Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 20

Latching

The moment I lost my fertility, I started searching for a baby. I wasn’t sure how it would happen now, but I held on to the dream like a child who refuses to stop asking for the same Christmas toy, even after her frustrated parents tell her that it’s sold out.

On one of my many hospitalizations post-hysterectomy—one to remove my right ovary, one to remove yet another cyst from the left—a doctor did an ultrasound and told me I was ovulating.

“Have you thought about freezing your eggs?” he asked.

I hadn’t, no. I had been told—after the hysterectomy, after the hormonal ups and downs and the Ehlers-Danlos diagnosis, after the days and nights spent medicating the pain from simply trying to hold on to the pieces I could—that freezing my eggs would be a challenging process, and one I should have undertaken before all of this.

My mother was in the room when he said it. And, while she had always promised me that the idea of biological grandchildren meant nothing to her, I saw her eyes light up. The next morning, home from the hospital, she had woken me with a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of tea: “Good morning, my beautiful girl.” I was sure I could see what she saw—possibility where there had been none, a basket of pastel easter eggs with legs.

Within days, my father and I were sitting in an office in Midtown, across from Dr. Coperman, a man famous for being able to get eggs out of anyone, anything. His acolytes made it sound like he could extract embryos from a piece of wood. As I told him my story, he nodded: “I don’t see any reason we shouldn’t try. What do you think, sir—should we make you a grandpa?”

“That would be…wild,” my father said. I knew what he was thinking—more pain? More drugs? More money? And for what? But he had always wanted me to have the things I wanted. His life would have been so much easier had he cared much less.

The doctor gave me a bunch of new labels. With one functioning ovary, I was a “good candidate.” Without a husband, I was a “solo starter.” With a gay donor, I was “a user of fresh homosexual sperm” with “FDA-ineligible” jizz. (I didn’t know this when I chose my donor: If you find a hetero art school kid with a ketamine addiction, drag him off the street, and convince him to say he’s dating you, you’re congratulated. If you carefully select an accomplished gay friend of child-rearing age, you are taking a risk that the reproductive authorities won’t sign off on.)

As we paid at the desk—paying so much, just for the chance to try—the receptionist mistook my sixty-nine-year-old father for my husband, which nauseated me, though one look around the waiting room confirmed it was an innocent mistake. We were right at home among the silver-haired men and their non-starter wives flipping through issues of Parents magazine. These men—tagging along to start their second or third families—were the most buoyant patients, the ones who seemed to have the least to lose. The women, meanwhile, were fragile and bloated, boxes of tissues between their knees, waiting for information that would make them cancel their plans for the next two weeks, in either a fit of nesting ecstasy or bereft emptiness.

Within days, my fridge was full of drugs—drugs to prepare for ovulation, shocking supplies of estrogen, medication to trigger ovulation once my estrogen had been cranked to unnatural highs. I was warned that it would inflame any remaining endometriosis in my gut and bowels, that the pain would probably be “uncomfortable,” which is doctor-speak for intolerable. I hired a nurse to help me—to distinguish the medications, load the syringes, inject me in the morning and at night.

“Often husbands learn to do it,” the nurse told me. “But sometimes they faint.”

While I was in rehab, three of my closest friends had gotten pregnant. Each later told me she was hurt and confounded by my lack of curiosity, the disappearing act I pulled, how little interest I showed for the miracle life growing inside of her. I tried to defend myself—I had been coming off drugs. I wasn’t conscious of what was happening to me, much less in the world around me. I was recovering from a hysterectomy and hadn’t realized just how traumatized I was. But I had to realize that I was the common denominator. Two pregnant women could be a coincidence. Three is a nation. When they’re angry, it’s a global movement.

A few months later, my friend Scotty—who was also pregnant, but much less smug about it—brought a doula to my place for a ceremony to honor my uterus and help guide the right child to me. I loved the doula, who wore high-waisted jeans and had fluffy red bangs and looked generally like a nanny from 1975. After some tender dialogue about how each of us is on our own path toward the divine, she tied a string around my waist and asked me to select some beads from a Ziploc bag to make a talisman. I felt peaceful and sleepy, angry and hungry, annoyed that she wanted me to stand up for the end of the ceremony.

