Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 21

Homeward Bound

I met him in a backyard in LA in the heart of the pandemic. He was sitting in a folding chair with his mask on, ankles crossed in perfectly worn Vans. He wore rolled-up jeans with a ring of keys on his belt, a torn vintage tee, and a fitted hat like a bike messenger—the kind of look I would see on a friend’s Tinder date and say, “What is it, 2009?” But when he lowered his mask to take a sip of water, I felt my stomach flip-flop. It was something about the symmetry of his face, the golden ratio of his pillowy mouth to his strong yet cherubic nose. It was like they had been selected right from a “Brad Pitt facial features” catalog.

Eighteen months earlier, I had prayed to no longer be so boy crazy. Scotty had made a passing joke about the revolving door of men I had brought to her house for dinner, and how it was only a matter of time before her children would call the new boyfriend by the last one’s name. (“Hi, Jason!” “I’m Josh.”) Knowing she was right, I benched myself for a while.

At first, celibacy was liberating. I stopped keeping vigil over my body: I ate crackers in bed until I fell asleep with crumbs on my pillow, let my armpit hair grow, wore massive cotton underwear. My phone was no longer a hot brick of anxiety, and my heart no longer beat to the rhythm of the oddly busy schedule of some random photo assistant with a man bun.

And then I saw him. And I knew, in a matter of seconds, that I was going to throw all that hard-earned peace away to make bad choices—sober, self-aware, full-throated bad choices—with this fucking guy.

Later that evening, he approached me in a dusky corner of the yard. He introduced himself by a name that sounded too sensible for someone who had disoriented me so totally, so I will call him Craig (it evokes the same feeling). He said, “I noticed your tea has been steeping for about five minutes. If that’s green tea, which I think it is, that’s too long. It should steep for three minutes at a hundred and eighty degrees.”

Before I could respond, he wrested my cup from me, removing the soaking tea bag and placing it in the pocket of his jeans, where a wet mark began to expand.

“Wow,” I said. “Are you a big tea drinker or something?”

“No, I just like to see things done the right way.”

I asked him how old he was, and he told me thirty-six and then corrected himself: “Thirty-five,” he said. “Sorry, you make me nervous.”

Christmas was coming. Like many people separated from their families by geography and the virus, I had plans to spend it with a few friends. I had gone from the borrowed house in the hills to renting a “trailer” in Malibu. I put trailer in quotes, because it had a Jacuzzi tub, poured concrete floors, and a chandelier that turned various neon colors when a switch was flicked.

“The guy before you put a lot into the place,” the landlord said. I soon learned—when a child’s retainer arrived addressed to Charlie J. Sheen—that it had quite the storied previous resident.

Craig texted me, just a hello, a nice to meet you.

With a boldness that had evaded me for some time, I wrote, “Come over on Christmas and dance with me by my pink tinsel tree.”

“Do you mean it, though?” he asked. And then a moment later: “Still recovering from something, so can we keep this a little low-key and mellow?”

“LOL,” I typed. “What do you think, I’m gonna knock you up and we’ll wake up married in Vegas? I’m moving to London in two weeks. Just come slow dance with me.”

When Craig came to the door, he looked older than I remembered, sun-beaten and drowsy. He had a bottle of tequila under his arm and held it out to me.

“No thanks, I don’t drink,” I told him, but offered him a glass. It was the last “no” I would say to him.

He’d brought me cigarettes—to be clear, this was a “the world is ending anyway” habit I’d picked up too late in life and have since kicked—and we smoked them on the deck. Somehow, we got on the topic of crying, and he told me he hadn’t shed a tear in ages, even though something awful had happened to him recently. I asked him what had happened, expecting him to come back with a small travesty, a minor mistake, but instead it really was awful. Unsure of what to say, I rubbed his shoulder through his corduroy jacket.

I drove us to Zuma Beach in my golf cart, making a dangerous U-turn on the Pacific Coast Highway.

“Am I scaring you?” I asked. “I don’t have a license.”

He was drinking tequila from a cup, legs crossed, leaning back against the torn leatherette seat. “No, but you really can’t drive, can you?”

On the beach, we sat on his coat, listening to a mix of ’90s pop and getting closer and closer until our sentences were trailing off and I could feel his breath, which smelled like booze and cigarettes and not drinking enough water. When I finally pressed my mouth to his, he seemed unsurprised, as if he had been the one to start it.

