to say sorry.

“He’s gone now,” she said. “Let’s not dwell.”

But one morning, I awoke to a call from my father. “Hey, doll,” he said. “I know you have work today, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news…” He had woken early for a work trip to Dallas. I knew he had dressed up for the airport like he always did, in a silk shirt buttoned all the way to the top, suit pants, black sneakers, placing his notepad, pencils, book, and glasses case in the bag he wore across his chest. He had run product through his hair, moisturized with Nivea, and cleaned the lenses of his glasses. He’d had black tea, which he brewed from leaves and not a bag and then drank from a tall water glass. But upon opening the door to leave, he found Nick lying naked on the doormat, his clothes scattered down the hall. My father shook him awake—“Nick,” I imagined him saying with an eerie calm; “Nick, my man”—but when Nick’s eyes opened, he took off running, collecting his garments as he went.

A shame so dense filled my stomach that I felt bile rise up in the back of my throat. I could handle so much. But my father, confronted with this naked, broken man curled up on his doorstep like a kidney bean: It felt like the end. I wondered when the indignities would stop, when I would no longer feel the aftershocks of my bad behavior.

He could hear me swallow, for once at a loss for words.

“Listen, it was disconcerting, to say the least. But we can move on. We already have.”

Jenni and I spoke our last real words to each other in a therapist’s office on Larchmont Avenue, three weeks after we finished shooting Camping. It was the kind of room that looks like a set for an antidepressant commercial—gray Ikea couch, a vase with a single orchid, a window with a gridded view out to some other windows.

I don’t remember exactly what the therapist looked like, just the basic shape of him—grayish hair, square glasses, pleated khakis. I think he was dating Jenni’s shrink, the same shrink she had recommended to every lovelorn woman we met in every general meeting we ever had. Her name involved an R that was improbably pronounced like a T, and her advice was equally nontraditional and often involved a “treat yourself ” attitude about wine.

About a month after my return from treatment, Jenni and I had gone out for a particularly stilted dinner, ostensibly to discuss the bright future of our business with our CEO—a friend of hers from her early twenties—and her ex-husband, who was still running Lenny. The newsletter was still chugging along, churning out articles about self-care and friendship hygiene, unsung heroines of the aerodynamics industry, and how hobbies can reframe your sense of worth under capitalism. I wasn’t sure when everyone we interacted with had become someone Jenni felt safe with, had cohabitated or did cohabitate with—only that it had happened slowly and then all at once. The one time I had mentioned hiring my brother for a job (one he, no doubt, would not have taken but was qualified for nonetheless), she had laughed: “Do we really want to invite Dunham dynamics into all this?”

As we made a performance of perusing the menu, a few women known for their supporting roles in mid-2000s sitcoms stopped by the table, tequila-tipsy, necks dense with jewelry that cost a lot more than it should have.

“Can’t wait for Saturday,” one said brightly.

“What should we bring?” the other asked.

I didn’t even have to ask Jenni if she was having a party, or whether she’d forgotten to invite me. After all, I used to host them with her. The women made a show of greeting me, too, telling me how much they loved my blazer, how great my earrings were, but the sound had been sucked out of the place and, as their lips were moving, all I could hear were the wawawa sounds the adults make in Charlie Brown cartoons.

I was just shy of two months sober, clinging to each new day on my iPhone counter like it was money in the bank. And, as we made our way down a list of obligations we had—a script we were co-writing for two luminary men known for their action franchises, a book we were optioning about a female sociopath, a possible rescheduling of the Lenny tour—I mentioned that I felt my body, seven months out from the hysterectomy, might need a break. A month, maybe two.

I somehow hadn’t considered asking before. I’d used vacation days to get surgery. I’d gone to rehab feeling like someone choosing to skip out on work for four random weeks of spa services. But I had never thought of taking some time with the express purpose of trying to figure out where I had been and what I wanted next. What would happen if I took some time not at my rock bottom, or during a health crisis, but just because it was an important thing to do? I stared at my untouched entrée—the purple yams, the steak I was actually, if I really considered it, spiritually repulsed by—and all I could picture was the continuous days of feigned inspiration ahead of me if I didn’t do something, a future me that was digging deep to try and find something important to say and coming up with only cheap topical jokes and themes I’d stolen from women’s march literature. I pictured showing up at the office and laughing through meetings with writers whom agents said we “had to know, and would fully align with.”

There was also the subject of the Big Bad, the incident, the rupture, which I had experienced as a rupture of self and she had experienced as the first time it was her name, and not just mine, that was in the Internet’s line of fire. I didn’t actually know how she’d experienced it because—aside from a few collective calls with crisis PR that I took from my hospital bed—we never addressed it. I had tried once, as we sat on Disney Ranch, in a rare moment where it was just the two of us.

