Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 2

I Get Ideas

When I was freshly twenty, on summer break from college—a place tucked between scenic Midwestern cornfields and a postindustrial wasteland where meth had replaced sprockets as the major export—I made my first short film. I called it a satire, although I’m not sure I knew what that meant. It was about a teenage art dealer (played by my brother when he was still presenting as female) who ruled her gallery with an iron fist, bossing around people three and four times her age, an idea that seemed like a fairy tale but was, in retrospect, a rather prescient vision of my life to come.

I cast my family, used our home as both production office and set, and made ruthless fun of the very industry that had allowed me to grow up in the city and attend the esteemed liberal arts school I was currently enrolled in. I haven’t watched the film in twenty years—I’m sure I would be both charmed and alarmed by its amateur presentation—but at the time, it felt like one small step for me, one huge step for womankind. It’s that kind of hubris that defines being a young artist, and which should never be beaten out of anyone.

I submitted the film to Sundance’s even more indie counterpart, Slamdance, and when I was accepted, it felt like the beginning of my life—not just as a filmmaker, but as a human being. I booked tickets to Park City and dragged along my two best friends at the time, Audrey and Sara—two stunningly petite brunettes who made me feel both more and less worthwhile when they flanked me. There was a Facebook group for accepted filmmakers, where cheap house shares were available, and we secured a single king-size bed in a run-down ski lodge, splitting the house—which had a dusty pair of antlers over the nonworking fireplace and a dubious “native” decorating scheme—with film bros in their thirties and their wanly supportive girlfriends. All we knew is that the film festival promised celebrity sightings (I kept track in scrawled notes on the back of an envelope—Jared Leto! Gary Coleman holding hands with Teri Hatcher! Scott fucking Speedman!) and, if we played our cards right, the chance to get very drunk with our fake IDs.

On the first night, we trooped in snow boots to a crowded “western”-themed establishment bar, where men shoved business cards at us— John Johnson, independent producer —and we took advantage of the open bar, slamming cocktails which, we were told, were lower in alcohol because this was Mormon country. Audrey, with her winged black eyeliner and sideswept bangs, even attracted the attention of celebrity DJ Steve Aoki, who invited us to join him at a “Motorola x Budweiser activation.” How would we even be able to go back to college, eat in the sad light of the cafeteria, and take a class called “Intro to the History of Modern Agriculture,” after all this excitement?

The next day, my twelve-minute short aired to a sleepy crowd of twelve people—and my glory was over faster than the sex we’d been having with undergraduate men back in Ohio. The disappointment had barely set in—all the desperate all-nighters in the media lab had amounted to this?—before I became enraptured by the short that came next. It was distinctly more impressive and assured than mine, well-shot, replete with pro actors and puppet choreography. Called “The Back of Her Head,” it told the story of a shy indie boy with a crush on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in the apartment across the way. I was sure the filmmaker must be an adult, with years of experience perfecting his craft—this was the (500) Days of Summer of romantic puppet shorts! But when it was time for the filmmaker to stand up and take his bow, a pair of college boys stood up, baby-faced and dressed in the knowingly grandpa-ish garb that signified indie culture at the time. As they walked to the stage for the Q and A, one of them tripped. The audience gasped. They tripped again. They kept tripping all the way to the stage, a bit of immersive theater that nobody knew whether to laugh or wince at—nobody, that was, except for me, because I thought it was the funniest, most brilliant thing I’d ever seen in my fucking life. This was Josh and Benny Safdie, two Boston University students about my age, and we spent the rest of the festival running around with them, bound by a desire to make ebullient mayhem. By the end of the second night, as we ate dough balls on the pilled faux-suede couch in our ski lodge and talked about filmmakers I thought mattered only to me, I had decided they were the smartest boys I’d ever met.

Despite being undergrads themselves, Benny and Josh had already surrounded themselves with a remarkable group of technicians—cinematographers, production designers, actors—and when Josh graduated in May, he would set up a shop for them in a building on lower Broadway, not far from my parents’ place. The office was a kind of dormitory for wildly talented indie film nerds: They were also native New Yorkers, and they ran with a crew of other filmmakers—boys, always boys—who had graduated from Tisch, Columbia, schools where, unlike mine, the film departments consisted of more than a passed-around Super 8 camera, a broken projector, and one aging professor who enjoyed talking about Bergman and hugging us all for way too long.