On our second date, Craig came over dressed nicely. Our last night together had ended with an awkward tussle in my overlit bedroom, jokes about how he’d have to return and put on a “better show.” It felt like, in the intervening days, he’d read several bestsellers about dating, so chivalrous was his behavior. He brought deep-dish pizza to reheat in my oven. He gave me Japanese slippers in case my feet got cold in the UK, in a houndstooth pattern he knew I liked because of the coat I had been wearing on the day we met. We held hands across my dining table under the light of the pink Christmas tree.

He was the kind of sex partner who put in exactly as much effort as he needed to in order to seem like he cared about how women felt, which was not that much. But he was a dazzling kisser—to attempt the sports metaphor, it was like he was mastering the form and might even become a coach once he was past his prime.

Later, curled in a towel on the end of the bed, I asked Craig if he would like to take a trip with me someplace. One last hurrah before I disappeared to a foreign country and an unknown future. He said he “probably would,” that it sounded stupid given his desire to stay single, but also like “something we should do.”

Something we should do was all I heard.

A few days later, I texted Craig, asking whether we would see each other one more time before I left. “Twice is just hooking up. Three times and at least I can call it an affair in my memoir.”

“I’m more than happy to,” he wrote back, “but I prefer tryst to affair,” sending me a screen cap of the definition: “A private romantic rendezvous between lovers.”

Craig and I pulled into Santa Barbara the next Tuesday. He carried our bags into a sweet little cottage with a fireplace, a tufted couch, a dining nook, and a white canopy bed. I had made every effort to engage in a way that said “casual,” referencing a few times that I “happened to have two days without work and this hotel was easy.” (Neither was true.) Outside the room was a wooden board, where the hotel spelled out guest’s names in twee wooden blocks. At that point, I still made a habit of traveling under the name Rose O’Neill, not because anyone really cared where I went anymore, but just because it felt good, not to…be.

“Well, Mrs. O’Neill,” he said. “Let’s test the bed.”

I could hear birds and what I thought might be cicadas, the hum of faraway traffic—or was it the ocean? As he kissed me into silence, I wondered how much of the magic was my delusion and how much was his uncanny ability to ramp up intimacy—the way he made lingering eye contact that first day, grabbed the back of my neck in the car up to Santa Barbara like my father does to my mother on long drives.

Later that night, sitting by the fire, I asked Craig how he was feeling about the trauma he had mentioned, the thing that meant he couldn’t really be here with me or with anyone. As he spoke, I nodded empathically, a judgment-free zone. When we talked, I had a tendency to present myself as healed, a done deal, nicely serviced—if you purchase me, you won’t even need a warranty!

We somehow got on the topic of my boy craziness. I told him about how it had manifested early and often, and that recently I’d found my journal from 1991 in which I had drawn a picture of my crush—orange face, blue shirt, mushroom cut, surrounded by dozens of messy pink hearts—with the words, scrawled above it: “This is my frand Colin he is my favrt boy.” A few years later, I had violently crossed these words—and his face—out with a ballpoint pen, humiliated by my former self, but it is all still legible.

“Who was your first crush?” I asked.

He considered. “I can’t really remember. I probably just looked at a group of pretty girls and was like, ‘Any one of them is fine.’ ” I was fine. This was fine. It was all, he was saying, perfectly fine. And that was meant to be enough.

The next morning, I was leaving for London—the film that the pandemic had delayed, Catherine Called Birdy, seemed to finally be headed into production. I woke up early—not to pack, but to prepare Craig’s presents. I decided which of my prized gold chains would fit around his neck, carefully measuring them against each other. Then I handwrote a letter describing exactly what the last two weeks—it had been two weeks to the day since Christmas—had meant to me.

I was proud of the letter. I felt, at the time, that it was a beautiful letter, the kind of letter a person would feel lucky to receive. A resistant man would become a loving one. A scared man would become a bold one. A reticent man would think, This is one of the all-time great notes. This is one of the all-time great women.

Reading it now, it has the melodramatically girlish timbre of that movie where Mandy Moore sings a gorgeous song to her high school class, kisses the popular boy, and then promptly dies, just as things are getting good for her. This has been, I was saying, a walk to remember.

