Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 3

Role-Play

Just as suddenly as I had been dropped into Hollywood—sitting in waiting rooms in Sunset Boulevard high-rises, wandering down a faux New York street on the Warner Bros. lot—I was dropped back home and into the windowless bedroom with the broken dresser. Despite the HBO job offer, I was still under my parents’ rule, which consisted of such unreasonable standards as “wash the dishes” and “don’t fuck in our bedroom.” I got my contract to write the pilot, accepting the Writers Guild minimum fee with glee, signing the pages with a dramatic flourish and faxing them back within minutes. I would spend the next few months developing the pilot, but first, HBO told me that I would be set up with something called a “supervisor.” I had only had one of those in the context of my job as an intern at the Audubon Society when I was sixteen—she was the woman who made sure we chopped the frozen mice with precision so that the baby owls could digest them properly—but this wasn’t that. This, they explained, was a kind of mentor, someone who helped you if you had never written TV, to understand the invisible but mighty set of rules that governed the form. They said they had lined up a string of candidates for me to talk to on the phone (this was a pre-Zoom world, when you had to imagine what people looked like based on subtle cues such as whether they used the word “sick” or “dope” to mean “cool”); all were people with experience on comedies I either knew about or knew I should know about.

The first was a woman named Jenni Konner. Jenni had written on beloved shows like Undeclared and created a number of series that were too smart for prime time and therefore short-lived. When we got on the phone, she felt immediately familiar, the way people describe meeting siblings they have been separated from for a lifetime and finding that they share commonalities that cannot be explained. She had the unmistakable cadence of a person widely considered funny. And, we had something in common, she told me: Her father, Larry—a writer on, among other things, The Sopranos —lived upstairs from us on Desbrosses Street with his second family. They were actually the neighbors my mother had the most hostile relationship with, lots of passive-aggressive emails about garbage being exchanged. The closest he and I had ever come to speaking was when we were accidentally locked in the building’s vestibule together because of a malfunction with the lock, and he cursed under his breath about missing a meeting and being “fucked in the fucking ass.” But to me, it felt like destiny. She was thirty-eight, a mother of two, recently split from both her husband and her longtime writing partner. She was going through something of a personal renaissance, she said, and had been looking for a new way forward when someone handed her a burned DVD of Tiny Furniture. “I watched and I thought, ‘That’s what it feels like to be a person,’ ” she said. I lay back on the bed as we talked, feet on the wall, assuming the dreamy pose of someone falling in love in a 1950s movie.

Toward the end of the call, she told me, “You should talk to everyone. Play the field. I’d love to do this with you, but you have choices and chances, and you should try it all.”

“I don’t want to talk to anyone else,” I said. “I want you.”

Later that night, I emailed her. I remember it ended with “P.S. I can tell by your voice that you’re beautiful.”

“Wait until you meet me,” she answered. “I’m a pudgy hairy Jewess.”

A week or so after Jenni and I joined forces, I received an email from someone claiming to be Judd Apatow. He said he loved the movie, that it made him laugh and reminded him of the joy of just making something for the hell of it. Signing off, he told me that if I ever wanted someone to help “get enough money that it will make the process way less fun,” to please call him, followed by what seemed to be his direct line. My friend Isabel had recently discovered a program that allowed you to send emails from false addresses—we had thus far only used it to pretend to be each other’s former hookups—but my first instinct was that this was her work, a little nudge to remind me not to get too big for my low-rise britches. I did, after all, love Judd enough that I had gone to the first available showing of Funny People, at midnight on a Thursday, the year before. I also had a running joke about my desire to do a “reverse Apatow” and cast a very hot guy as my romantic partner with zero conversation about the disparity (it wouldn’t be a joke for long!).

I returned his message: “If this is really Judd Apatow, holy shit. If this is Isabel, fuck you, this is a mean prank.”

He said, “Call me and I’ll prove my identity—but say hi to Isabel.”