While still in school, I took every trip home to New York as a chance to ingratiate myself further to them, offering to hold the boom, PA, wheatpaste fliers for screenings, or just pay for their dinner at a noodle shop in Chinatown because I was the only one still on an allowance. It was all worth it to listen to filmmakers act the way I thought filmmakers were supposed to act (I guess that was, in a word, male ). All I wanted was to be around people who were making movies—not just talking about movies, or writing about movies on their Blogspots, like the one I kept where I reviewed Cassavetes films for no one—but really making them. Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost (the creators of both the film and the term Catfish, among other accomplishments), production designer Sam Lisenco, and early YouTube titans the Neistat Brothers had all taken offices in the same building. Ronald Bronstein and his wife, Mary, were hanging around, fresh off the festival runs of their films Frownland and Yeast. I’m not even counting the blond fuckboys with the streetwear brand or the guy who called himself a “sound sculptor” (obviously, that’s the only one I got the chance to kiss).

Never in my life had I felt like I knew what was happening, much less known the locus of where it was happening. But 365 Broadway reminded me of the way my mother spoke about Soho in the early 1970s, when someone fascinating was always doing something fascinating, and all you had to do was get out of bed to find it. Sometimes the excitement even came to my bed, when we’d all pile in and watch some misunderstood classic like Ishtar on the flat-screen TV I’d inherited from my Uncle Bart, limbs tangled in that way you stop doing with your guy friends once you enter your first real monogamous relationship (and never start again unless you’re an adult who is into circus arts).

In the summer between my junior and senior years, the guys—who were known en masse as the Red Bucket collective—helped me film my first “feature” film, a misguided but ambitious hybrid of vérité digital and Godard-inspired Super 16 entitled Creative Nonfiction. The shoot, which took us to my great-aunt’s house in Connecticut and the commune my mother had lived on when she was my age in the woods of Upstate New York, started with a literal bang when a light we had rented fell out the back of our white kidnap van on a country road at three a.m. A fight ensued: “WE’RE FUCKED. WE COULD BE ON THE HOOK FOR, LIKE…” None of us actually knew the amount—it could have been a thousand or a million, which were equal numbers as far as we were concerned—as Sam screamed at Brett who screamed at Chris who screamed at Josh, all certain the other one should have been responsible for properly latching the back doors. We returned the light, straight-faced, and never met a consequence. It seemed all was well that ended well, and we finished by dumping three massive bags of sand out on the floor of my mother’s studio to create a faux desert and forgetting to clean it up.

When I graduated from Oberlin a year later, I decided the best use of my limited babysitting income would be to rent a 150-square-foot “studio” a floor below the Red Bucket office. Sara—the gamine film editrix who had accompanied me to Slamdance—took the desk next to mine. Now I wasn’t just an interloper—I was a part of the fabric of the place.

A friend of theirs—an actress and writer named Greta Gerwig, who was already famous to me because she had starred in some of the premiere “mumblecore” films of the mid- to late 2000s that had beckoned from the shelves of Campus Video and convinced me that a career in movies was within my reach—needed office space, too, and joined us on the fourth floor, where Sara and I were diligently shooting and editing episodes of a web series called Delusional Downtown Divas. Meant to skewer the art world, “DDD,” as we called it, averaged about 300 views, but it was a way to create at a breakneck pace, often shooting at actual art openings, live music events, and other spaces that made the lack of production budget look less glaring. It starred my three closest friends, Isabel, Joana, and Audrey—girls I’d met when I was one, three, and thirteen. At night, we partied prodigiously—in echoey lofts rented by boys who dressed like James Dean and had somehow been paid well for indie albums that didn’t chart, at the Jane Hotel, where you could spot the Olsen twins on a Tuesday night, and in our childhood homes when our parents left for the weekends.

During the week, I sped from my job selling couture-influenced baby attire to my little office, editing on a desktop computer I’d put on my first credit card and was paying off ten dollars at a time. Greta, meanwhile, used our little space as a place to film audition tapes, and occasionally I would act as her reader, assisting her in delivering scenes from scripts with code names like “Flight of the Pterodactyls” (this turned out to be a Jurassic Park sequel). We were all in awe when Greta booked her first studio film, Greenberg, and headed off to California—when she came home three months later, we threw her a massive party in Chinatown. When I asked her how it was, she shrugged and said, “Everyone hikes.”

This was, looking back, a very innocent time. Yes, there was drama—what are your early twenties if not a chance to burn every bridge and then build it back again, to hiss things like “Have a nice life, bitch.” A boy who knew a boy built us a loft to store our equipment and a ladder, in which he wood-burned the Springsteen lyrics “I love you for your pink Cadillac” and so naturally I slept with him, then road-tripped with him to a wedding in Kentucky. By the end of the weekend, we weren’t speaking, except for when he demanded that I drive fifty miles on the highway in Baltimore so he could get some shut-eye, even though I had no license. Sara and I got into a fight when I found out she and her older paramour had been sleeping on the floor of the office at night, which seemed to me like an abuse of privileges (although it’s impossible now to imagine caring about that). Once, a jilted boyfriend of Audrey’s stomped into my office with a thrifted lamp she had forgotten at his place, smashed it, and screamed, “MAKE SURE TO TELL HER ABOUT THIS.”