Blinding sun shone through the window of his bedroom and onto my face, and I felt like a flower opening at hyper-speed in one of those time-lapse science videos you watch in eighth grade.

“You look very pretty today,” he said, smiling. “And happy.” I was in his lap, in a floral dress.

He set a timer for thirty minutes so I wouldn’t miss my flight. We stayed like that for a long time, my legs wrapped around his waist, my dress half up, kissing in that patch of sun like two lazy cats.

When the timer went off, I put my gold chain on him. It fit perfectly, falling just to his clavicle. He took photos of us and told me not to stick my tongue out, to be serious “for memories.” I looked at him, and he looked straight down the lens. (“Testosterone in shoes,” my friend would say when I texted the picture later.) I saw into the future—how this chain would dangle on other perfectly fine women, on sunny days, in a bedroom he would be content to stay in until his landlord sold the place or he finally decided to pack it in and commit to a life with someone. There was no telling which would come first.

Then I handed him the letter and told him not to read it until I was in the air, which he agreed was the most romantic way.

I told Craig I would miss him, lip quivering as I said that I wished the timing were different. “But the timing could have only been the timing,” he said like some sort of surf Buddha, smiling radiantly. He was at peace. It was all easy for him. He stood outside, waving as the car pulled away.

Later on the plane, I would look at the photos from Craig’s room and feel a queasy homesickness for a place that had not been my home, longing for a lover who had not loved me, wondering if he’d read the letter yet, wondering if he’d read it a second time, wondering if he was already sleeping, and then wondering if he was awake.

What I didn’t yet know was that I would get off the plane to no message, hoping against hope that some service glitch in the airport allowed only my mother’s texts to come through.

I didn’t know that later I’d receive only a brief acknowledgment of receipt: “Hey, bud. Thanks for the nice note.”

I didn’t know that over the next week, his messages would slow to a trickle, then stop.

I didn’t know that I would spend the entire fourteen days of quarantine in London crying, as much at the rejection as at my own stupidity, at the force with which I’d tried to hurl myself at an immovable object, the pieces of myself I’d given away.

I loved that necklace.

I barely slept, as if in some kind of pheromonal withdrawal. “How can you go from having sex with someone five times a day to not even wanting to know them?” I wailed to my mother.

“Well, that’s your issue right there,” she said. “You can’t have sex five times a day. You won’t know which way is up.”

I didn’t know that two weeks after quarantine ended, a friend would encourage me to get back on the horse and send my number to a man he swore was “not your husband or anything, just a fun-times guy.”

I didn’t know that man would, in fact, become my husband.

He came over and immediately asked if I wanted to order pho. Before it had come, he had told me that he was sober; that he was working through his own childhood trauma, which he’d been unable to access until sobriety; that he lived to make music; and that, at nearly thirty-five years old, he was finally okay with the idea of being alone.

Immediately, I would ask this man hard questions, and I would really hear him when he answered, slowly and deliberately, sometimes telling me things he knew I wouldn’t want to hear, but doing it anyway (which I’ve come to think is love). Within weeks, he would be living with me in the small furnished apartment in Marylebone that had so recently felt like a purgatory, walking the dog with me on rainy nights as she carefully avoided the puddles—a California girl through and through. He would cackle beside me as he showed me British comedy classics, The Inbetweeners and Brass Eye, and one night, watching him smoke a rolled cigarette at the window, I’d think—without a whiff of the mania I’d felt that day in Ventura— What a perfect place this is.

Soon, this man and I would decide to try really living together. “Let’s test it out for six months,” we said, “and if either or both of us doesn’t like it, at the end of our lease, we will go our own ways, no hard feelings.” We shook on it.

We found a rental in Hampstead, where we would take Ingrid—whom he loved as much or even more than I did, staring at her face for hours, calling her “mama” and “baby” and “ beautiful girl”—ambling past sweet families on picnics or men “cottaging” in the brush, depending on the time of day. Then to St John’s Wood, where we watched tourists write their names on Abbey Road and strain for good pictures at the famous crossing. And to Islington, where I memorized the silhouette of everyone’s parlor through their windows, becoming particularly obsessed by one Italianate mansion overlooking the park with windows so cobwebbed, I was sure Miss Havisham was in residence (Dickens described her as “scarcely forty,” and her fate had so recently seemed like mine).

