Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 6

What Will We Do This Time About Adam?

I bought my first apartment smack in the middle of season one. It was in a building in Brooklyn Heights—a former women’s college dormitory with the glamorous, Gilded Age name of Mansion House. I was not deterred by the fact that the median resident’s age was eighty-six. It was a NORC, aka a naturally occurring retirement community, and as far as I was concerned as a young professional who needed to focus, this was the ideal set of conditions. I would later learn that there was a building-wide crisis in which adult diapers being thrown down the trash compactor was turning the basement into a hellscape, and at least three times a week, an ambulance arrived to ferry off one of our people. I was fairly sad for a few days after I saw Selma, a petite woman with a bob and a cane, taken out in what appeared to be a body bag—only to be surprised by her walking out her door later that week with a bitter wave. Back from the dead.

It was a building I knew well. I had spent the summer after college graduation there, in a one-bedroom on the sixth floor, babysitting for my high school chorus teacher’s three obese cats while he was away doing a summer stock production of My Fair Lady, playing the single gayest Henry Higgins ever to hit the stage (and that’s really saying something). I loved everything about the place—the black-and-white-tiled lobby, with its rattling chandeliers; the trio of doormen, who were de facto therapists but would have let a group of vandals in with a smile; the somehow comforting presence of the emissaries from the medical alert necklace company, who were constantly in and out handling product malfunctions and false alarms. (Selma didn’t want one, though—“demeaning.”)

So when my chorus teacher tipped me off that his neighbor had died about three hours ago (that’s New York real estate, baby!) and his next of kin were trying to sell the one-bedroom off quickly, I was there in a flash. The whole place was painted a chipped eggshell blue, with stained wall-to-wall carpeting that had once probably been a color called “whisper white” or “French creme” and several broken TVs, their antennas protruding at odd angles. I made a shockingly low offer, wired the entirety of my season one earnings (lower than you’d expect—at that age, I didn’t know how to do anything but smile and gasp when offered anything with three zeroes at the end), and became, at twenty-five, a New York property owner. I had been imbued from an early age to believe that owning a piece of New York real estate—no matter how small, shoddy, or odd—was the most power and security you could attain. As far as I was concerned, these 750 square feet represented not just my own success, but the realized dreams of my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother before her. Fuck, I was making great-great-grandma Regina proud, the fourteen-year-old Polish girl who had arrived alone at Ellis Island in 1901 with just a fur hat and a dream.

But no sooner had I finished celebrating did I realize what a project I had in front of me. I brought a friend to see the place. It was only seconds after he said “it doesn’t feel too haunted” that an old-timey telephone immediately began to ring somewhere in the living area. We looked everywhere for any sign of a phone, or even a jack, staring at each other with Blair Witch terror. Finally, his hand settled on a spot on the wall by the kitchen that was vibrating with the sound.

I showed my father—usually a real MacGyver when it comes to spaces. “Jesus, Lee, this is an absolute shithole. You already paid?”

It was an unexpected new ally who advised me on how to revamp the place. A few months earlier, another email, which seemed like it had been fabricated by the same app I thought had created Judd’s, appeared in my inbox. To be fair, noraephron@aol.com seems like remarkable bait. (Later, I would learn AOL emails are a Hollywood flex, employed by moguls so respected that updating their servers from 1998 isn’t a necessity. I swear: These people are out there, single-handedly keeping America Online afloat.)

Nora had sent a short message saying that she had seen and enjoyed Tiny Furniture —“I laughed out loud, which is rare”—and offered to take me to lunch, an invitation I accepted readily and showed up uncharacteristically early for. She was as her writing advertised—elegant, so sharp-witted it left you stammering, and generous with both her praise and her candor.

