Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 19

All Adventurous Women Do

Two years to the day after I left Jack’s and my apartment, I set myself on fire.

When the fire started, I’d been in a hotel room in London. I had finished shooting Industry and moved on to prepping Catherine Called Birdy. In this new city, I suddenly found myself welcome in places I had wondered if I’d ever feel welcome in again—dinner parties full of artists and actors, fashion shows and art galleries. I was sober—nearly two years—and it seemed to me the results of that choice were like a lantern, lighting new paths. I was waking up in the morning in a dozen necklaces in a room with fine pillowcases, a new freaky dog at my feet, and while my body still ached, I had found a regimen—of medication (not the fun kind), work, distraction—that made me feel, for stretches of hours and even days, like the person I had once been sure I was. I had breakfast with cute boys I met at AA, smiling coquettishly into my green tea. My father visited, and I took him to Wimbledon, wearing a giant bow in my growing hair. I got a septum ring on a random Tuesday, started wearing Gloria Steinem glasses, filled my days with meetings over drinks, where I ordered sparkling water with lime cordial. When I’d remained in New York, Jack and I had continued our circular fighting—sometimes for turf, sometimes over shared objects or friends, usually in some kind of misguided attempt to hold on to a “friendship” which had never, really, shown signs of blossoming into something healthy. Before I left for the UK, I had written him a serious—if slightly dramatic and self-aggrandizing note: “I will always love you, but we need to make some space.” Water coloring nudes on the floor of my hotel room, my phone lighting up with people who were excited by my new presence in this new place, it felt as if every choice had been leading to this.

I got calls about scripts. I got asked to write essays. I was sent a request to go on tape for the role of Elvis’s mother in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, and walked around the room smoking Marlboros and trilling the lines to myself, improvising in her voice: “Elvis, my boy, it’s all insaaahhhd of you.”

One night, feeling strong and self-assured, changed in ways that seemed worth advertising, I unblocked Jack’s number and called him. He answered on the first ring. The time apart seemed to have broken a spell, and on this call, we talked with the same unstoppable rhythm we’d had when we first met—about pop music, television, people who annoyed us both. We laughed. We didn’t dig into old shit but established that yes, we missed each other. Yes, with all the anger and tension dispersed, there was something here to save. I only teared up once, at the end, at the right part: “I missed you,” he told me. “I love you. Of course I do.”

It was in this daze of good fortune, this tidal wave of sober gifts, that I was lighting a candle at five p.m. —scented, to get rid of the smell of smoke and set the scene for some healthy journaling—when, suddenly and without warning, I felt my nightgown set ablaze.

My reflexes were slow. I could not seem to make it real. I heard the flames, felt them lapping at my ear, smelled the hair at my temples singeing. I poured a glass of water on my chest, and the fire only doubled its powers. I stopped, dropped, and rolled, and there it finally went. (Always listen to mommy.) After the flames had given out, I lay there on the floor in agony, clutching my right breast and rocking back and forth, kicking like a pony.

I called the front desk—I’d been living at the hotel for months, and was always unfailingly polite, the same tone I used with doctors and business managers and everyone else I wanted to take me seriously. But on this call, I was barely coherent, muttering weakly, “I set myself on fire. I am totally sober,” and as they sent for an ambulance, I unlatched the door, pulled a bathrobe over my now-naked form, and promptly collapsed.

Over what felt like an hour, a valet—one of a set of twins who worked there, I’m still not quite sure which one saved me, as neither seemed to want to take credit—sat with me and gently poured water into the crease of my armpit. Finally, the ambulance drivers arrived, gorgeous and young and fit, and they undressed me again and placed me in the shower, spraying me with freezing water and asking me rapid-fire questions: “Do you like to go clubbing? Do you have a boyfriend? Do you regret any of your tattoos?” No. No. Probably.

“Are you hitting on me?” I finally hissed, unsure why they hadn’t yet taken me to a hospital. I haven’t mentioned the pain, which was—and this is saying something—the worst I’d ever felt. A new class of pain. Looking at my armpit, you would barely have seen it—like a little kid with a nothing playground scrape asking, “Is it bleeding?” But I could feel each nerve screaming, fighting, begging not to die, like a chorus of desperate female murderesses seizing and raging during their last moments in the electric chair.

