Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 22

It’s Back

A few weeks before finishing this book, I checked into the Sunset Tower for a two-night stay. It had been almost three years since I’d been in Los Angeles, and I briefly debated whether I was really ready to return to the scene of not just the crime, but a full-on spree. Since my last visit, the lobby had only become more overrun with the “have your people call my people” people. Since then, I had gained a lot of weight and then lost only a little. Since then, Jack had gotten married to a beautiful actress with a surprising laugh whom I had befriended seven years ago, when I was recently sober and raw as a plate of that famous Sunset Tower tartare, on the set of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And once again, he’d won the friend that I wanted, so when I wept like a child on the first afternoon I saw a paparazzi picture of them kissing on the Brooklyn Bridge, I knew that nobody would understand why I was so upset, that they’d assume it was because I was jealous of her, and that made me weep even harder.

They live in the Brooklyn Heights apartment I hated so much and she must like, but I heard they were often in LA, and I imagined running into them, into anybody—would they even recognize me? Or would I experience that unsettling moment in which they tried to identify me, as if I were an actor behind heavy prosthetics making a gritty play for the Oscar? I wasn’t sure I could bear it.

But ultimately, I couldn’t imagine anywhere else I might be happier in the city. Silver Lake reminded me of the pandemic, of having a PICC line installed in my arm, the tube through my armpit and into my heart for months, chain-smoking furiously, just doing my small part to make it harder for the heavy-duty antibiotics to do their job. Malibu I associated with being alone; Venice Beach with being so embarrassingly hopeful upon first arriving. It seemed to me that during my twenties, I’d somehow managed to taint entire boroughs, entire metropolises. But the Tower contained so much that the events somehow canceled each other out—like in rehab when the PTSD intake questionnaire asked me to name the memory that triggered me most and, unable to settle on just one, I could only picture snow.

When I first landed at the Sunset Tower in the final days of November 2011, I was still dazzled by the constant, glaring sun, the postcard palm trees, the endless parade of beautiful people who would, in any other town, take your breath away but who Los Angeles rendered anonymous as they all lined up for the same trendy salad. Back home in New York, I would have been standing at the intersection of Hudson and Canal in a thick scarf, face chapped by freezing wind, as I somehow always managed to find myself looking for a cab at that four p.m. ghost hour when they all turn their off-duty lights on. Finally, giving up, I would have wandered for blocks uptown, holding my arm up half-heartedly at every car that passed, until I finally made it the thirteen blocks to my therapist’s office on foot, running twenty minutes late for a fifty-minute session. Back in New York, I would have been waiting for a text that never came, then gone home to pick at a scavenged dinner of whatever was in a jar or box in our kitchen, listening to my parents talk through logistics.

“We can stop into Gagosian for ten minutes.”

“But it’s never ten minutes with you, Laurie, is it?”

“I’m sorry that I actually like seeing people.”

I’d watch them move from couch to bookshelf and then to dining table to sort the mail, their usual choreography, as I bit into a pickle. It felt as if I’d always be watching life from a kitchen island, filing dialogue snippets away for a rainy day that might never come.

And in Los Angeles, it hardly rained, but it was that day. This was the city where you go when possibility knocks on your door. Not just possibility, but glamour, intrigue, the promise of something I didn’t want to admit sounded like it would feel pretty fucking good: affirmation. Boatloads of affirmation.

From the window of my first room at the Tower, I could see down Sunset in both directions. One looked toward a slew of lesser hotels where people on lesser missions might have lesser cocktails; one was the Sierra Towers, where multiple Friends cast members apparently had spacious midcentury apartments despite also having spacious midcentury houses in the same vicinity. I could see nearly to the border of Beverly Hills, at which point the grass became so green, it looked plastic. In the other direction was the seedy cowboy-themed bar where aspiring Playboy Playmates rode a mechanical bull, while some guy, who had printed up business cards solely to create these scenarios, watched. The view from the other side of the building held the Chateau Marmont, its various tentacles spreading up into the hills like a castle in a children’s book. And, on the side of a modern condominium down across from the old liquor store, I could see a billboard that changed its content monthly and would, two years later, feature a heavily edited image of my face, ten stories high.