Over many of these lunches, I would get to know her in all her singularity. For a self-mythologizer, she was shockingly modest but never bothered with the faux humbleness that plagues so many successful women. She had barbs, yes, but she saved them for the bad guys. She made me feel like she was welcoming me into a club, a club of women who were putting up with bullshit, sure— she had a blasé way of talking about the inevitable disrespect and disloyalty of the business, qualities I hadn’t encountered yet but trusted she knew more about than I did—but I would also be granted access, via her meticulous taste and lack of gatekeeping, to the best blowouts, bagels, and cardigans. She told me never to laugh when a man suggested a joke for a female character that involved her period, but instead to ask, “Do you get heavy periods, Bob?” She told me that a director’s best friend was a Patagonia jacket, not fleece but the thin goose down: “It has to be the cropped zip one, or it’s nothing.” She ordered half the menu and took a slow, ecstatic bite of everything. And it was always good, because she didn’t go to places that served bad food. She loved being over seventy, because she could ride the subway everywhere for a reduced fare: “Can you believe? Nobody tells you about this incredible upside to aging.”

Over nearly the next year and a half, she offered me time—time I would later learn that she knew she had little of, as she had been diagnosed with a rare blood cancer years before, about which she told almost no one. As far as I could tell, as I watched her speed-walk toward the subway with her perfect shag haircut and her pegged black pants, she was just getting ready for an endless third act.

I would also learn, when she died in 2012, just how many of us felt that we were Nora’s special, her chosen, the bearer of her baton. She liked strays. She liked oddballs. She was precise, professional, and tidy. But she didn’t mind if you were greasy-haired and ham-fisted. As long as she thought you were at least a little funny.

She never made me feel like a failure, even when I failed. She loved to give suggestions. Which is why, at the restaurant at the Gramercy Park Hotel, where we split a perfect cacio e pepe on a gusty fall afternoon, I told Nora that I had bought a dud apartment.

“It seemed like a great idea,” I told her. Now it had been sitting, blue and full of televisions, for two months while I continued to sleep on the blow-up mattress next to my mother’s hand weights.

“Does it have molding?” she asked.

Yes.

“Original tile?”

In the bathroom, pink and black.

“So, a pink toilet?”

Yes, yes, a pink toilet.

“It can be saved.”

She told me I would call a man named Enda. I would ask him to strip the carpets and get to the original parquet: “It’s got to be down there.” I would ask him to use a very specific white, which was actually a mix of two whites. “Satin finish for the woodwork, matte everywhere else.” She told me where to get shades—not blinds, shades. She even suggested a refrigerator, a 1950s replica SMEG that barely fit an ice cream but looked cute as shit. I chose the pink, which, in her view, was twee and incorrect but better than nothing.

When Enda and his guys were finished, I took the N/R to Court Street, walked along Clark and cut across Pierrepont, turned onto Hicks Street and through the Mansion House courtyard, and past the doorman, who was frantic, as the elevator had broken and he had been carrying octogenarians up and down the stairs all day. I opened the door with the rusty key and looked around at the most beautiful room I had ever seen.

No sooner had I put down roots in Brooklyn Heights, I was off to Los Angeles again for three months’ time to edit the first season of Girls. Inspired by Judd’s love of improv, we didn’t just have the scripted scenes, but hours and hours of ad libs and experiments to comb through, to find the tone—somewhere between meandering indie and classic situational comedy, with a touch of coming-of-age drama.

Intent on having a real Los Angeles life, like Play It As It Lays without the heavy barbiturate use, I decided against the long-stay hotel. Instead, a glamorous friend who was everywhere you wanted to be suggested a sublet in the hills above West Hollywood. Knowing I couldn’t drive, she assured me, “You can just walk to the Chateau every night. It’ll be divine.” The house was owned by the founder of the Bowery Hotel, a man known for his taste, and had been occupied for years by a screenwriter who wore sunglasses inside and seemed, to me, like the kind of guy who was a member of many museums.

So I was surprised when my cab took me up, up, past the Chateau—way past the Chateau—at least three miles straight up a hill that bordered on vertical. When the cab finally stopped, I found myself standing in front of a chipped gray box, the kind of place where girls are held captive in Ashley Judd thrillers from the ’90s.