I called him later that day—I thought an assistant would answer, but it was just him, and I stuttered my name out, nervous in a way I hadn’t been since the bat mitzvah where we were all asked to do karaoke and I chose Sir Mix-a-Lot. He said he’d heard that I was working on a pilot with his old friend Jenni, and asked if we needed “anyone else to jump on.” He was coming to New York the next week and invited me to meet him for a drink at the Mandarin Oriental.

I was so scared before that meeting, waiting in the lobby in a shift dress my mother had chosen when I was hostessing the year before because she thought it “read young professional.” But when he appeared a few minutes late, looking lost in cargo shorts, white tube socks that hit right at midcalf, and a Get Him to the Greek T-shirt, my anxiety eased. He reminded me less of a Hollywood uber-producer than of Howie, the Long Island exterminator my mother’s cousin Eileen was briefly married to, and to whom my father referred as “the insect assassin.” Judd ordered a Diet Coke and then a cranberry juice, so I did the same. I was comforted by the awkward way he busied himself reorganizing the utensils we weren’t using. He told me about the movie he was starting to write—a sequel to Knocked Up, this time focusing on Paul Rudd’s and Leslie Mann’s characters as they turn forty (an age that sounded impossibly advanced but that I will have turned soon after this book reaches people’s hands for the first time). Afterward, he took me upstairs to meet Leslie herself, who was having her hair and makeup done by a squad of handsome homosexuals—they were preparing to go to the Met Gala.

As I left, Judd said, “This will be fun. Mostly.”

A few weeks later, HBO flew me out to LA to start work with Jenni. This time, they put me up in a hotel with the glamorous name of Le Montrose. It had barely been a month since South by Southwest. In the meantime, we had sold Tiny Furniture to IFC Films for distribution, making exactly twice our budget—enough to pay back all our investors and offer several thousand dollars to every major collaborator, which is unheard of in indie film. I had also been offered a job by uber-producer Scott Rudin, adapting a young adult novel about a pair of teens falling in love over Christmas in New York while on a scavenger hunt organized via secret notes left at the Strand Bookstore. It didn’t occur to me to ask myself whether I really loved the book, or to think if I had something unique to offer the adaptation—it was Supermarket Sweep, and I was going to grab everything I could before the clock ran out. It’s only in the last few years that the feeling has even started to ease.

I landed midmorning, and Jenni told me to come right from the airport to meet her at her new apartment—in the El Royale, a glamorous art deco building in Hancock Park where she had just moved after the breakup of her marriage. When I arrived, the doorman told me she wasn’t in—“errand running long, see you in ten” Jenni texted—and I sat in the ornately tiled lobby, listening to the tinkle of the fountain, smelling the freesia in the air, and wondering if any twenty-three-year-old had ever been so lucky or so nervous.

When she appeared, arms full of Whole Foods bags, she was decidedly not chubby or hairy. She was slight, with tanned skin and thick but tidy brows, a rosebud mouth, and middle-parted auburn hair that hung in artful layers to her shoulders. She was wearing boot-cut jeans, a flannel shirt, a shrunken, boyish blazer, and thick black glasses (“lady comedy writer drag,” she would later call it). She led me through the lobby, kissing every resident on the cheek as we went—a fabulous bald-headed gay man with swollen biceps, a Ramones look-alike with the aged Chihuahua, a gorgeous blond actress with the singsong voice.

In her galley kitchen, she poured me coconut water, something I had never tasted, and served us raw-food wraps. I had never been friends with anyone going through a divorce before, so I didn’t know how much to ask. She hinted that she was in love again. She told me her kids were with her half the time. We realized we had birthdays two days apart. I learned all of this over the next few days as we sat on her floor, laying out a concept for the first episode on pink index cards. I had already written pages and pages of background for the girls I imagined: Marnie Michaels (a stand-in for my friend Audrey, a pretty and productive know-it-all who always got what she wanted but never seemed to enjoy having it); Jessa Johansson ( Jemima, a genre unto herself ); and Hannah Horvath (me: good intentions but bad execution; maybe—hopefully—lovable). Jenni explained the mechanics of a pilot, what it had to do—she introduced me to ideas like A and B stories, inciting incidents, and comic set pieces. She asked me what would change for the characters from the start of the pilot to the end, from the start of the season to the end, and—this is assuming we ever got this far—from the start of the series to the end.