When I arrived the first time, I said my name at the desk—my real name, not any of the aliases I would check in under for the next ten years. I was just Lena. The name meant nothing to them. All that they noticed, likely, was the fact that—however frazzled, hair unwashed, mess of fake gold bracelets rubbing off green on my skin—I was unfailingly polite, asking their names, thanking them at every step of the process.

“You don’t have to thank me so much,” my father used to say, usually as he did something for me that I should have been doing for myself—chores I should have been better at by that point—or on nights when I forgot my key and had to buzz the door while he was sleeping.

During all those days I spent at the Tower—hundreds and hundreds of them—people did for me what I should have done for myself. Prepare my food. Make my bed. Launder my underpants and fold them gently around tissue paper, so that every time they came back, it was as if I were opening a new purchase. And nearly every time I reentered the building, I stopped at the desk, apologetic: “Guess who forgot her key card again?”

“Learned helplessness” is what our Girls producer Ilene had called it—the condition of celebrities who have to call someone else in a panic just to find out the password to their own computer, the code to their own door, to ask for a latte or a change of bedsheets or “a doctor, a doctor right now please, I can’t go through hair and makeup until I see a doctor.”

Which is why it was funny that, when I actually became helpless, I was already very good at it. I’d had a head start at letting people remind me to eat, to sleep, to breathe. A hospital is no match for a girl who has had her bananas peeled for her, her hair tucked behind her ears again and again by hawkeyed homosexuals watching closely on the monitor, her schedule announced instead of discussed.

But then again, celebrity is no match for illness. It isn’t a magic talisman that protects our bodies from doing what bodies inevitably do, and that’s break down. Just like everything in life, some of us get there sooner than others.

This time, I arrived late on a Tuesday night with a neatly packed suitcase, hair in a low bun, wearing all black. At the desk were new young faces, adorable in their blazers.

“Reservation under Rose O’Neill?” I asked a tidy, earnest guy I immediately recognized must be a budding actor, based on the committed line reading that came next:

“We actually don’t have a reservation under that name? Might it be under anyone else’s?” I was traveling for work on someone else’s dime. They had handled all this. And it was too late to call my assistant back in London, whom I work diligently not to bother on off-hours, keeping all passwords and important documents in a file I do, in fact, know the password for.

And so I hazarded a guess: “Ruth Stein?” No. “Renata Halpern?” Still nothing. “Lauri Reynolds?” Not Lauri, either.

“Could it be under another name, possibly…?” he asked, coaxing me. At the same time, he studied my face, doing—I felt but couldn’t be sure—the mental math to try and ascertain whether I was the person he thought that I was.

But then again, maybe not. After all, he would have been about ten when Girls first aired, when I first made my way through these doors. Maybe he just thought he was about to be yelled at by someone he assumed was well-off enough to stay here in a junior suite but not so well-off as to be able to afford good dermal fillers. He may have been dreading the moment he’d have to send me packing to the Best Western next door.

And then it came to me: “Lena Dunham? Is it under…Lena Dunham?”

He let out an audible gasp of relief. “There we are. All right, Miss Dunham—you’re in room eleven-oh-eight. We’ll have Joseph take your bags up—you’ve stayed with us before, I gather?”

I debated telling them this next part—would I sound like a fossil? Desperate to matter to a storyline that barely contained me? But finally I said it, because, to quote my father for the millionth time, “It has the added benefit of being true.”

“I actually used to live here,” I whispered conspiratorially.

“Oh, we know, ” his colleague, a long-haired butch with a bow tie, added.

I panicked momentarily. “Did they tell you about the time I set the table on fire?”

“Oh, wow, no, haven’t heard that one,” she said, laughing. “Do we have to lock up the matches?”

“No,” I told her. “It was a different time.”