We weren’t making money—if anything, we were losing it, living with our parents in order to be able to afford this odd little utopia. One day, Ariel (or ’Rel, as we called him) spent hours constructing a phone system that went between floors, built from tin cans and twine, just so we could tell dirty jokes followed by “over and out.” To this day, I still get a pang every time I watch a documentary about an artist and they talk about this very moment, when they first became part of a creative community but nobody was doing it for the cash yet, when nobody had yet betrayed a trusted collaborator or called someone else a sellout. At the time, it all seems tentative and terrifying, impossible and inevitable. In all, it lasted only a year or so, but it felt much longer, or maybe wider—because it was when I really fell in love with movies, and it was also the first time I felt like someone worth knowing.

I had been out of school for a year when the dread set in. Yes, we had the office. Yes, we had our day jobs—at that moment, I was keeping Excel spreadsheets for an accountant who specialized in medical billing and palming my ass (a theme, it seemed, of young womanhood). But despite the merry mayhem of the movie dorm on Broadway, the sustainability of it all was starting to seem questionable. I could afford the rent on the office because I didn’t need to pay for a place to live, but increasingly my parents seemed less delighted that I was home and more maddened by the logistics of living with someone old enough to drink but too young to honor a single instruction they gave about how to behave in their home. I couldn’t bring myself to stay for longer than five months at any given job—it seemed to be about the cutoff when whoever was employing me would realize that I had no applicable skills.

I was involved with another Oberlin graduate who was living in San Francisco, and every few months I’d take out a new credit card to buy an economy ticket to visit him, where we would snort Adderall off his Selena poster and fuck half-heartedly on his desk chair in the weak light of sunrise over the Castro—but it was becoming clear that this placeholder was not, in fact, the great love of my life. Neither was the graphic designer who did tae kwon do, or the ornithologist who called me every few weeks from the salmon fishing boat he was working on. At my brief job as a restaurant hostess—a few months that felt like years, during which I spent all my tips just to pay for cabs after sleeping past my alarm—I had met an older man; he was in his thirties and had a cleft lip, and I had immediately fixated on him, finding him sensual, damaged, and slightly dangerous. I left the job but kept his number, and we began having sex in the alleyway behind his job after he closed up at one a.m. —ostensibly for the thrill of it, but actually because he had a live-in girlfriend he referred to as “my roommate Hayley.” When I finally did see his home, which was a dilapidated row house he shared with a few friends and his brother—who looked like how my paramour might have looked had he not loved cocaine—I was so shocked by the state of filth that I had to quickly decide whether to flee or deem it exotic. I chose the latter.

I could feel the disdain from my parents and sibling every time they cast their eyes over my pigsty of a bedroom, messy with expired makeup and polyester lacy underthings and mix CDs I’d stepped on in platforms while trying to creep into my bed in the dark. The rush of being newly out of college had maxed out.

Based on a comment from my mother—couched as concern, as these comments always are—I became aware that I had gained the freshman fifty and held on to it. And so I started dieting, counting my almonds, and eating cottage cheese with Splenda for all three meals (and a few snacks, too). I had gone from growing to shrinking—creeping into my father’s closet every morning to weigh myself after my “first morning urination,” just as the pro-anorexia websites I frequented suggested. It was there that I would look myself in the eyes in the full-length mirror and think—with the rage of a boxing coach talking to a wayward prodigy—“you better make something of yourself, kid.”

It was from this place—the sense that life might just go on this way until I was too old for it to be cute, until I wasn’t becoming someone new but just was —that I wrote Tiny Furniture. Impatient and afraid, hungry and heartbroken over no one in particular, I wrote the film over a few nights in my father’s office. I had been in a period of conflict with my mother that felt, to me, like a biblical battle between good and evil but was really just about the fact that I never, ever cleaned up after myself. Looking for wine in the cabinet one night, I found a box of my mother’s journals from when she was my age. With a logic as thin as my body was growing, I decided to ferret them away under my bed and read them, night after night—and the person they revealed was shockingly like me.

I opened my eyes this morning and before I even registered where I was I had the feeling of being disturbed and unhappy. First thing when I woke up. Then all the reasons why filtered in. A lot of petty friend problems compounded with a lot of shit from my parents who, despite all their trimmings, have retained their straight, conservative, biased and fucked up values. The deadly liberals. Again I experience profound disillusionment in realizing who and what they are. Yesterday I caught my mother in her fucked up games.