One afternoon, as we were working, a census guy knocked on the door. Jenni welcomed him in and, as she answered his questions about her water usage, he and I locked eyes. He wasn’t cute, but he also wasn’t ugly, and he seemed to think the same about me—which was, at the time, the defining characteristic I looked for in a sex partner, though I’d done it with plenty of people for whom this didn’t seem to be true. After he left, Jenni smiled at me knowingly: “After I watched your movie,” she said, “I wasn’t sure if you dated or if you were the kind of woman who always got in your own way. Now I see you do just fine.”

Looking back, the only hint I ever got, during that first dreamy week, drunk on the possibility of what we were making, that Jenni was more than my new Manic Pixie Dream Friend was one afternoon when I arrived to work and, mussed from sleep, she welcomed me in and then said I could sit on the sofa, but she needed to return to bed. I sat alone for a few hours, flipping through home décor magazines, until it became clear she wasn’t coming back out, and I returned to my hotel room. We didn’t acknowledge the lost afternoon, and over the coming months, we talked and texted constantly, the kind of rapid-fire getting-to-know-you that can feel like falling in love. But occasionally, she would disappear for a day, two, three. When she reemerged, I tried not to be needy, never asked where she had been.

Usually, I was the friend who was curling into myself, pulling back from the world. I had always wanted friends but had never known exactly what to do with them. If I had been known for anything in high school, it was planning elaborate outfits for events that, at the last minute, I was either too tired or terrified to attend. The people who loved me seemed continually frustrated by what I could not seem to do, the basic niceties of human interaction I was unable to fake if the mood and circumstances were not exactly right. This must have seemed, to the outside world, like profound selfishness—but I felt continually frustrated by not having the words to explain the difference between “won’t” and “can’t.” For someone who had made a study of having the right language, I could never summon it when the subject was my own constantly fluctuating level of ease with the outside world.

This friendship with Jenni was different. She made me feel safe to appear in all my incarnations. If the situation involved social pressure, she was like a pillar, steady and charming, clearing a path. One on one, everything she told me about herself fascinated me more. Every joke she told made me cackle, instead of the forced laugh I pushed out at college gatherings. I started using her signature phrases—“that’s bananas” and “100p.” The more time I spent with her, the more I wanted. The more attention and praise she offered, the more I required. I wanted to walk like her, talk like her, dress like her. She wrote texts back to boys for me (“they should always be one word, like yes, ” she said) and told me which face cream to use (a blemish balm that looked chalky in the bottle but made your skin shine). The only thing I wanted to do alone was write: pages and pages of this world, which was becoming clearer and clearer in my head the more she reflected it back to me.

In early summer, on one of Jenni’s trips to New York, she took a very pregnant Jemima and me out to brunch. She was flattering, playful, but it didn’t seem to work on Jem. When Jenni got up to use the bathroom, Jem hissed, “Now I know why you’re talking differently. You sound just like her. ”

The place where I still sounded like myself was on the page. I was, with Jenni and Judd’s encouragement, churning out pages and pages of dialogue—not with any real endgame in mind, but as a way to try and understand what these girls sounded like. I wrote parties and workplace scenes, breakups and hookups. The show was, at that point, still called The Untitled Lena Dunham Project, and I was trying to understand what Lena Dunham sounded like when given the space to exist beyond her parents’ living room.

One thing we agreed on was that the main character shouldn’t be from New York. Coming from New York deadened the central conflict, which was the idea that these girls had come to the city looking for Sex and the City and gotten dead-end internships, bedbugs, and HPV.

It was on a trip to the Traverse City Film Festival, in a quaint Michigan town famous for its chocolate-covered cherries, where everyone apologized almost as much as I did, that it occurred to me I had always felt at home in the Midwest. I had never had my mother’s New York power bitch energy—I couldn’t cut a line, or chew out a cab driver, or get into a subway car where someone had shit themselves without throwing up. And so, it was decided: Hannah was a transplant from Michigan. I couldn’t understand that experience, but I could understand winding up somewhere you had never expected to land and just trying to keep up.