I remember thinking, as I looked at this fertility guru, with her Berkeley bangs and open, smiling face—and at Scotty, who was as pregnant as a house—that anyone could be a mother. It even happens by accident. So why, if I craved it so much, would I be denied?

For the last three years, I’d been in a group chat with a few women I knew professionally. It started the day after Trump was elected as a place to vent but then kept going, through professional and personal ups and downs, moments of joy and elation and loss. We met in different cities for dinner, laughing until late, feeling like part of something.

The chat continued as several of us—not us, them—got pregnant and gave birth. People recommended CBD creams and Epsom salts, night nurses and high chairs. They were sensitive to my situation—as the lone infertile woman in the bunch—but nobody could be sensitive enough, and as they shared stories of swelling and nausea, I started to feel the disparity between their bodies and mine.

Most of my texts were sent from hospital beds or waiting rooms, something I told myself not to share but couldn’t seem to hold in. Once I began IVF, and the hormones coursed through me, I was spilling over with emotions I had no place for. The other women in the chat knew I hadn’t been well. They knew I was undergoing this invasive Hail Mary of egg freezing, anyway. And from my couch, as my stomach expanded and my mind burned, I was erratic and needy, one day obsessed with adoption and another dying to locate a surrogate, one day sure I’d be fine if I never had children and the next convinced my life had been a waste. I detailed my hunt for chic bathtub rails and disability-friendly toilets and maybe, if I were in my friends’ position, I also would have questioned the idea of all of these realities meeting to make a mother.

“Being a mother sounds hard to do when you’re so sick all the time,” one said when I announced I’d try to have a baby within a year if the embryos succeeded.

A few moments later, another said, “I’ll be taking some time off this chat to focus on the new baby. Wishing you well in your journey.”

I watched them sign off, one by one, as if the first two had created permission for a mass exodus. Try as I might—and boy, did I want to—it was hard to believe the chat had petered out simply because of our busy days and sleepless nights. I had been unable to hide my ugliness—my need and my desire, my obsession and my inadequacy. I was the guest nobody wanted to talk to at the party. I wasn’t cruel, or entitled, or demanding. I was just alarming. I was something nobody wanted to look at. I didn’t want to look at me, so why would they?

Later, one of these women was diagnosed, one by one, with every illness that had plagued me. She took the same journeys I did, used the same doctors, ended up at the same rehab. She wrote, asking for advice, but she never mentioned the chat—how quick she had been to exit, how repulsive my state had seemed to her. I didn’t mention it, either, just sent her back a list of resources, including a link to my favorite heating pad.

I answered all of her questions, at all hours, until she finished with me again. Maybe it wasn’t my illness that scared her, or the lingering effects of radioactivity. Maybe she was just famesick, suffering, and unaware. And who was I to judge?

Later, a fact-checker for an article I was writing on infertility reached out to her. They asked: “Is it true you left a group chat with Lena Dunham because her struggles changed the tenor of the conversation?”

She confirmed.

I learned that none of my eggs were viable on Memorial Day, in the midst of the pandemic. I was in Los Angeles when I got the call from Dr. Coperman, the slight Jewish man who was my entry into—and now exit from—the world of corporate reproduction.

I hadn’t been expecting the fertilization procedure to take place for another few weeks—that would happen after the eggs were unfrozen, determined viable, and placed in a petri dish with my homosexual donor’s tested sperm. My sperm donor and I were still working on our agreement with a family lawyer, a boilerplate contract that basically stated that no matter what happened—if I died in a fiery plane crash or was committed to the state after tattooing no boundaries on my face—he would have neither the obligation nor the ability to interfere with how the child was raised. Considering the amount of money I had already spent on this process—one round was a few scripts’ worth of cash—three thousand dollars in lawyer’s fees seemed like a steal.