A violin bow

A lover and please let it work to make me happy

To start getting my art together

To weigh 128 to 125 and to be healthy

A bathing suit

Frye boots in the winter

A new winter coat

To be friends with Ed

Please let Peter call soon because he cares

Nice bed sheets

Pair of dark green cotton pants

Velvet thongs

Long hair

Let things be OK with the Con Ed man

A shoe rack like Jane’s

Toe operation

Tooth fixed

To be more discreet—tell less of my secrets, fears etc, esp. Sex and unkind words about people

Today I feel bad and mad. What the fuck is gonna happen to me. 5th affair bombed out. Each one bothering me surprisingly less and less. This one ended absolutely absurdly. I never did describe Monday night. I got drunker than shit at the Whitney opening. 3 gin and tonics. Had the spins real terribly. Good old Peter took me home. I almost threw up in the cab. He got me to my bed and very carefully undressed me. Hung my beautiful new skirt, my beautiful new shirt, and my color coordinated Opaque Panty hose over a 2 × 4. He was so gentle about it. Then he proceeded to undress himself and got on top of me and fucked me which for some unknown reason I think is funny. If I didn’t feel close to him I’d be outraged by the situation but I guess it’s reached the point where a fuck isn’t an outrage.

It revealed someone I had never known—my mother, as I had experienced her, had a level of composure as completely solid as the veneers on her teeth. She was always dressed impeccably but with the louche ease of someone who knows they’re cool. She couldn’t be rattled, to the point that my teenage fights with her often ended in me trying to shock her by beating the couch pillows or biting my own arm. Anything for her to register an emotion beyond hostile bemusement. This was, after all, the woman who told me not to hold her hand on the way to fifth grade because it would only increase my social isolation.

But here she was—lonely, weight-obsessed, angry, violated. These pages—hundreds of them—became a kind of call-and-response, a conversation I was having with the version of her that once pulsated with need, not only the need to create work but to create a life worth living, just like I was trying to do now. It had felt urgent for my mother, the bid to avoid the adult life she saw as inevitable, the world her parents occupied—desperately trying to keep up, to conform at “the club,” to have daughters who were good representations of their solid American values. Walking back and forth to the Midtown office of the handsy accountant, heels blistering in my pleather Zara pumps, babysitting city kids who asked for sushi as a snack, I felt the same way. But one thing I could say about my mother, no matter how much she had enraged me with her refusal to engage my inner life, was that she had never demanded I be respectable—only happy.

I had made web series and shorts— Creative Nonfiction had even been screened at the South by Southwest Film Festival. None of it seemed to impress her much—she wasn’t ever condescending about my work, just hyper-involved in her own. But when I finished Tiny Furniture —which used snippets of her journals, read aloud to the camera by a frustrated daughter of an artist mother, because they always told us to write what we knew!—and printed it, on the morning of her sixtieth birthday, I dropped it in front of her at the kitchen table. “Sorry, but I read your journals. You once said you wanted to act. This is for us to do together. Happy birthday.”

In a move that was deeply unlike her—she was the kind of mother who pinned nothing to the fridge and walked out of high school plays at intermission—she sat and read it in one sitting. “Okay,” she said, and shrugged. “Let’s go.”

In days, my mother went from my archnemesis to my number one champion, convincing my father to leave the city for the month of November so that we could have the loft to ourselves as a set, staging area, catering hub, and more. She asked friends of hers to donate, amounts that weren’t life-changing for them but were dream-making for me. I overheard her with one on the phone: “It’s good—it’s really good. You’re going to make back every penny.” And she kept at it until we had twenty thousand dollars, an amount that sounded to me like it could keep a family of ten alive for the next five years. It was this dogged belief, this clearing of the path, that has made every aspect of my life possible.

At this point, between my festival adventures and a network of inexperienced but willing bodies from high school, college, and even Myspace, I could assemble a crew. My producers, Alicia Van Couvering and Kyle Martin, were both NYU graduates with a level of professionalism that made everything I’d done before look like what it was: child’s play. And so, with the hastily written script in hand, we set up shop at the dining room table and began preproduction. All we were missing was a cast.

Jemima Kirke, the one friend in high school who had seen me as more than a comic sidekick, had recently surfaced from a rehab in Florida and come back into my life like a summer rainstorm, sudden and pleasingly violent. Although she had never acted beyond a few Stella Adler classes taken out of boredom, I knew her beauty—so disarming it stopped men in the street, and especially when we were thirteen—was enough to make her presence onscreen work. She was more luminous now—freshly sober, pleasingly curvy—than she’d been when she was the most luminous girl in high school, and it slapped me across the face: She was my muse. She had always been the person I aspired to behave like—part Lolita, part Keith Richards, with a healthy dose of indie sleaze and a haughty sense of manners about very specific things like being late.