Inside was a midcentury bachelor pad with a heavy emphasis on the bachelor. The view was astounding—down the hill and over all of West Hollywood, which glowed and pulsed so intensely it was almost nauseating. What the street side lacked in windows was more than made up for by the glass wall that extended the length of the rear. On my first morning there, I woke up and headed outside, in just my T-shirt, to take in the cool foggy air, the surrounding iconic A-frames, and the traffic moving below on Sunset. I’m here, I thought, waking up in the Hollywood Hills like so many hopeful young starlets before me (never mind that some of them had been murdered, and some had ended up in electroshock baths—for now, even that was part of the allure). In a reverie at the glamour of my own situation, I leaned on the railing, only for it to break off and plummet hundreds of feet down the side of the hill. Upon further inspection, the house was being consumed by termites.

But still, the view.

Determined to make the best of it in a pre-Uber world, I walked down the hill most nights for dinner. Besides Jenni—who was an adult, with children and a life—I had only a smattering of friends, none of them close, most of them comedy writers who vacillated between being impressed by my grit and mettle to giving the distinct impression that they didn’t want me coming for their lunch. Forever naïve, always the girl shocked to be invited to the sleepover, I gleefully told my mother about a screenwriter who had taken me under her wing, a glamorous blonde in her early thirties who concealed her own minx-ishness with a pair of Buddy Holly glasses.

“She says that I shouldn’t be taking random rewrite jobs, that I have to stay true to my indie roots,” I told her. “She says that I should avoid LA as much as I can and never forget where I came from.”

“Lena,” my mother said coolly, amused by my naïveté, “she just doesn’t want you taking her jobs.”

Getting anywhere—except to the edit bay and back, where I was chauffeured by Rubi, a patient boy in a collared shirt—required a willing chaperone. But, unsure who I could ask and for what, I often walked down the hill at dusk to eat alone at a vegan restaurant—despite the fact that I was no longer vegan, just mildly eating-disordered and afraid of raw fish—and back up again in the dark. The curves were sharp, and the streets were abandoned and shadowy. I tended, at that point, to wear skirts that barely covered my ass crack and, exhausted by the trek, I must have appeared to have the dizzy tilt of someone almost too drunk to function. An easy pickup. Looking back, it’s a miracle I survived.

My mother came to visit me in early November. I had planned us a week of chic dinners and facials; a few sessions with the stunning Amazonian personal trainer, who was having me do burpees up and down the hill and trying to get me involved in a protein-powder pyramid scheme.

But when she pulled up in her cab, I could see the horror on her face as she took in the view that had alarmed me as well upon arrival.

“I promise,” I said. “The inside is gorgeous.”

She did not agree. It took her all of five minutes to do a top-to-bottom inspection and determine that the place was cursed—dangerously located, potentially haunted; on our first night, sharing a bed as we always did when we were alone, she swore she sensed a presence “lingering in the doorframe.”

“Lingering? Did you say lingering?”

“Yes, SHE was lingering.”

While I couldn’t deny that the house was falling—piece by piece—into the canyon, I fought her: “This is where I want to be! I LOVE IT HERE!”

But on day three, as we ate toast on the futon wedged into the kitchenette, we heard a banging on the front door. An unhoused man had arrived there, pounding as we refused to answer, slurring as he demanded a hundred dollars for “services rendered.” (“What services?” we asked again and again, as my mother peeked around the side of the porch and caught enough of a glimpse to say he “had a Manson vibe, for SURE.”) When he refused to leave after an hour and began to batter the door with a two-by-four, we called 911, who arrived six hours later. He had been gone for hours.

When she left, I felt a deep melancholy. Somehow, the person I wanted to impress most had left, certain not that I was thriving in Tinseltown, but that I was going to have my head bashed in, either by the phantom woman who had eyed her or the man who had rendered phantom services. But still, I was determined to stay—until I heard a slow creak, and a door I hadn’t known was there opened to reveal a bathroom I had never been informed about, its floor covered in odd pink liquid.