I had awoken that day at two p.m. in a cold sweat with a migraine—another EDS symptom I’d been experiencing since I was prepubescent and still could not find a solution for—and had this exact thought: If I had a child, how would this fly? I padded to the porch to smoke, and listened to a song called “Young and Sad” on repeat. Then I went back to bed, spilled a Mexican Coke on my sheets, cleaned up the mess with one of my nice towels, and then left it wadded up on the floor.

I didn’t understand why Dr. Coperman was calling on Memorial Day. I was as surprised as anyone that doctors continue attempting to make vanity embryos during pandemics, much less on national holidays. When he spoke my name with that sympathetic downturn, the apologetic-doctor voice I have come to know so well, my face crumpled in apprehension.

“Hi, Lena, this is Dr. Coperman. I’m sorry to be calling with bad news, but we were unable to fertilize any of your eggs,” he said. “As you know, we had six. Five did not take. The one that did seems to have chromosomal issues, and ultimately…” He trailed off as I tried to picture it—the dark room, the glowing dish, the sperm meeting my eggs so violently that they combusted. It was hard to understand that they were gone. That it wasn’t like trying to meet a friend for coffee on a weekend and missing your window, rescheduling for the next. It wasn’t like that at all.

“You’re such a nice lady,” he said. The word lady revolted me. “We all would have loved to give you a different result.”

He told me that he knew what I had gone through to get those eggs. That he saw how hard it was. That I was a trouper. A trouper is what they had called me every time I came back to set with something broken, did my job when I shouldn’t have. I tried to believe that there was some value in the experience, in being tough through something tough. But ultimately, it felt like going on Survivor and acting like the camera crew wasn’t there. I had volunteered for the gig, and so the points were false.

Dr. Coperman said that we would have more results at the end of the week and could discuss my “remaining options,” but he knew that I knew that there weren’t any. The moment in time when I made those eggs was like a rip in the sky. It rained gold coins for a day. We brought out our buckets.

I didn’t know where to put my feelings, so I emailed my friend Bill—a friend who had come into my life like lightning in a clear sky, just as my life had begun to unbraid, and had made me feel, at the lowest moments, as if I had something to offer. He would show up to the hospital—his dirty blond hair windswept, his collar raised like Richard Gere in a ’90s movie—and read to me. Auden poems. Bits of novels. His hands were always full of baked goods, and his smile told me he knew where I was and could imagine where I was going.

A few months into our friendship, we decided to take a spontaneous trip to Sedona. It happened to fall a week after the 2016 election. Jack was on tour. I’m not sure what he thought when I announced that my first vacation in years would be with a relative stranger. But then again, he wasn’t a stranger. What had begun as an email correspondence so grand that I waited for his notes like a woman with a lover away at war had morphed into the kind of relationship where we could sit for hours in front of a fire, moving between antique gossip and revelations so crisp it felt like we were on hallucinogens. If he hadn’t been married and gay, I would have hurled myself out of my life with Jack for him. What I got was better—when I was ejected from that life, he was there waiting. When I wept under a tree at rehab, looking more like Ferdinand the bull than a woman, he assured me weeping in fields was par for the course. He sent me books and emojis and made me feel that there was a future to be had after touching the bottom of the pool—you only had to push yourself back up toward the surface and let the water do the rest.

In Sedona, we ate black bean burgers and went to a store that sold crystals in bulk and took a hike to the vortex with Feather, a gray-haired woman with the proud bearing of a mountain goat. She asked us to write our wishes on a piece of paper, set them alight, and then scream into the canyon. I don’t remember what we wished for—we may have been focused on national security—but I hadn’t felt that safe in a long time. Sitting there, our backs against the cool rock, surrounded by a landscape as wrinkled as an ancient face, we were nowhere and everywhere, smiling stupidly. Feather gave us a complimentary bag of her proprietary tea recipe, which smelled a lot like Sleepy Time but was a lovely gesture.

He emailed me back almost immediately:

Oh hell.

My love, I am so sorry.

You’ve spent an enormous amount—money the least of it—to arrive at this conclusion. I’m so sorry.