I said I wouldn’t go to the hospital without my dog, Ingrid, who had seemed unfazed from the start, curled in on herself at the end of the bed, her hairless, tailless ass and grumpy rump of a face nearly indistinguishable from each other. Somehow, they agreed. She rode with me to the hospital, assuming the same position she’d taken on the bed in my lap on the gurney. On the ride, they gave me “gas and air,” the same thing they’d offer a pregnant woman, and I sucked at it desperately. And when they finally got me to the hospital and the pain meds hit my veins and I fell asleep with my chin resting on my chest, my nipple blistering, I couldn’t remember my own phone number—apparently only Jack’s.

“Your contact isn’t answering,” the nurse explained gently. “Is there anyone else you might call?”

“My father isn’t picking up?” I asked, confused by whose number I’d given, by what time it was where he was, by who he was.

The next morning, I awoke in the burn unit at Chelsea Westminster. As the doctor scraped the now-blistered skin from my armpit, my chest, my nipple, I called Jack—this time on purpose. “I can’t talk,” he wrote. “If you’re scared, try my mother—she’s home.” I thought of what he must think now—he’d opened the door again, invited the vampire across the threshold, and now he needed a favor from his mother just to get her back out again. Once a crazy bitch, always a crazy bitch. I don’t know what I thought—maybe that the call had meant we were now going to be there for each other, could be there for each other. A lot of time had passed for him—less for me.

Always a glutton for punishment, I called his mom. The same woman who had washed my hair so gently in the hospital in the days before the hysterectomy, who had sat by my bed when he couldn’t. “Oh, Lee,” she said, sounding genuinely contrite.

A few hours later, he wrote to me: “At a venue—bad service. My mom explained what happened. I’m so sorry. You will be fine. You’re the strongest person I know.” I didn’t want to be strong. I wanted to be mighty, the woman who—only a day before—had been deciding her London Fashion Week schedule, mistaking the same old shit for new glory, invitations that aren’t that hard to get with personal growth.

The strongest person he knew. And why was that? I wouldn’t have to be strong, I thought, if you’d just let me be weak. But there were no fights left to have, and there was no more confusing conflict for proximity, and we really were just strangers, even if his number was the only one that came to me when I was playing out the same patterns, high again, new hospital band but same old shit.

I spent the night in the burn unit as I waited for plans to be transported back to the United States for surgery. They could have done it there in England, but my father said it was best that I be home, as if it had happened to me deep in the jungle and not in a bustling modern metropolis. The unit was a long thin corridor of beds—it reminded me of the book Madeline, with all the schoolgirls asleep in a row. In the middle of the night, Miss Clavel turned on the light and said, something is not right.

There were two of us there that night, a woman named Susan and me. I stayed quiet, sleepy from anti-nausea meds and light, fizzy painkillers. (My only critique of UK burn units: altogether too stingy with their painkillers, but then again, don’t trust me—once a pill head, always a pill head.) But Susan—oh, Susan—took it upon herself to call her mother and tell her everything she’d ever thought of her.

In the thickest Cockney brogue, Susan said, “I guess givin burf to me mean nunnit, innit? Nunnit, innit? Ya right cunt, mum, can’t walk three miles out ’er way.”

I waddled to the bathroom with my IV pole and, realizing Susan had hung up and was weeping, calmly asked, “Are you all right, Susan?”

“Just me mum,” she said, and shrugged. Susan later revealed her injury came when she fell asleep on the ground in front of her stove—“Just asleep in front of the stove, nothing to see here,” she seemed to be saying about her story full of holes—as she was “boiling a cuppa.” The water had bubbled over and made its way down her back. She hadn’t noticed for a week. Again, she told me this like it could happen to the best of us.

I tried not to plug every one of these details into the “How the fuck did I end up in this nightmare?” puzzle I was assembling. I could make sense of my body rebelling—but the randomness of this was sickening, toppling my very fresh belief in a power greater than myself.

“Fire is an element,” I told myself again and again. “People are touched by fire.”

My father decided he needed to collect me in person. “I have eyes on the package,” he said to my mother, hovering above my bed, packing my things as I dozed. No sooner had he arrived, we turned around back for Heathrow, to catch a plane bound for Los Angeles, where my doctor insisted I would receive the best treatment (if your emergency crosses over into the aesthetic, LA is indeed the place to go). I was bandaged chin to tit, wearing the pajamas from my last Virgin flight, but that didn’t stop me from asking the wheelchair attendant to push me into the duty-free Chanel, where I purchased a pair of kelly green ballet flats in a Demerol fog. “They’re classic,” I kept explaining to my father. “They’re a must-have, and I didn’t have to pay tax—that’s huge.”