Even as Jenni and Judd worked to give me the confidence to tackle the series—since Judd had signed on, HBO now wanted me to write four episodes and a “bible,” which is a thorough guide for where a series will go, rather than just the pilot—I was unable to let go of the dynamic I had begun with the man with the cleft lip. No matter how many times it was made clear to me that I would never occupy a meaningful role in his life, I was hell-bent on trying, even if trying meant exposing myself to increasingly degrading sexual acts and unendingly poor follow-up communication.

Even my friends, no strangers to all manner of heterosexual humiliations, seemed confounded by my attachment to him—he was awkward, gangly, sometimes wore a turtleneck, laughed at a pitch only dogs could hear. But since the moment I had first glimpsed him, reading alone in a booth at a bar, I had felt—in some primitive part of my mind that overruled logic—that he was my destiny. Never mind that he had a girlfriend, so our early sexual encounters took place in the street. Never mind that once he broke up with that girlfriend, he immediately replaced her with a new one who wasn’t me. And never mind that as his approach to sex had grown from perfunctory to sadistic, the clearer it became that he wasn’t scaring me away. I still thought that true love was performed with the one-sided devotion of a kicked dog. It was like one of those contests where you had to keep your hand on a truck until you were the last one standing and you won not just the car but the respect of the people—never mind that you had pissed yourself in the process.

Despite what was to come, I was not yet much of a substance user. In fact, I only did it with him. But often I would appear at his door with the pills stolen from my mother’s various dental surgeries wrapped in a tissue. Whatever we snorted just made it easier to justify my continued presence in an environment where I could expect anything from being gagged with my own tights to having a serrated blade run lightly along my leg, leaving only the faintest white line.

I explained this to myself by saying that he had seen something in me, something I couldn’t see in myself. I didn’t know it yet, but what I wanted was to be degraded, humiliated, punished just for the desire to be wanted. I was too young then to know that this complexity of desire was as common as his Ikea couch, and so every orgasm I had pulsated with guilt, every morning came with an edge of grief—if I carried on like this, I could never be a girl worth my father’s adoring glances again. Maybe I already wasn’t. If he only knew what I was doing when I didn’t come home until four a.m. on a Tuesday night, I thought, he would spit in my face.

When all the pills and the legs stretched behind my head and the dutifully answered calls failed to convince him I was the one, I decided that I was going to invite the man with the cleft lip to be my date to a film festival, which was screening Tiny Furniture that June. Nobody was more shocked than me when he—this person who would barely let me sleep over after he fucked every hole I had and probably some I didn’t—agreed to fly across the country and spend four nights with me. Maybe it was because, despite the fact that the film festival put all its filmmakers up at an anonymous Hilton downtown, I told him they’d given me a room at the Chateau Marmont gratis. I knew he was attracted to symbols of louche 1970s excess, that he’d find this glamorous and tempting. And so it was worth putting the room on my first American Express, which was white to denote student status and allowed for discounts on academic texts and at museum bookshops. I hadn’t yet been paid by HBO, so there weren’t even any funds to apply to this frivolous nonsense. It was, like the entire relationship, some beautiful bullshit that would fuck me in the ass later.

I went a few days ahead to work with Jenni. When he arrived at LAX, he rented a red Camaro, a gesture I found both touching and repulsive, although it could not have prepared me for the maroon leather vest and matching low slung pants he chose to wear to the film screening itself—a film I had not chosen to disclose included a play-by-play reenactment of the first time we had sex, a coupling that took place in a massive steel pipe hidden in a Con Edison plant in Dumbo.

“Suck my cock,” the actor playing him hissed. “Choke on it. Good girl.” I looked next to me, at the fuckboy Pablo Escobar impersonator who was apparently my sexual kryptonite. He was taking it surprisingly well.

People just like to feel seen.

Our newly acquired film distributor, IFC, was throwing a small party for the cast and crew in a bungalow back at the Chateau Marmont. I needed to make it an early night, though—now that we would be working together, Judd wanted me to see big-budget filmmaking in action. He had invited me to visit the set of a soon-to-be classic about female friendship called Bridesmaids. A teamster driver (a term I had never heard, save for on the vintage T-shirt of a poetry bro at an internship I did for only ten days: I Have a Team—It’s Called the Teamsters , it said) would pick me up at eight a.m.