Before the six months were up, we would get married in Soho, behind a red door in the late afternoon, our guests spilling onto Greek Street and smoking among the drunken party boys after midnight. We would drive seven hours to Wales to adopt a second dog, a scrawny boy the color of sticky toffee pudding, deciding his name could not and should not remain “Dobby.”

Craig would text me a few times the next year, pictures of him repairing the necklace each time it broke, until finally he said, “The jeweler says he can’t fix it again, guess I need a new one.” One night, probably drunk, probably horny, he wrote, “You were so nice to me, Lena.”

Writing, like dating, is just as much about what you refuse to see as what you observe. Craig’s immaturity made me feel less old, and his beauty made me feel more beautiful. I wanted, too badly, to be both of those things—and so I saw very little. It took longer than I’d like to admit he hadn’t awoken me—I was waking, and he walked by. He was a mirror, not a light. He was a Tube ride, not a destination.

They all were—and I got out when we reached my stop.

In January 2019, when I was at my sickest, after yet another unclear hospital stay, after leaving once again with more pain than I arrived with, I got a tattoo: It reads SICK in thick script designed to look like rope. It’s on the back of my neck, massive. When my mother saw it, she shrieked: “How could you do that? You don’t want to put that energy into the world!” At the time, I screamed with the hot rage with which riot grrrls have always educated their mothers, that I was taking back the word. “Like bitch, ” I explained.

I told her that her entire matrix for understanding my life—her sense that I was on a path toward healing, pursuing normalcy—was incorrect. Being chronically ill meant that you were never getting better. There was no well when your status quo was sick, and maybe we’d all do better to take that into account. I had seen too many doctors who explained, in their sunny offices full of supplements and skin oils, that “healing is not linear.” I had spoken kindly to my body, told her what a good job she was doing. It felt like it was time for some tough love.

When I met my husband, he told me about his trauma, and I told him two things I saw as facts: I was sick, and people did not like me. If he could be comfortable with those two immutable truths, then we could be together. I considered this very adult behavior—preparing someone for the worst, so that you could never be accused of false advertising. He nodded. “Wow, you’ve really been through the wars. What do you want for dinner?”

I was stunned by the ease with which he moved past it. Later, he explained: “I knew those were the stories you were telling yourself.” He also knew, very wisely, I wasn’t ready to be disabused of them. We cling to our tragedy just as tightly as we cling to the things we love most, airtight explanations for what ails us.

He pushed me little by little, knowing implicitly that to come on too strong would be to lose me—maybe, just maybe, I was capable of getting up for a walk on my worst day, just as I was capable of working sixteen hours straight at the computer or barking from a director’s chair for months on end. Somehow my mind had done a flip-flop, where the hardest aspects of my life (work, interpersonal challenges) seemed breezy, and the things most people do by instinct (walk, drink water, sleep) had been rendered impossible.

It was subtle, the way he pushed me toward something that looked like healing, even if I refused to call it that. Until my body wasn’t without pain, but my pain was just a part of living in my body. I learned new habits. I spoke about myself differently. I dared to do more. Little by slowly, I began to resemble a person who was part of the world.

It should come as no surprise that as this happened, I began to write again—powerful bursts of ideas seemed to wake me up and carry me through the day, so that hours, once again, seemed like minutes. I began to see story everywhere—not just in the monotony of what my body had endured, but in the new way it was moving, in the places it was taking me, in the corner cafés and flower shops, in line at the museum and yes, even in the doctor’s waiting room—where my husband taught me to ask questions instead of accepting, ad nauseam, the stories I was told and the pills that came with them.

I used to try so desperately to distinguish emotional pain from physical pain, psychic distress from the siren calls my nerve endings seemed to send out day and night. It was so important to me that they be separate, that nobody consider my body’s revolt to be the result of my mind’s disorganization. It never occurred to me that as my body disintegrated, it was speaking to me, and that it got louder when I refused to listen. It was telling me—because I refused to see the signs, heed the warning lights—what I couldn’t let myself know about the empty places I had been taken just because I was full of the desire to make art. It knew that fame held only disillusionment and isolation. It knew that the people who loved me when I was up were not going to hold me when I was down. It was certain, even though I could not be, that this was not the “more” I had always thought I was destined for.