David Call was an actor I’d met through friends, and he’d been on Gossip Girl, which at the time was as impressive as saying you’d had a supporting role in an Orson Welles movie.

And Alex Karpovsky, already a darling to the same set who worshipped Greta, I had run into at nine a.m. at South by Southwest as he crossed the road still drunk from the night before and I’d demanded his number—my first agenda had been to kiss, but when that failed, collaboration seemed fine.

The film had intentionally been written to be shot mostly in and around my family’s loft, and would also star my brother (still, at that time, a sister), my mother, and even some of our neighbors. Until I got that PD-170 camera, I had never acted, beyond some alarming high school productions, though I had always harbored some quiet sense that I could do something in front of a camera that I wasn’t able to do in real life. But, unsure of anyone else who could encapsulate the specificity of, well, me—I gave myself the role.

I had only ever directed with a crew of one—me, holding the camera and the microphone at the same time, occasionally assisted by one of the guys from the Safdies’ office, who would just stand there and roll his eyes at how much I didn’t know. My previous shoots had been haphazard, dragging equipment and rolls of seamless paper across town, so heavy that I had to stop every few feet to pant.

But, with help from a group of people whose confidence likely stemmed from the fact that we somehow had access to what seemed like a fortune, we tried to run Tiny Furniture like a real set—and I could see the difference it made. With some measure of foresight, the footage seemed to come alive, imbued with something deeper than the scene I’d written. Much of this was down to my cinematographer, Jody Lee Lipes, who had been a star player at NYU’s undergrad film school, with an eye that had been refined by watching European minimalists like Michael Haneke and Tom Tykwer. He had already filmed Afterschool, a movie that premiered at Cannes, and he had a quiet confidence that made me feel like we were doing something of note. Before Jody, nobody had ever pushed me to consider the frame, the light, or even the words on the page. I knew only about first drafts, not the push to perfect what had tumbled out of me. But Jody was meticulous, from the way he dressed—pressed work shirts, Red Wing boots and jeans without a hole in sight—to the way he packed his bag and sharpened his Japanese pencils. I could feel myself growing quickly, the way a baby keeps tripling its weight. At night, when the crew would clear out of the apartment—leaving empty bags of chips and bits of gaffer tape for me to clean up so that my parents wouldn’t have a breakdown—I would sit and watch every take, rapt, glowing with the sense that I was becoming someone new with every day finished.

We wrapped our eighteen-day shoot just after Thanksgiving. I celebrated by going to Brooklyn and letting the man with the cleft lip cum on my back, but for the first time, his dismissive attitude didn’t sear me. I felt as if—without his knowing—I had transformed from a silly little plaything to someone to reckon with (it didn’t hurt that I’d stolen about seventeen filthy sex lines directly from his mouth and used them for comic effect in a film he had no idea I was making).

We rushed to edit the film to have it ready for South by Southwest, which was fast becoming the hub of a DIY film movement. People like Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, Lynn Shelton, Barry Jenkins, and the Duplass Brothers were making small-scale films that were having an outsize impact—and South by Southwest was where they all converged. The chief programmer at the time, Janet Pierson, had taken an interest in my earlier work, programming Creative Nonfiction —which everyone, everywhere had rejected, including the festival’s previous programmer—in a Wednesday afternoon slot that was nowhere near prime time but close enough to the action that I was encouraged to go on. When we finished editing Tiny Furniture —hours before the deadline for submissions closed—I sent it to her along with a note that was as florid as any written in the history of letters. “This film is an expression of what it feels like for me to be alive!” I wrote. And I meant it.

In the days that followed, I returned to babysitting, trying not to think about who might be watching the film, and what they might think of it—or me, naked, crouched in the shower, weeping after a humiliating sexual liaison in a sewage pipe. It helped that my parents, upon seeing the finished product, had nodded with the kind of respect they usually only showed to dead artists.

I still remember where I was when I got the call—on the toilet, midstream, at the massive penthouse of a family with five kids whose names all started with the letter J who kept a separate fridge for babysitter’s snacks, which were all generically branded from Costco. Janet had watched the film, and she wanted us to premiere in competition at South by Southwest the following month.

When younger artists tell me about what seem like small triumphs—getting accepted to a festival, getting a note of encouragement from an artist they love—I always try and remind them to celebrate these early wins. Those first experiences of creative acceptance are unparalleled, because you don’t know enough to worry.