I called our producer Ilene, who sighed in a way that said, “I knew I’d get this call sooner or later.” She told me to pack a bag, and she would call a cab to take me to the Sunset Tower, a hotel on Sunset Boulevard that had not yet achieved the glamorous appeal of the Chateau and where HBO got a corporate rate.

After a final hair-raising ride down the hill, I arrived at “The Tower” with a mess of overflowing tote bags and fifteen hardback books, most of them about murders in the Hollywood Hills, if I’m being honest. While once the home of glamorous icons like John Wayne and Greta Garbo, the hotel was in the process of being revamped into a hot spot. I was getting in on the ground floor—well, the second, if we’re being literal. I was led to a small but elegant cream room, with thick beige curtains, lacquered chestnut cabinets, and an oatmeal-raisin cookie on a porcelain plate. I lay face down across the well-made bed, unaware that by the time I turned thirty, I would have lived in this building for a collective three years and known every inch of the property, every shortcut and secret passage, every adjacent smoothie place and every good block for strolling with an anxious dog, every balcony you could cry on, every bathtub you could bleed in, and every bed you could beg for forgiveness on. The layout of every suite would be ingrained in my psyche, the specificities of the window latches. I didn’t know that I’d recover from at least three surgeries or avoid at least four bellmen after the conversation grew too intimate. I had absolutely no idea that I would set a side table on fire while sober as a judge in the middle of the day, and it wouldn’t even be the first fire I’d start.

We finished editing season one—a process that both challenged and thrilled me. I watched how this step could smooth directorial hiccups and slouchy writing, bad performance days and limp chemistry. And before we had even settled on an air date, HBO immediately asked us to open up a second-season writer’s room.

By that time, Jenni had moved out of the El Royale and into a house with her boyfriend and her two children, a grown-up house with an open-plan kitchen and duck egg–green cabinets and a pool shaped like a kidney. Los Angeles was starting to seem less like a transient moment and more like a fact, and so she suggested I head to the leasing office at the El Royale and see what was available. After all, it was convenient—walkable streets, a community of eccentrics—people who had come to Los Angeles and decided to rent until they made their fortune, only to never make that fortune and remain in overpriced units with unreliable plumbing but exceptional character.

I dressed up for my trip to the leasing office like I was applying for a temp job, in a gray wool blazer and silk A-line skirt. A blonde with long pink nails, aged somewhere between forty and seventy, asked very few questions—she just clacked away on an ancient IBM computer, as focused as if she were trying to solve a theorem, and announced that I was “certainly in luck! These apartments are in HIGH demand and RARELY available, but you seem like an excellent asset to the El Royale community.” Did I? A one-bedroom on the second floor had just opened up. I wrote her a check, and in return, she handed me a typed list of the building’s famed former residents—Clark Gable, William Faulkner, Cameron Diaz, and Nicolas Cage, who had been rumored to have destroyed his aquarium and thrown a baby shark out the window in a fit of rage directed at his girlfriend Nicollette Sheridan.

Unlike the hills, the El Royale was situated on a trendy strollable stretch. Café Gratitude had opened up down the street. There they served overdetermined health food with names like Grateful, Loved, and Necessary, so when the waiters took your order, you were expected to say “I am Whole. I am Energized. Oh, and I’ll have one…I am Enlightened.” I loved every absurd second of it. The food was all raw zucchini noodles and nut pâté, massaged kale and coconut wafers, which was perfect because I was determined to shed the weight I had so obediently tacked on during season one in time for the premiere, a regimen that also involved up to two classes a day at the newly opened SoulCycle, where I closed my eyes as the instructor told me to “reach the top of that mountain, the one you never thought you could climb, and as you do, TAKE IN THAT FUCKING VIEW.”