The party was in one of the bungalows surrounding the pool. I was surprised, once finally inside the famed hotel, to see how shabby the carpets were—with frayed edges, cigarette burns—and how antiquated the fixtures. It was, perhaps, the charm for the truly rich—to stay someplace that had the one thing that money can’t buy: a real live history of excess, intrigue, and rock ’n’ roll, which was spelled out down to the browning curtains (it has since been tastefully redecorated). In the bungalow, the pool glowed and lit the space up like one of the many neon signs on Sunset beyond. The half-darkness acted as a cloak of invisibility—or, at least, the man, who my friends just called “Lip,” seemed to think so: Trying to echolocate him, in that way a young woman always can with a man who intends to evade her, I found him in the space between the wall and the refrigerator, kissing a girl who had arrived in a black bikini top that revealed her underboobs before that was a style thing. It was then that any notion of an early night went out the window, as I pounded vodka with any mixer I could find, until I was blacking out and coming to in endless iterations around the hotel. A glimpse of me waking up in the elevator. A moment lying at the edge of the pool. A dalliance with John Belushi’s ghost in the stairwell. And then, somehow, I found my way back to bed, waking in a panic at the exact hour the teamster was meant to pick me up.

He was a gruff former stuntman who informed me that the drive would be over an hour to the country club where they were filming the now-iconic wedding scene. I immediately knew this was going to be an issue—I wasn’t sure if I was going to puke, shit, or some combination of the two that was utterly new to me—perhaps new to humanity as a whole.

An hour—and two vomit stops by the side of the road—later, I was in Judd’s trailer bathroom, listening to him conduct a conference call while trying to expel the night’s sins from different ends. This had always been inevitable. I had seen the Mack truck coming toward me from a mile away, and stood still until it reached me, and now here I was, roadkill—ruining my career before it even started.

As I watched the crew film the country club engagement party scene—Rose Byrne winsome and winning, Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig taking every alt joke thrown at them like big-league catchers—I begged myself to sit up straight in the director’s chair that had been brought out for me. Judd kindly introduced me to writers, producers, and the film’s director, Paul Feig, in his natty suit. I dry-heaved into the toilet in the potpourri-scented bathroom, somehow even sicker than I’d been before. Through it all, Judd introduced me cheerily as “a great director.” Yeah, more like a great big whore.

Years later, when I finally told Judd what had actually been happening to me that day, he told me he’d known all along. “I had seen your movie,” he said. “You think I thought you were well-adjusted?”

Lip and I spent one more night together at the Chateau. The lobby was full of people who felt comfortable there, people who knew not to sit on the upholstered poufs, that they were low tables rather than high chairs. That evening, empty and sour from all that puking, I went to the restaurant by myself and decided to have dinner. Mind you, I hadn’t eaten meat in over ten years—I had been a militant high school vegan, so irritatingly didactic that the popular boys xeroxed fliers with my face on them that said Lena: The Other White Meat . Yet as I looked at the menu, I felt so much rage—at the man I was here with, at myself, at my weak and anemic way of moving through our dynamic—that I housed a cheeseburger and then ordered another, the juices running down my face and shirt, a sad little vampire.

After dinner, I went upstairs to our room. We lay in bed watching Billy Madison. “I might be a creep,” he told me. “I might not be any good. I can’t love anyone. And I’m sorry about that.”

I nodded, determined that—no matter how much of me he had seen, and from how many angles—he would never see me cry.

This man, whom I wanted so badly that it felt like love—ten years my senior but boyish in his lack of civility and desire never to be responsible for anyone else for as long as he lived—would ultimately serve as the inspiration for the character of Adam on Girls, something I didn’t neglect to tell the actor playing him.

“He didn’t act like he loved me,” I explained to the real-life Adam playing the TV Adam playing man with cleft lip. “But…and I can’t explain it any better than this…I just know he did.”