On the plane, I waved cheerily at Sandra Oh and Elle Fanning, propelling myself up in order to compliment them on Killing Eve and The Neon Demon, respectively. My father says that when he quit trying to control me he just watched it like a TV show. It was funny if he forgot that he was involved.

Back in the United States, the burn unit was less intimate, and you had to strain to hear other people’s screams, but if you reached for them, they were there. My favorite nurse, Angie, reminded me again and again that God doesn’t like when we ask why, that he gives his hardest jobs to his toughest soldiers, that he never sends mail to the wrong address. But I wasn’t a tough soldier. This was the wrong address. I wanted to know why.

I had two surgeries in two days—bloody ones involving grafts of skin from cadavers and some peeled off my own thigh—and checked my phone obsessively to see whether Jack would offer anything beyond his first round of platitudes. I wanted to know how heavily I was weighting my personal narrative in a direction that was now void. And lying there, wrapped head to toe like a mummy, I began to imagine a book that would tell this story—not gratuitous, not self-satisfied, I thought, just true.

My mother was sitting by my bed, as she had sat by so many beds. It was nearly Christmas, and a man in a suit decorated with working holiday lights stopped by to show us some close-up magic. “It’s not really a good time for us,” my mother said. “Maybe you can come back later when she’s alone?”

I want to write this book, I told her. Tell this story. Everything I’ve been through. How random it was, but how all of it needed to happen.

“Oh, Lena,” she moaned. “It just sounds so sad.”

A few months before I was burned, I had been living a particularly good night of my particularly good new life out in London. I was with Jane, a glamorous friend of my mother’s, who tends to attract a certain breed of high-powered artistic man. A film producer, one of the first women to make male Hollywood bend to her will, her phone is always lighting up with the names of guys we only need to see the first names of to recognize. Since I met her—when I was five or six, and she was dating my father’s token single friend—she’s always had the best fitted blazers.

That night in London, at a velvety hot spot in Mayfair, she was expecting a gang that included Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel. As they streamed in close to ten o’clock, the surprise was Bruce Springsteen, looking ageless in a bandanna and diamond earring.

Jane picked up her tequila soda and guided me toward a seat at the end of a long oak table. I clutched my sweaty Diet Coke, hoping for the seat between Jane and no one, to be the social equivalent of a heel of bread. But I ended up wedged between Jane and Mr. De Niro, eye to eye with Sir Bruce, chewing on a slice of lime until it turned to wet paper in my mouth.

I had met Bruce years ago, with his wife, when I was still with Jack. While aggressing celebrities to share my work or any work is not even close to my thing, Jack’s love of Bruce was so deep—and his love of New Jersey—that I took a deep breath and categorized it as the selfless work of a loving girlfriend. After all, Jack was doing amazing work bringing industry and music to Jersey with his Shadow of the City festival. Shouldn’t the Boss and his family know? I had heard later that the brag session had flowered into a friendship. I just wasn’t around to see it.

And after an awkward perusal of menus, Bruce looked up at me with eyes so clear, I knew he saw my secret garden and said, “Since we last saw each other, Jack has become very special to me.”

Reader, sometimes you see two doors in life, one marked “NORMAL BEHAVIOR” and one marked “PSYCHO STUFF.” And after a brief pause, to really consider what’s best, you choose…psycho stuff. And that is what I did. That is what I have so often done. From my mouth came a font of verbal diarrhea that sounded something like this: “I’m glad he’s special to you because he promised to love me forever and that’s not how it turned out and I may not have been perfect but I would have tried and tried and now he shames me just for existing and I’m going to write a memoir one day and I don’t know how not to just call it I HATE YOU Jack, you BROKE ME Jack.”

Bruce Springsteen could have done a lot of things in this moment. He could have ignored me. He could have politely excused himself to the bathroom. He could have demanded to switch seats or had me thrown out or yelled, “GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, GIRL. THIS IS NOT THE LADIES’ ROOM. GET A TAMPON AND GET A LIFE.”

Instead, he looked at me with the gentlest eyes, eyes that crinkled with all the charm that our nation’s creative father should exude, and said: “Well, Lena, this is the hard stuff. These are the questions artists must ask ourselves. And none of us had that answer, about how best to express our hurt through art. But when I was writing my memoir, I told myself this, again and again. First off, if it’s boring, stop writing it.” He laughed self-effacingly. “And second, you don’t owe it to people to be honest about every little thing. That doesn’t mean you lie—it just means you can have secrets. You only owe it to them to show ’em how your mind works.”

I swallowed hard, trying not to vomit a little puddle of Diet Coke and truth onto the fancy table.