Building management was in the process of repainting every unit and asked me for my color choices from a Sherwin-Williams catalog. I chose baby blue for the living room, purple for the bedroom, and soft pink and mint green for the closet and built-in vanity. In the kitchen, a yellow that looked like butter on the page but read more urine when applied. I bought a pale purple velvet couch from Urban Outfitters that looked like an upholstered clamshell, and two navy Regency chairs from Jonathan Adler that were the single most expensive things I had ever owned. Everything else—a painting of oversize daisies, two mismatched side tables, and a pair of Shaker chairs for the kitchen—came from the Goodwill in North Hollywood.

I pinned the list of my famous precursors on the corkboard in the kitchen.

By day, I was in the writer’s room, extending a story I never thought I’d get to tell in the first place. The beginning of season two lived in that wonderful space when you’ve finished something you’re proud of and are starting something else, but no one has weighed in yet. At night, I floated through my glamorous new apartment in a daze, feeling—finally—like the illusive LA dream was mine.

Our writer’s room had been in session for about a week. We were using a conference room on the ground floor of Judd’s office—aptly named the Apatower. It wasn’t particularly glamorous—it had a massive whiteboard and sat next to the unused company gym (as Judd once told me, “Never trust a buff comedian”), but I loved it. The room was a chance to spend time in a room of the funniest people you’d ever met, telling the funniest stories and figuring out what to have for lunch—what could be better? I had been initially resistant to a room, as I did my best writing in bed, late, alone. But Judd and Jenni had convinced me, and it really did feel like being at the coolest table in high school and getting paid for it.

The team had been in the room for about a week when my agents informed me that Scott Rudin, now in possession of the YA script he had commissioned just weeks after Tiny Furniture first screened—which I had written in a series of all-nighters at the house in the hills—wanted to be assured of my “commitment to the process.” With season two of Girls now under way, he was concerned that my TV work would get in the way of the timeline he had imagined for production, and so he wanted me to simultaneously revise the film while I shot season two, begin prep on the film the day that we wrapped, and direct the film at the same time we edited season two. While I was no stranger to giddily accepting unrealistic timelines, even I knew this wasn’t humanly possible. My agents and I agreed I’d have to drop out of the project—which, if I’m being honest, was a sort of relief. While I hated the idea of quitting, I had accepted the job in a moment when I was sure that I would never be offered another. My connection to the material was tenuous at best, and Scott—while charming and brilliant—always left me feeling uneasy. The image I saw as I sat across from him receiving notes was of swimming in an aquarium full of sharks, trying to keep my knees tucked up and out of the way.

My agents called Scott with the news. Within minutes, I had received a torrent of emails I can still quote from memory but won’t, because I don’t want you to be as traumatized as I was. Suffice to say, Mr. Rudin had gone from flattery and flowers and Alexander Wang handbags and celebrating my youthful naïveté and enthusiasm to telling me what I really was: a spoiled little girl who didn’t even know how to live without her parents getting her dressed in the morning, a phony who would be cast out of the business just as quickly as I had been allowed in. Furthermore, he said, he would sue: for what was unclear, as I had not yet signed a contract or been paid, having begun (and finished) the job in good faith.

As I read the emails, time slowed to a stop. I had been found out. I was going to lose it all. That disembodied feeling returned, and no amount of SoulCycle, of sweet potato noodles with kimchi or baby-pink built-in vanities, could bring me back into myself.

The next morning, back at what I had nicknamed “disassociation station,” I was absentmindedly cleaning my ear with a Q-tip—a long wooden medical Q-tip my mother had left in my bathroom, meant not for ears but for cleaning wounds or sutures—when I felt a pop, a trickle, and then an explosion of pain. I fell to the ground, crawled to my phone, and summoned my sweet friend Jesse Peretz—a director and producer on Girls who was in town to help with our sound mix—to get me to the emergency room. There a doctor looked down my ear and announced casually, “There’s too much blood for me to see.” The fact that it was coming out of my mouth, too, didn’t seem like a very good sign. They cleaned my ear with saline—that, too, poured out of my mouth. My eardrum, they could now see, hadn’t just ruptured—it was gone.