You don’t need or want a cheer me up speech from me—grief is grief and should have its dark day. But I can tell you that I read the last pages of Charlotte’s Web to our kiddo tonight and balled and she held my arm and teared up and I could not have felt closer to another human being if I’d carried her. How your children arrive won’t matter in the end. I know because mine fell from the sky. Just like you did for me.

Hugging you from here. Let me know if there is anything I can do. In the meantime, EB White knew what he was talking about when he ended his love letter to friendship, his fable of unlikely love and acceptance between a spider and a pig:

“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

You, my dear, are both.

Love and grief and friendship forever

I saved it, thinking: This should be in a book someday.

A few weeks after I found out that I would never become a biological mother, I started lactating. It was light at first, leaving subtle wet circles on my shirts. When my breasts began to ache, my friend Scotty came over to show me how to express the milk into a mug. It wasn’t much, but afterward, I felt massive relief, as if a pimple had burst. The doctor didn’t seem as alarmed by this incident as I was—not by the health implications or the poetic ones, either—and so I woke up every day for a month and pulled at my breast like it was rising dough. One day, I awoke to find it had stopped. I was surprised at the grief I felt—for a moment, I had known something—just a hint—about what it was to be a new mother. Now I was just a barren hag again.

When I was in rehab, I was encouraged to do exposure therapy for PTSD. The counselor in charge of this effort asked me to choose a trigger to experience—a memory, an object, a sound—again and again until it no longer had the same effect. The goal of this exposure therapy was that what had alarmed me would no longer hold so much power, that I’d be able to move through the world inured to something that had previously destabilized me. Some people chose to relive a terrible memory, an assault or a loss. Others looked at photos of an abusive parent. I chose a very specific issue of People magazine. It had been sitting innocently on a couch in the common area when it had called to me, demanding that I flip through its pages. It was a special issue on “Celebrity Motherhood,” full of rich, glowing women in cushy living rooms and lush, green yards, surrounded by well-dressed kids playing with high-tech toys. Many of the women were pregnant, standing at kitchen counters in leggings and linen tops, chopping vegetables. One sat in bed with an eye mask, a toddler cradling her growing belly.

I told my therapist that the magazine had ruined my week—no, my life, which was already fairly ruined. “What’s the worst part?” he asked. I described how it made me feel physically—the itchy nausea that set in when I thought about the logistics of a uterus stretching, of a vagina engorging and hips widening. After all, I have had nothing but grief from those parts of my body. Pure grief. I have loved being a woman, but I have hated operating the equipment.

But it was more than that, too. I thought of an abstract future in which my ex and his new partner conceived a child. I imagined the paparazzi photo, a long-lens shot from across an autumnal street in our old neighborhood. She has on a camel overcoat. It hangs open around her stomach, which extends like a beach ball under a clean white T-shirt. He is protecting her with one arm, ensuring that their unborn child is not grazed by oncoming traffic as they step off the curb. The image—this projected future page of People magazine—is evidence that his journey toward parenthood did not end with me. And that mine ended with him.

It’s wild how far you can drift from yourself in the process of trying to get what you want. What started as wanting to carry the child of the man I loved became wanting to have a child with a man who was willing to help me have one. Which then became hiring a lawyer to draft a contract for a gay sperm-donor friend and calling a surrogate who came highly recommended by another celebrity. I was forced to admit, when the eggs failed, when I was all out of ideas, when I knew that I was too sick just then to be raising anyone anyway, just how much of it was about finishing what I started. I tried to have a child. Along the way, my body broke. My relationship did, too. In the process—because of it?—I became a functional junkie. I had lost my way, and a half-dozen eggs sitting in Midtown promised to lead me home.

Instead, each step took the process further from my body, my family, my reality. Each move was more expensive, more desperate, more lonely. I stopped being able to picture the ending.

There is a lot you can correct in life—you can end a relationship, get sober, get serious, say sorry—but you can’t force the universe to give you a baby that your body has told you all along was an impossibility. The irony is that knowing I cannot have a child—my ability to accept that and move on—may be the only reason I deserve to be anyone’s parent at all. I think I finally have something to teach somebody.