“I’ve been thinking a lot,” I stuttered. “This came into our life for a reason, and there’s something we have to learn about—”

Before I could finish my sentence, she snapped. “I’m not even close to being able to go there.” I couldn’t tell if she wanted to cry or slap me.

It seemed that the agenda that had been decided upon in my absence was that we would doggedly continue marching forward until everyone forgot. But I wasn’t going to forget. And until I had sat properly in the humility of this failing, in the silence it brought into my life after the noise died down, I knew that I would have nothing to say, nothing to write, and nothing to give.

My body wasn’t any more cooperative. Despite the hope that perhaps sobriety would turn over a new leaf, that acknowledging my mental anguish would heal my physical pain, no such thing had happened. Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome meant that no matter what changes I made to my medication regimen or to my sense of serenity, there would always be an issue. Sometimes these health crises were dramatic and quixotic—hives that went as quick as they came, a sudden migraine that could only be resolved via violent barfing. But usually it was mundane, a quotidian backdrop of pain that I fought against, or just tacitly accepted, as I moved through my day. At night, I slept on an ornate network of heating pads plugged into a power strip. When I walked, my hips and knees clicked. At Disney Ranch, despite the practical boots, I rolled an ankle and had to hop around on one foot for the rest of the day. The more I learned, the more I understood I wasn’t waiting for a cure. I was waiting for the bravery to reframe how I talked about what my body could do, to use words like “chronic” and “disability.” Jack had said I was always in a crisis, pointing to it as one of the many unsustainable conditions of our life. But a crisis only arises if you’re expecting a smooth journey. I was still reaching for the idea that some things could just be.

Staring down at my napkin, I continued: “I was thinking maybe I’d just spend a few months with my family, focusing on—”

“Or you could take the rest of the year off,” Jenni said. “Two years, even. And then I guess my kids can just pay for their own college education.”

There is a lot of talk in sober circles about a “God shot,” the moment where a higher power makes themself apparent. I’ve heard it described like a flash of clarity, or even an invisible hand grabbing you by the scruff of your neck. But I experienced it more like the male voice narrating ’90s movie trailers, telling us the basic outline of the plot of Mrs. Doubtfire.

Lena, the voice said, you don’t have to do this anymore.

“I feel like a ship,” I had texted my brother before rehab. “I’m just trying to stay on choppy water and not crash again on the rocks, to stay on the water and not sink and become a shipwreck.”

“Then be the shipwreck,” he had said. “Try that for a while.”

Jenni drove me home from dinner in silence, in the car we used to call her moving purse—full of juice boxes and workout clothes and tweezers. (Car light is the best place to catch a stray chin hair, one of the millions of things she taught me.) We parked outside my house.

“I don’t feel like you actually want to spend time with me anymore,” I finally told her, breaking the silence. I was shivering inside my blazer, despite the heat of Los Angeles in July.

“I want to want to spend time with you,” she said, her hands gripping the wheel, even though we were now parked. “I’m really trying to like you again.”

I told her the truth, tried to lay it out as clearly as I could, to explain it as cause and effect the way Dr. Mark and I had discussed in rehab—the triad of illness, trauma, and addiction was more than I had been able to bear. Everything that had happened publicly was harder than I let on. But it was real. It could be clearly laid out on a timeline, like in a history book or a true crime podcast. I always struggled physically, but my symptoms, which seemed diffuse, were never collated into a diagnosis, especially in a world where the pain of girls and women is dismissed. Stress has a measurable effect on autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, and worsened my physical symptoms, so ironically making Girls —arguably the best thing that had ever happened to me, but also the hardest I had ever worked—only served to make me sicker. But by this point, my responsibilities made taking the time to get well seemingly impossible. When I was offered medication so that I could show up for those responsibilities, it seemed like a miracle—until it wasn’t. And now, I told her, I was still dealing with the physical pain of an incurable condition, a condition I had never taken a moment to consider the emotional implications of, without any of the cushions—Jack, overwork, pills—that had served to make me feel, at least for short periods of time, whole.

“But you keep saying you’re sick,” she said. “Like you still believe it’s physical.”

Later, my mother would confess that in the days before rehab, Jenni had called her. She had told her that she didn’t understand—now that the hysterectomy had happened, I was well. The last excuse had been erased. “And she’s clinging to this random diagnosis like it’s an answer,” she said, trying to commiserate with Laurie Simmons. She hadn’t learned the number one rule of Laurie Simmons, which is that she is the only person who is ever allowed to question her own children. And she sure as shit wasn’t going to let this one slip by unnoticed.

“JENNI,” my father heard her screaming. “DON’T YOU GET IT? THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING. She wanted a child. You have two. You will never begin to imagine. And as for her diagnosis? Maybe you should have asked the insurance doctor if she really needed all that smack.”

Click.

Maybe that’s why Jenni hadn’t been looking at me. It wouldn’t be the first time my mother, her eyes flashing as red as her hennaed hair, had scared the shit out of someone close to me.