I could have handled the beginning of season two coinciding with the first press obligations for season one. I could probably have handled Rudin’s emails, as impotent, childlike, and terrified as they made me feel. (“Don’t you get it?” my mother asked. “He sends seventy of these a day. He won’t remember next week!” But I would, I told her. I would.)

I could have handled being thousands of miles from home in a building where Aidan Quinn was mounting a campaign to revamp the gymnasium and my upstairs neighbor, a style icon named Gary, told me I was making a huge mistake “living without sisal floors.”

But I could not handle this—my ear and throat becoming one hollow, echoing cavity. I tried to make it through the day, but the voices in the writer’s room sounded like the vague tinkle of chatter in a crowded bar. I made my way back to the El Royale, riding wordlessly beside the PA tasked with driving me, cupping my ear like I was listening for the sound of the ocean in a shell.

By the end of the week, I could only lie in bed, rubbing my feet together, imagining being hauled out of the El Royale on a gurney like so many Frances Farmers before me. I was back outside my body, and I couldn’t imagine how I’d find my way back in. Maybe I was gone for good this time.

My father, attuned as he was to my moods and always able to gauge what was playful drama and what deserved his concern, immediately got on a plane. He took me to an ear clinic that had a model of the inner ear as large as a jungle gym. I knew I felt bad, because I didn’t even ask him to take a picture of me leaning on it. There a doctor placed me in a soundproof booth and had me listen to a series of beeps, raising my hand every time I heard a noise. I could barely pick my arm up. Then a different doctor expertly glued a small piece of what he himself referred to as “cigarette paper” to create a new, temporary eardrum that allowed me to at least distinguish human language.

“Okay,” I said to my father. “I guess I’ll head back to the writer’s room.”

“No,” he said. “Not on my watch. You’re burned-out, fucked up, and you look like you haven’t eaten in months.” That was really something coming from him, a man who considers a sweet potato an indulgent snack. And so he called Jenni, asking her to bring Judd on the line, and explained, “It’s time for her to go home. She does her best writing alone, anyway.”

I returned to the psychopharmacologist’s office, where I’d been making pilgrimages since I was twelve. She prescribed 25 mg of Lexapro and more Klonopin to be taken as needed. “You have a tendency,” she said, “to let stress compound until you can no longer tolerate being in your own body. Disassociation is a natural response—it’s your subconscious trying to help you, like it would if there was a predator in nature and you had to fight, flee, or freeze. Only you remain frozen.”

I was embarrassed. I knew that Hollywood was a place where you had to be able to compartmentalize your stress, work through the anxiety, and perform under profound pressure. But so far, every time things got too hot, well, it wasn’t that I left the kitchen—it was that I stood in a fugue state with my hand on the stove.

The writer’s room continued to meet, sending me their daily notes. I tried to take notes of my own, but I was weak and affectless. I observed, as if from another room, that I no longer knew what a joke sounded like, much less how to tell one.

At night, I made my mother sit with me on the air mattress at the back of the loft as I fell asleep. Now I lost the weight without trying. The only time I socialized was when, in one of the brief moments when the Klonopin made me brave, I demanded that the guy I had fucked at the season one wrap party bring me a bottle of NyQuil for my sniffles and kiss me in my doorway, and—the moment I realized he had an erection—announced he had to leave. I felt like a teen in over my head—I couldn’t be expected to give a blow job any more than I could be expected to rise above the circumstances that had landed me here.

In Los Angeles, the writers continued to pitch ideas for the season. In my parents’ apartment, I churned out episode drafts, perusing their pitches and incorporating the ideas that made sense. The process was disjointed, but somehow—even with my center of gravity gone again, with my paper eardrum—I continued to do my job. HBO had me doing interviews in preparation for the release of our first season and, arriving at a café to meet esteemed television critic Emily Nussbaum, I tidied my hair in the glass of the window until my face began to resemble a melting candle. Looking back, it’s a miracle to me that I managed to speak cogently about the work, when I had to tell my feet to walk.