It was telling me that I didn’t have to cooperate with my own commodification, that I was allowed to stop. That, in fact, soldiering on didn’t prove I was worthy of all I’d been given. It only proved that I was as dense as my detractors told me I was.

I was always asking how long it would take to heal, and I was always being given answers by men in white coats with no vaginas. Answers like: “In six weeks, there will be no more soreness,” and “Withdrawal can last anywhere from three weeks to three months,” and “Give it five days, and you’ll be back on your feet.”

As I collected wounds, I also collected failures: I never felt strong in the allotted time. I never felt like myself. After a while, I forgot what “myself ” meant.

I’ve been sober for almost eight years now. It’s been almost nine since my uterus came out. It’s been seven since the first ovary was removed, three since the second. This doesn’t begin to account for all the smaller procedures, the scraping and biopsies and cysts that hurt more than their size would indicate. My abdomen may be forever shifting its contents, searching for a new equilibrium, even after I forget what all the gurgling is about.

Then there were the smaller traumas, the spikes in cortisol, the wounded friendships, numbers blocked and unblocked, waiting for embarrassing stories to fall further back into the Google results for my name. I’d give myself small allowances: a day in bed staring at the ceiling, an afternoon with a book I was too anxious to read, a few hours with my cellphone charging outside my room. I didn’t give myself room to dream, to heal, or to grow. People on the Internet were cruel to me, but nobody was crueler to me than I was to myself.

At one of the first sober gatherings I ever attended, in a church in Midtown, I heard somebody say, “Time takes time.” I remember wincing at the simplicity of it, thinking I could never survive in a sect of people who spoke like a refrigerator magnet come to life. Of course, we shouldn’t Compare and Despair. Obviously, Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes. And duh, triple duh, le duh with a cherry on top: Time Takes Time.

But if I’d believed that time takes time, that healing takes time, I would never have forced myself back to work with a tummy full of sutures, then lay next to a heater on the floor of my dressing room during every spare moment. I wouldn’t have raced back to the set with a broken arm, sobbing alone in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant while the crew waited outside, chewing pain pills on a moving train while the AD yelled, “Next stop, we shoot!” I wouldn’t have hurled myself at every boy with pink lips, given blow jobs in Griffith Park at night, or demanded commitment from men I didn’t even want to be committed to. Time had to pass. My body had to expand, contract, expand again. My breasts had to sag, one lower than the other. My eyesight had to go, just a bit. I lay in bed. I watched shows about women searching for love on beaches, weeping through eliminations, fucking under the gaze of a night vision camera, going places that I could not. I raised one clingy dog and one independent one. I yelled at my parents when they suggested I go for a walk. I apologized from my gut. I stopped saying sorry when I didn’t mean it. I got married, but it didn’t heal me. I made art again, and people were kinder, and still I ached. I showed up to the party, twisting my knee the one time I tried to wear heels. I stopped being invited to the Met Gala, but people started inviting me to their weddings again. Sometimes I didn’t have the energy to go, but I was honest about that. Honest was all I could be.

I have found a way to do this job I love. Hollywood’s culture has always been permissive toward everything but human frailty. Cruelty in the name of achievement was considered justified, but stopping in the name of grief or pain or simply fatigue was not. I finally started to believe that being honest, kind, and passionate was enough, and that I was allowed to ask for what I needed so that I could make things and still survive. If someone responds with judgment or mounts new demands because of my limitations, I know to move with purpose in the other direction. As a result of this filtration system, I work with people who I see eye to eye with. This isn’t to say that Jenni or any of the colleagues who were around for Girls meant me harm, only to say that I had no idea how not to harm myself.

And one day, people started looking at me, tilting their heads and saying, “You look good.” They didn’t mean my hair—it’s going gray, witchy strands shooting out from the crown of my head like I’ve been electrocuted. They didn’t mean my body—these days, I tuck my stomach into my pants like an undershirt made of flesh. They certainly didn’t mean my eyebrows, which are only half there. They meant something in my eyes: After so long spent as two solitary wells to nowhere, two black holes of need, they were simply brown again. They meant I could sit without folding and refolding my limbs, that my voice didn’t start to wane toward the end of a meal. They meant I had waited it out—minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, year by year.

That’s what I mean when I say I’ve survived.