“It’s very hard to write about people we’ve loved,” he said. And then he looked at me, as if his eye contact was a hallway and I was walking deeper in: “And sometimes we forget that, in the moment, those relationships should have taken as much work as our real jobs.”

And with that, he turned to Robert De Niro, who was comfortingly enraged about Trump, and went back to the business of being Bruce Springsteen. In pictures later that summer, I would see Jack’s girlfriend riding in a cream convertible Bruce got them. It’s all part of the work of loving the people very special to you while you can, I guess. Showing them, in whatever way you know best, that they matter—that they’ll always matter.

On day six in the hospital, I finally got to see my skin graft—the nurse gently unwrapped me, and the skin was red and streaky as bacon but soft like a baby’s ass. I briefly mourned my perfect, milky right breast, the one I never appreciated enough when it was whole. It didn’t take me long to forget what it had once been and accept what it was, scarred, half the nipple seeming to have been magically erased as if by an intern’s Photoshop tool. Like many women, I am used to being compromised.

There’s a line that I love from Tana French’s book The Likeness: “Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.” I wrote it down on a Post-it and put it over my desk, to never forget.

I understood now that trying to understand why two people fall out of love is a bit like studying a place that existed before photographs, pre–printing press, a time that is kept alive only by the stone foundations of burnt cottages and buried barrels of mead found by determined archaeologists or lucky farmers. We may have the evidence—the daily messages exchanged between former partners (“baby cakes, do you like these curtains or do they make you think of Vegas?”), the iPhone images of early courtship (hands entwined on the plane to a new city), and the devolution (absent-eyed in New Year’s hats that read 2017 in hopeful glitter). But we can never be the people who occupied that place. Even if we were them once, we can’t be them again. The world they shared dies along with their memories.

Time has worked hard for me. What I remember less and less of are the slights, the nights slept turned in on myself, jokes with a bitter rind of truth, microscopic betrayals that nobody will ever own up to now. What I remember best is the feeling of being loved without reservation for the first time, of being chosen and known, even when it felt like a curse to be seen with such clarity. I remember the stories that made us stay awake until three a.m. cackling like children at a sleepover and the giddy way I ran to the elevator when he arrived fresh off a red-eye, feet bare and wearing nothing but a misty-eyed smile. I remember when the tour bus pulled onto our block like an airplane landing in a suburban backyard, and how we’d hold each other somberly until I had to walk him down and send him off with the cupped wave of a brave wartime widow.

I remember that time, that time I told you about when Instagram first invented DMs and we tested the technology across the room from each other: “Marry me?” I had asked. “Baby in 2015, married in 2016,” he wrote back.

And I thought that would be it. And for a time, it was.

During that summer of 2020 in LA, when the world spun off its axis, nighttime became the loudest time of day. George Floyd’s death had set off a series of uprisings in Los Angeles, and the city pulsed with the sound of invisible things making themselves visible. I could smell the smoke from burning cars. Overhead, helicopters circled until five a.m . The cops could be heard on megaphones saying, over and over, “Lay down so we can peacefully arrest you.” One night, driving to pick up some pet food, I saw a naked man tackled to the ground by officers, and people stopped in the middle of traffic to get out of their cars to police the police.

Between the pandemic, the fires, and the protests, the city filled with tents. I took a car to have a cranberry juice with a redhead in his midtwenties whom I had met on the Internet (using a profile where I showed only my shoulder and the outline of my right tit). Jemima had helped me set the profile up, explaining that I was crazy if I thought famous people never looked for sex on the Internet.

I hadn’t had sex in nearly two years. It had occurred to me, sometime in the six months after I got sober, as I hurled myself in the direction of every immovable male object that I encountered, that I was as addicted to the feeling of disappearing into someone else’s desire as I was to Klonopin, and to feeling necessary and important.

This guy, this kind young man, asked me to meet him at a parking lot of a bar on the east side. It was a hipster place, with socially distanced picnic tables outside, in Echo Park, a neighborhood of zillennials where it last occurred to me to socialize a decade ago. I slipped my jeans and blazer on in the dark, brushed out my wet hair, rolled on a rose perfume I bought online because it has the words “attraction” and “pleasure” in the description.

When I arrived, he was already there, in a black mask, with a tequila soda sweating on the table in front of him. His red hair swooped to one side. He greeted me awkwardly, rising to pull my chair out. I gave him a half-hearted hug, like we were two teenagers meeting up at the mall. I had already explained to him who I was—thirty-four, former television presence, current Internet sex seeker. He was easy to talk to. He had a funny way of using his hands, like they were puppets acting out a little play. He asked me about my pets and my hobbies, where I’d traveled, New York versus Los Angeles. I found myself unable to focus on his face or on my body, whether I could summon attraction for him or not. Now that I didn’t drink or do drugs, it was almost impossible to center myself in these sorts of encounters, and I felt as though I’d kiss anyone who asked me. He didn’t ask.