Each day close to my parents eased the anxiety a little bit, as the Lexapro began to even the spikes of fear. But nothing helped me more than the laugh Nora let out when I told her the Rudin story. “He said he’s going to sue me,” I said, my lip quivering, unable to touch my bread pudding. “He was so charming at the beginning.”

“Honey,” she said. “If Scott was a straight man, we’d all have fucked him and then wondered why we’d done it.”

I told Adam that I was home. He was doing a production of Look Back in Anger off Broadway and got me a solo ticket. It was one of my first outings after what I came to think of as “the freak-out,” an incident against which I began to judge time: It’s been six weeks since the freak-out. Two months. Three. The further from it I got, the more I could think of myself as the eager-beaver young professional I wanted to be, and not the head case that I had—so often—been.

During the first season, chair incident aside, we had felt like partners. I ran decisions by him that weren’t his to make. We rehearsed on weekends in his spare white living room, even when the scene was easy and didn’t require it. He hugged me tight in the morning and again at the end of the day. One Saturday afternoon, as I reached for a glass of water in his galley kitchen and chatted offhandedly about something meaningless, I looked up to see him smiling at me with something so tender, it felt like it could only have been love. It disarmed me so totally that I dropped my glass.

“You really don’t know how beautiful you are, do you?”

We fought often—usually about the content of a scene, what it required, and how it would be executed—and we never saw eye to eye on what we were fighting about. I reasoned that the intensity of his anger at me, anger that could make him spit and throw things, was proportionate to the intensity of our creative connection. One day in his dressing room, as I apologized for a perceived slight I couldn’t remember committing, he got close to my face and hissed, “Never forget that I know you. I really fucking know you.”

“What do you know?” I yelped.

“You don’t go to parties. You love animals. And you hate being whispered about.” And he was right. (But then again, who likes being whispered about?)

Sometimes I would say things like, “I feel like you really understand me,” or “I’d never tell that to anybody else,” just to see what it felt like. Sometimes I’d tell him he made me feel safe. I didn’t yet understand that sometimes you say what you wish were true, instead of just saying what is.

I went to his play, sat in the small black box theater in Midtown, watching Adam rage around a tragic kitchen using a thick Welsh accent. After the show, I met him at the stage door, and we went to a small bar where we drank tall glasses of beer and touched knees. I told him my parents were out of town for the night and admitted—to my own surprise—that I was afraid.

And so he drove me downtown on his motorcycle and sat on the couch with me, tenderly petting Dean, the dog on wheels. I don’t remember most of what we talked about—I think he complained about monogamy and feeling misunderstood—only that he listened with surprising concern as I described what had happened and stayed until my eyes started to close, then gently tiptoed out.

I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering if Adam liked me. He could be short-tempered and verbally aggressive, condescending and physically imposing. He could also be protective, loving even—his eyes would flash with anger when I described mistreatment by one of the random guys I was dating, or the famous comedian in Los Angeles who showed up to my El Royale apartment without being invited, insisting—AT TEN p.m. —that I had to try the matzo ball soup from Canter’s. The entire feeling was very “nobody talks shit about my mother but me.”

But did he see me as a mother? A boss? A girl? Fuckable? Unfuckable? Irritating? Brilliant? He showed flashes of all of these, but during this week—the week my parents were out of town, when his girlfriend was doing a play in Cincinnati—he was pure concern, pure laughter, pure gold.

But that week, the week of my empty apartment, he came over almost every night. I was still frail and fawning, a careful and terrified version of myself—and maybe he liked me most that way. Maybe it made his heart go out to me, or maybe it just leveled the balance of power. On Friday, he called me as he was leaving the theater. “You still home alone, Dunham?”

I was.

“Okay. I’m riding down to you. But I’m warning you, if I come up, I’m not leaving this time.”