The next morning, my hands shook as I sat, pants-less in my yard, smoking a cigarette with one hand and typing a message to Jenni with the other: “I am trying so hard to be sober. It’s been 62 days. You do not make me feel safe or proud, and I cannot speak to you until we are in front of a therapist.”

“Are you saying that I scare you?” Jenni asked. “If you bring sobriety into it, I can’t argue with that. Only you know what you’re actually feeling.”

It was the first time in a long time I could say that was the case.

Our session was booked for two weeks later. I spent that time in Marin County with my family while my brother had his breasts removed. I had packed badly and was forced to buy a few dresses and a pair of sweats at the airport; my mother said they were all a size too small. My father got mad at me for taking too long at Starbucks on the way to my brother’s surgery, and my mom got mad at me for wearing “slutty” shorts and carrying Bowie with me everywhere, feeding her from the table. “She needs me,” I explained. I didn’t have to say the next part: “Nobody else does.”

I was determined to stay quiet, knowing that my brother’s whole life had been defined by the gelatinous way in which I took up space. It was a big deal that he had let us join him, and I wasn’t going to fuck it up. I had decided after rehab that my job, for as long as it needed to be, was going to be to accept what Cyrus offered me with gratitude and not demand seconds. I was going to be there when he asked and be gone when he didn’t. I was going to make it clear that I knew how to listen, how to take love without demand. It was like the cautious love you feel for an adopted cat, knowing that—every time they settle for a moment on the arm of the couch, flick their tail against your leg—your patience is bringing you closer. All you have to do is not grab them by the fistful like a gleeful toddler. All you have to do is take a hint.

Don’t get me wrong—all I wanted to do was talk about Jenni. At breakfast, as my father read every paper cover to cover, I yearned to play out how our therapy session might go, analyze all possible outcomes. I checked my phone constantly, knowing that it would never be her—in reality, it had been months since we communicated like we used to. (Once, at the height of it all, we had tried to count our daily text message tally and stopped when we reached 192.) But, despite the desire to bring it up constantly, I only talked about Jenni with Nathan, via text, who’d always write back with a version of “Awww, buddy.”

Cyrus had found a doctor in Marin who had performed dozens of top surgeries. He was a tall, handsome Black man in orange crocs, a tattoo peeking out from his scrubs. Cyrus had been speaking to him about the procedure for over a year—he had insisted on handling it himself, much to the chagrin of my mother, who loves very few things more than she loves locating highly regarded medical specialists. We went back into the pre-op area as Dr. Julius drew swift lines in blue marker across Cy’s chest and my mother joked, “They’re so gorgeous, can’t you stick them on me?” And as the nurse placed Cy in a puffy blue surgical cap, laid him back on the gurney, and set him up for anesthesia, I was reminded of when he was six weeks old and had developed spinal meningitis, a 104 fever that turned his little body ultraviolet. My mother cut a studio visit with the Museum of Modern Art short and ran around the corner to the pediatrician. She forgot her wallet and so they had to pay for her cab to the hospital, and she remembers sitting in the taxi, watching for his breath, moved to tears by the tininess of his form in his “repulsive” pea-green terry cloth jumper. At the hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses prepping him for a spinal tap, she wondered, Oh, why didn’t I put him in a nicer jumper.

The next day, my mother had picked me up from first grade early and walked me through the park and over to St. Vincent’s, where we were handed large laminated visitor’s passes that looked like the numbers the girls carry in beauty pageants. I watched my baby sister stretch his muscly little arms in a glass-walled crib, an IV needle taped to the flesh of his chubby foot.

“Is he dead?” I’d asked while he slept.

“No,” my mother told me. “He’s just getting better.”

It wasn’t long after he cried in his pea-green romper that it became clear my mother’s baby daughter was not a girl. It didn’t matter if he wore dungarees or a fuchsia dress and matching headband. Inevitably, someone would lean into his stroller and say, “Your son is adorable.”

As soon as he could dress himself, he rejected anything femme, instead wearing little cargo pants, a short-sleeved T-shirt over a long-sleeved one, and a trucker cap. At school, he bombed around with the boys, and asked us to call him Jimmy. My mother consulted a therapist who said to ride it out, let a phase be a phase, and lo and behold, as he got older and social pressures mounted, he entered his pre-teens, then tweens, with debutante energy, he became what everyone had expected when they saw the ultrasound. Still, it had always taken something from him—obsessive jogging on the treadmill and almonds counted out at lunch every day, a Tracy Flick hunger for straight A’s, making sure that he was always smack in the middle of the popular crew.

With college, and queerness, this fell away. He became messier, moodier, more honest. He started to look more like the person he had been when he was four and five. When he came out to us, no one was surprised.

And now here he was, trembling as the nurse placed the needle in the crook of his arm, being wheeled off to begin the beautiful process of becoming. Like getting sober, this was the first step and not the last, the beginning of everything and the end of something else.