So I did. After our second drink, I asked him if he wanted to walk me up the hill to his house and show me his cacti collection. I hoped that he wouldn’t notice how winded I got on the walk, how unused to moving through the world I was (a kind way of saying out of shape). Somewhere near his gate, he took my hand, and inside his garden, he tenderly showed me every plant, naming them for me, explaining the origin of certain cacti and how he’d pollinated them using a paintbrush from cuttings he collected in the desert on expeditions.

“Do you have all of these just to get girls to trust you?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, genuinely considering the question. “Is it working?” I kissed him, grabbing his face, then his collar, pulling my sweater up and letting the hot air hit my chest.

“Should we go inside?” he finally asked.

Indoors, we were stopped in the kitchen by a roommate who reeked of weed. He looked at me with slits for eyes and said, “Oh, you.” He was hauling a duffel bag, sweating through his tank top.

“This is Neal,” my date said, looking unsteady for the first time.

Neal told me he’d always wanted to meet me, because he’d always wanted to tell me there was something in his student film that really resembled a plot line on Girls, and he felt that it was “more than a coincidence.” He explained the story arc of his student film, something I never hoped to listen to in my time on this earth. It was also never a storyline on Girls.

“Huh,” he grunted. “I guess I didn’t watch the show that closely.” The one time I used an app exclusively meant for banging, traveled all the way across town in an Uber during a pandemic and was about to get away with it—this was the first time I encountered charges of plagiarism. Who did I have to fuck to get fucked around here?

“Sorry,” my date said. “He’s…I’m sorry.”

He led me into his room—it was painted sunshine yellow, the walls covered in black-and-white posters of ’70s films and obscure Los Angeles architectural gems. He had more plants, a dozen vintage cameras on a shelf, and a bed on the floor with dove-gray sheets. “Do you like the Smiths?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Good,” he said, “because I have this playlist called ‘Do you like the Smiths?’ ”

I kissed him again, and he knocked me onto the bed gently, his knee between my legs. He tipped my face back, kissing my cheeks, my chin, my neck, and finally my lips.

Before I pulled my sweater fully off, I told him not to be alarmed but that I had a burn scar and it was big. The wound was only six months old. I was still pink as a mole rat and healing slowly. He didn’t wince, just said, “Please tell me if anything hurts.” He kissed that scar, and the other ones across my stomach, where I’d tattooed little stars to remind me of all that had happened to me, everywhere I’d been sliced or sewn. He pulled my pants off like he was opening a present, looking up at me with smiling green eyes, like we were playing tag. And when he reached for a condom—only when I asked him to—and pushed himself inside of me, I felt something rare—even rarer than crossing town and heading east. I was safe. I was safe now and I was going to be safe. No matter what happened—what he asked for, who he turned out to be—I would remain. I had become the person I had once hoped to be—not perfect, not blameless, not shameless, but total. I wasn’t going to give this newfound sense of myself up for anyone, no matter what they promised, no matter how they touched me or didn’t touch me, saw me or didn’t see me.

He was a part of this, sure. He was gentle and eager, kind-eyed and accepting, nonjudgmental and present. (When I’d asked how he saw his own sexuality, since his profile said he was open to threesomes and man-on-man play, he had shrugged and smiled, and said, “I mean, whatever works. I’m not a fucking cop.”) He was part of it, but I was most of it. It was the shift in me that was making this experience—one of pleasure, not guilty pleasure or rageful pleasure or pleasure that pulsed with a deeper, unspoken need—possible.

I finally understood, in some exquisite way, the cost of all these years spent dividing myself in two: little whore or Jack’s baby girl. Needy slut or loving wife. Grateful fat girl or feminist boss. I couldn’t do it anymore. It hurt too much, to cleave myself from myself. I just wanted to be in my body. And there I was.

I had thought I’d be married with a husband at this point, pushing my daughter in a stroller on the streets of Brooklyn, exasperated with her barrettes and my endless schedule. I had thought all of my mess would be behind me, and that secret nights in places I didn’t want to be caught would be ancient stories for a funnier book than this one. Not, as my mother called it, a sad book. But I had been sad. Maybe I wasn’t anymore, but I would be again. And that was okay.