One morning in December, Jemima had called me at seven-thirty a.m. I felt the vibration under my pillow, and her name at that hour filled me with terror.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m pregnant,” she trilled. We were still at that age where the only appropriate response seemed to be, “Okay, so where should we go to handle it?”

But no, she said. She was having the baby. It was bound to happen sometime, was her logic. She was in love—with a divorced father of two who had been excommunicated from his Orthodox community and now had a tattoo of her face on his chest. Anyway, she said, she was doing so well—and with a child in her life, she would be forced to continue that way. It seemed like a sign for us all, that life was changing, that—at the ripe old age of twenty-three—we were meeting our future head-on.

At the festival in March, Jem’s belly was beginning to poke through an unbuttoned silk shirt as we gathered outside the theater for the first screening. My parents had come, my sibling, too—annoyed to be missing school so close to their high school graduation, annoyed to be in this movie at all, but begrudgingly wearing the black satin shift dress my mother had set out for them. I had on a blue minidress with a pattern of swans bobbing around the hem, hoops that touched my shoulders, my hair badly flat-ironed, red lipstick doing little to offset the frame of zits that encircled my narrowing face. (The diet continued, despite the occasional midnight consumption of an entire wheel of Brie.)

I nearly blacked out as the film began to play to a packed house—the first notes of the score, the image of my pale, hollow face filling the screen. It wasn’t until the first laugh that I took a breath, but I stopped breathing again during the scene where the audio un-synced—almost imperceptibly, but just enough to create a stilted, propofol-haze. It only lasted a scene, but I spent the next hour whispering to Alicia, our intrepid producer: “Is it still doing it? Is it doing it now?”

As the credits rolled, the theater erupted in applause. We filed one by one onto the stage for a Q and A, and then—lingering outside—a line of people waited to congratulate us. “You’re going to win the prize if I have anything to do with it,” one juror whispered.

We spent the rest of the festival bobbing from party to party, sunning ourselves by Barton Springs, walking five miles out of town to a party we were told had wine, taking our shoes off and, at one point, attempting to hitchhike the rest of the way. Every review that came in, every compliment from an adult who seemed to know what they were talking about, was yet another cherry on top. Dayenu —it would have been enough.

One night, playing pool with a group of filmmakers from Dallas with sexy accents and their silent, surly girlfriends, I received an email from someone who identified himself as David Carr. He was a New York Times reporter whose name I recognized from his days as the paper’s “Carpetbagger,” reporting on Hollywood awards season. He had received a DVD of the film and wanted me to meet him in the lobby of the Driskill Hotel at ten. I didn’t know enough to understand that he was asking for an interview. I showed up in a too-tight crushed velvet minidress and promptly ordered an ice-cream sundae (this is when I learned that whatever you do in front of a journalist will end up in print as evidence, in this case of my hungry naïveté). David was in his early fifties but, having very publicly struggled with a crack addiction that nearly killed him, he had the hunched shoulders and throttled voice of a man who was much, much older. He asked me questions—about where I came from, what I was hoping to achieve, just how I ended up shooting a sex scene in a large metal pipe—but when he turned the tape recorder off, we talked until way past midnight. He was full of warnings—about the fickleness of Hollywood, the nastiness that would come with being precocious and female. While he was neither, he had seen a lot in his day—as a veteran reporter, interviewing people in their hopeful early days and again years later when they’d won it all but turned bitter. But also, as a dyed-in-the-wool addict who knew the darkest rabbit holes that people could willingly crawl down when given just a little bit of slack in the rope. I listened with bemusement—even spinning out sounded kind of exciting if I was going to do it as a filmmaker—and this is why now, I rarely say anything to young people in the throes of early success except “you can always call me if you need anything.” Because I know from experience that they can’t—and probably shouldn’t—listen. But just like I didn’t know then that some of David’s predictions would prove eerily accurate, I also didn’t know that this was the first of many late-night talks with David. The recorder would never come out again, but for the next three years, he’d be a sort of guardian angel–cum–sherpa, leading me through a landscape I didn’t understand.

The night of the festival awards ceremony, sun-soaked and napping in a two-bed motel room packed with six girls and their too many outfit changes, I heard Alicia shriek. She had accidentally received an embargoed email list of the prize winners. We had won the Grand Jury Prize. “You have to act surprised,” she hissed.

I wasn’t sure I knew how. I wasn’t even sure—in the film shot in my house, mother as costar—I had been acting at all. But when they announced the award, I didn’t have to perform. It was too shocking to hear my name—Lena Dunham, still untested and untainted—called in any context but to the principal’s office for falling asleep too many times in biology class. I took the statuette, thanked my mother incoherently, and held it in my lap on the airplane home, clutching it as I slept in the last row of a ninety-nine-dollar Southwest flight home.