“Call me when you’re outside.”

He did, ten minutes later. I crouched at the window, watching him park his bike, pull out his phone, and dial. But I didn’t answer. It felt as simple as ignoring your doorbell, as pretending to be asleep, as impossible as stopping your blood from flowing. But some part of me knew—some wise part of me, some bold part of me—that if we crossed whatever boundary we were threatening to cross, the return to work would be tinged with humiliation, that I’d be minimizing any authority I still had, and that, however it went, my heart—bruised but improbably not yet broken—would crack.

We never spoke about it again, but a month later, he called to tell me he was engaged. “When my girl was away, I realized I’m no good alone. I need someone to keep me in line.”

It was absurd to be heartbroken, to have thought I meant anything, that I occupied any role beyond distraction. I was his scene partner, sure—and so when we were in a scene, his attention was piercing, his presence all-consuming. But in life? It would never be me who kept him in line. I didn’t have the chops. Even at work, I couldn’t do it, in the one place I was meant to make the rules.

The Girls premiere was, unequivocally, the best night of my life up until that point.

It was my first time wearing a gown, my first time having someone else’s hair clipped into my hair, my first time having a party where everyone I’d hoped would come did, and even some people I didn’t want to come came, too, but it was so full they couldn’t find me through the crowd. Allison, Zosia, Jemima, and I posed on the red carpet with big, untrained smiles. The only sign that we knew what was coming was that we had all lost an inordinate amount of weight in a fairly short period of time, a fact none of us commented on.

My father and uncle looked so handsome in their suits that someone asked if they were my security, and my ninety-year-old Grandma Dottie tottered the red carpet—all four eleven of her, wearing a J. Crew kids’ cardigan covered in paillettes—and right up to Judd, asking, “So, I hear you’re from Long Island—who do we know in common?”

After the screening—which Adam sat out, having learned his lesson about watching himself, and where my parents proudly sat on either side of me, enjoying footage of me taking it from behind on a fifty-foot screen—there was a party. It was in the Boom Boom Room at the top of the Standard, replete with a hot tub and a vending machine for bikinis.

“Should we hop in?” asked a vaguely familiar man, who I later realized was Tony Danza.

There weren’t as many shows on back then, so each one had premieres as expensive as high-end weddings, with the kind of massive buffet my aunts would usually bring Tupperware to (instead, Aunt Susan wrapped filet mignon in cloth napkins and stuffed it in her purse). There were multiple chocolate fountains, men passing champagne, members of the New York glitterati smiling at us like we had just won a talent show.

The shakiness and existential terror of the winter had been replaced with the frenetic glee of speeding in a convertible, top down, at 110 miles an hour on a sunny day, hair whipping your face, arms in the air.

After the after-party, I went with Jenni, Judd, and some cast and crew to Corner Bistro—the very place I’d taken the call letting me know the pilot had been green-lit—and we ate fat burgers. I unclipped my fake hair and tucked it in my purse, folded my corset down, and threw on a sweatshirt. We hadn’t been doing this for long enough to be exhausted by it—we were high on the pure, uncut adrenaline of having people laugh in unison at the thing you’ve made. Reviews were starting to trickle in, and—at this point, at least—the positivity was unanimous. The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, all took turns anointing us as a new and thrilling voice in comedy. New York magazine had taken photos of us for a feature but, at the last minute, placed me on the cover—arms on my pert waist, hair falling in Jean Harlow waves, wearing massive sunglasses studded with pearls. The magazine was front and center at newsstands across New York. An ex-boyfriend who had once told me I had a soul of stone sent me a photo of the magazine in his pile of mail, writing, “I didn’t ask for this.” I couldn’t help but thrill.

That night, I slept on my parents’ sofa, just to be closer to their room—I felt, all at once, like I’d arrived at adulthood (it ruled) and like a little girl reliving a particularly fruitful Christmas, dragging her bed under the tree to extend the celebrations.