I had no idea what would happen from here. My parents had agreed to lend me five hundred dollars so that I could prepare for and attend the festival, and then I was expected to return to the odd jobs that subsidized my rent-free life. But within hours, emails began pouring in—from sales agents, from talent agents, from managers, from producers. Blithely unaware of the difference between any of these things, I answered them all with a gratitude bordering on demented. “WOW. THANK YOU. IT’S AN HONOR TO HEAR FROM YOU.”

I was used to asking my parents what I should do and how I should do it. We knew artists. We knew writers. We knew niche historians of queer culture. But we didn’t know anyone who made movies, unless you count the video artist who lived next door, who focused on modern dance–infused shorts shot through colored PVC walls (I didn’t).

My father, always the skeptic, told me to ignore the vultures. “What do they all want with a twenty-three-year-old?” he scoffed. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in the film, but this was the man who had often stated there should be a federal law against grad students showing their work publicly. But my mother—whether in ramshackle real estate or at a seemingly picked-over sample sale—has always sensed an opportunity, and her instincts kicked in. She knew enough to know something was happening, and (unlike so many mom-agers) that she wasn’t the right person to guide me. She had only one contact in Hollywood, and she called him.

He was an agent named Peter Benedek, who had founded United Talent Agency—which Google identified as “a top four firm.” He was the brother of my mom’s first boyfriend, Tom, who had wound up a screenwriter (ever heard of a little movie called Cocoon ?). She looked up Peter’s office in the Yellow Pages and was relieved when he said he could cut through the noise.

“I’m your agent now, babe,” he said on the phone, and I detected the reassuring traces of a New York accent.

“So I shouldn’t meet with anyone else who emailed me?” I asked.

“Ever heard of Dick Wolf? David Chase? You’re in good hands.”

Peter said the next order of business was a trip to Los Angeles. I would meet with everyone—film and television executives, producers, even some actors. “The couch-and-water-bottle tour of LA,” he called it.

I could count the trips I had taken without my parents on one hand. “We can’t put our lives on hold for this, honey,” my father explained.

“I have a show coming up,” my mother said. “And anyway, you don’t want to be the girl who shows up with her mommy.” It felt like the fifth-grade hand-holding incident all over again. But she was right. The independence she had given me to figure out what I wanted to do with my life was the same independence she would give me to figure out how I was going to do it.

In LA, I planned to stay with Ti West, a filmmaker I had met during one ill-fated day as a background actor in an SNL digital short that Joe Swanberg was shooting and Noah Baumbach was directing. I didn’t really know Joe—just enough that he would include me on an email calling for people “in hipster looks” to show up at a bar on the Lower East Side to make fifty bucks sitting at a café table. I was paired with Ti, who was in New York editing his soon-to-be breakthrough film, The House of the Devil. What began as a somewhat contentious dynamic—I called out his snotty taste and Diesel jeans; he told me that real filmmakers shoot on real film—had, by the end of the day, morphed into my inviting him to come stay on an air mattress in my bedroom. He had recently lost his illegal sublet and was sleeping in a room that “reeked of cat piss” deep in Brooklyn. I didn’t understand that my parents’ space wasn’t mine to offer. For two strange, tense months—this was in the oddly long year before Tiny Furniture —he slept in my room, my parents seemingly too confused to put a stop to it. When he left again—this time, to a studio on the east side of LA—we talked on the phone every night until we fell asleep. We were in love, I reasoned, which is why he was sleeping with every girl in American Apparel leggings but me. He had once told me that he wasn’t sure he had ever loved anyone, even a relative, so how could someone with their center of gravity this confused ever comprehend where his actual affections lay? It was this dynamic that gave birth to Alex Karpovsky’s character in Tiny Furniture and led to the character, played by my mother, screaming something she had once really screamed: “HE HAS TO GO. YOU’RE NOT EVEN FUCKING HIM.”

Ti picked me up at the airport. Our first stop was Lemonade, a restaurant I wanted to go to because it was frequented by the cast of The Hills. Our next stop was his apartment, a dank single room up a steep set of stairs in the hills of Los Feliz, where—like so many men before him—he slept with only a coverless duvet and a Pulp Fiction poster.

This arrangement lasted my first week. During the day, a young mail room employee at UTA would shuttle me from meeting to meeting, where I met men named Josh and Ben, Jeff and Sam, all of whom said, “We would love to find something to do with you.” (My diary from this time reads like I’m touring Disneyland: “Everyone is so nice here! They’d love to find something to do with me!”) I was uniformly twenty minutes late, confounded by how—depending on the time—twenty miles could take twenty minutes or three could take fifty.

At night, Ti and I would curl up in front of a classic comedy, and I’d wonder what he thought about me. It seemed I was always wondering, trying to understand the position I occupied in someone’s life and making decisions based on my abstract findings. I can’t remember the fight that put a stop to our brief domestic bliss, only that I packed my suitcase in tears and—finding the zipper broken—had to carry my clothes down the stairs armful by armful, loading them into a cab while the driver cursed under his breath in Armenian.

At this point, my mother called in her second and last favor (I guess I really am a nepo baby). She asked my father’s college friend Nancy—a gamine brunette who had lived in LA for decades, writing for trade newspapers about the ins and outs of the business—to open her guest room to me. She was chic in every way—with a perfect bob and pegged pants, like if Audrey Hepburn did yoga and lived in Venice Beach. Her best friend for many years had been the production designer Polly Platt, and she was well aware of the many ways the city could go wrong for people. Now she was married to a successful architect and lived in a modernist compound just a few blocks from the hypnotic chaos of Venice Beach. Her home, all steel beams and suspended glass walkways, looked like a movie set. The kitchen was always overflowing with organic fruit and unpasteurized milk. The room she set me up in felt like a tree house, a double bed and windows on all four sides. She gave me the code to the door, the instructions for heating the pool, and a warning: “Nobody here just wants to be your friend.”

I stayed for another week. I remember very few of the meetings, except for the day I walked into HBO. At that point, I had no sense that television was something I wanted to make, but I’d heard it was a job that could sustain an indie film habit—a job in a writer’s room seemed, as far as jobs went, like one I could handle. Looking around the double-height lobby, with posters for shows that had formed me— The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Six Feet Under, whose finale I could still weep about on command—I straightened my spine, overcome with a desire to impress that I hadn’t been able to muster for any of the Joshes or Jeffs.

In the room that day were a sea of people who would come to define my life for the next decade—Sue Naegle, then the head of series programming, a blonde with the stern sexiness of Robin Wright Penn; Kathleen McCaffrey, her former assistant turned development executive, who reminded me of my reality-TV favorite Lauren Conrad and who spoke with the conspiratorial intimacy of a sorority sister; Casey Bloys, the head of comedy, whose WASPish good looks belied a dirty sense of humor and a taste for nonconformity. We talked about the film, which they all seemed to have watched with careful attention, and about my impressions of LA—“Why is everyone wearing makeup to go to the gym?” I asked. And then they asked me: “What would you want to make?”

It was an unrehearsed response that came out in complete sentences, as if I were channeling in a seance. “ Sex and the City was about being a woman in New York, already established and looking for love. But what about the phase before, when you don’t even know enough to even know what you’re looking for? The New York I know isn’t glamorous—we graduated during a recession. We’re the first generation that can’t reasonably expect more than our parents had. We all grew up on Ritalin and AOL Instant Messenger. We’re having sex fueled by the availability of porn, and we’re feminists who don’t know how to live our politics. I want to see my friends on TV.”

The room was quiet for a moment. “Can you write us a page about that?” Sue asked.

That night, sitting on the floor of Nancy’s perfectly constructed living room in a beam of bright moonlight coming through the sliding glass doors, I wrote the page they had asked for: “These girls are overeducated and underemployed, sure that they’re too smart for their positions as assistants, nannies, and waitresses but not necessarily motivated enough to prove it (or even do their jobs well enough to advance). They have that mix of know-it-all entitlement and scathing self-deprecation that is the mark of all great Jewish comedians and many twenty-four-year-old women with liberal arts degrees. They have varying degrees of ambition but have been raised to achieve. They know they want to be successful long before they know what they want to be successful at.”

Later, I would joke in an interview that the pitch was so informal I had written it on a cocktail napkin. (Not true: I’d actually written it on my brother’s laptop, borrowed for the trip.) The napkin story would become more evidence of the accident of my success, the radical unfairness of a world where things are handed to the undeserving. That may be true, but in that moment, I had never worked harder: to express myself clearly and with conviction, to say something that was worth hearing, to overcome my fear of failure and submit to what life was offering me.

I reread what I’d written again and again, looking for holes, for inconsistencies of tone and theme, and in the morning, I emailed the page to the gang at HBO. Later that day, in the parking lot of a Jamba Juice, I got a call from my agent: “They want to offer you a blind pilot deal.”

I called my father, screaming like we’d won big on a scratch-off lotto ticket.

“What the fuck is a blind pilot deal?” he asked.

“Can’t you just be excited?” I demanded.

“If you think it’s something to be excited about, then sure. I’m excited! This is me, excited.”