Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 7

I Love You Baby

The week before the premiere, a friend had sent me to the studio of a young independent fashion designer named Rachel Antonoff to borrow some clothing for the various interviews I had coming up. Rachel was a downtown darling, making retro sailor dresses, strapless gowns in iridescent lamé, and printed satin shorts with matching pin-tucked blouses. It was exactly the kind of playful, somewhat twee, but devoutly femme attire I gravitated toward.

At her small office in Midtown, I tried on an array of dresses and we talked—immediately hitting it off as we discussed everything from our social anxiety to our love of International House of Pancakes to the brutality of dating in New York.

“You should meet my brother, Jack,” she said. “He’s the funniest, weirdest, coziest person alive.” Cozy, I told her, was my favorite word. “He’s in a band, and he meets all the wrong kinds of girls—they all want to be models, or scenesters. But he’s just a sweet boy who loves to be cozy.”

I knew who her brother was—a few weeks earlier, my father had left a copy of the Arts & Leisure section on the end of my bed, as he often did when he read a story he thought would interest me. He was directing me toward something above the fold, about a novelist with crippling OCD, but my eyes moved to a photo below it—three hipster boys in tuxedoes, members of a band apparently rising in popularity called fun. (lowercase and period a stylized choice). I had zeroed in on one face—wide-eyed behind thick black glasses. I realized I had seen him play almost a decade earlier, with his old band Steel Train, when I was a college freshman with a crush on a guitarist I would trawl the city to be close to. “ That guy used to date Scarlett Johansson?” my crush had whispered as we watched them play, clearly making a dig at Jack’s nerd drag. Later, outside on Ludlow Street, I saw Jack and his band members loading their gear into a van.

“Cool set,” I’d muttered, mortified when I had to repeat it again, louder.

“You should date my brother” seemed like the kind of thing someone says and forgets about—after all, Rachel and I had met for a total of thirty minutes—but a few days later, an email landed in my inbox.

Hi. This is Jack. Rachel says you’re funny and she thinks we would really get along. Maybe we should have dinner. Or if not, no worries. Bye!

I arrived for our date, in a nice restaurant downtown. Despite having dressed so early, I had hours to kill before leaving the house—changing from a white flouncy dress that Jenni deemed “a little too ‘best night of my life’ ” and into a pink silk blouse and skinny jeans—I was late. I texted him my apologies, and he responded within seconds. “No problem,” he wrote. “I’m here watching some people have a very bad date, which hopefully won’t happen to us.”

When I got there—rain-soaked, heart pounding as I realized I had never, in fact, been on a date—he was sitting at the bar, wearing a yellow-and-white-striped women’s boat neck shirt under a bright-green grandpa sweater with a Daria pin on it. I reached to shake his hand, and he pulled me into a one-armed hug, something I’d later come to recognize as the move he did in order to avoid shaking hands, a symptom of his profound germaphobia that had the accidental effect of making him seem incredibly affectionate to strangers.

By the time we made it to our table, we were talking quickly, like people giving timed speeches at an awards show. He ordered fried chicken with honey and licked his serrated knife while making eye contact, which pulled a laugh so genuine from my gut that seltzer came out my nose. I debated what to order.

“What would you order if no one were watching?” he asked.

“A cheeseburger.”

“Then you’ll have that.”

We both drank—he had a glass of Laphroaig, I drank some rosé, though neither of us would ever order an alcoholic beverage together again. He made me laugh with grandly abstract questions—“Isn’t it crazy that children come from literal fucking? Shouldn’t the two things be separate? Like, wouldn’t you rather your child come from a handshake and not an orgasm?”—and he laughed at all my weirdest jokes in turn. He was disarmingly frank, telling me—all before the entrées arrived—about his affair with a lesbian, his parents living apart despite remaining married (“I don’t know, it seems to work”), and the time he almost died of pneumonia the year before, which had left him obsessed with lung health and disinfecting household objects.

He told me he’d watched the first episode of Girls. “You’re like a modern Woody Allen, which is the nicest thing I can say to a person.” (Back then, it was.) I kept thinking, Is this what a date with a real person feels like? I had the sense that this was the prize I was being given for every encounter that had left me bruised and bleeding, every boy and man who had used my body like a cum sock, the reward for patience and hard work, a sign that things were really and truly coming into alignment.

Weeks earlier, I’d been walking down the street telling myself: If you love your work, you can’t expect to also be in love. Maybe we only get a certain percentage of what we want. Now this gentle, funny boy was paying for my dinner. When he put his card down, I protested, and he said, “I get airline miles on this card, so it’s really like you’re buying me a drink in the sky.”

When we walked outside, it was pouring even harder. He had driven in from New Jersey, where he still lived at home with his parents. Despite my newly Nora-fied apartment, I still spent at least half the weeks staying with mine. And so he offered to drive me the twenty blocks home. On the way to the car, he pulled his trench coat over both of our heads; we were like the lovers in springtime in my favorite painting at the Met, hiding from a storm under a diaphanous cloth.

As he opened the car door for me, he said, “My father has a supplement company, so I’m sorry the car smells like shark fin or whatever.” As we started driving, his hit song “We Are Young” came on the radio.

“Wow,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard myself on the radio.” He later told me that wasn’t technically true; he’d been fibbing to make the moment special, which made me like him even more.

“Does your band do choreography?” I’d asked, immediately regretting it.

“Choreography? No. It’s rock music. But if you want us to, I’ll suggest it. Do you want hip-hop, or more interpretive?”

He walked me to my door and, inside the vestibule where I’d once been trapped with Jenni’s cursing father, he kissed me, and his glasses fogged up. He pulled them onto his head: “Redo?” he asked, and we kissed again, more softly this time.

As he walked out backward, smiling, he asked, “Can I see you tomorrow?”

Upstairs, my parents were in bed, their lights still on, as my father read about the history of Mesopotamian sculpture and my mother flipped through an issue of Vogue. I told them, in one big rush, about the date: how funny he was, how cute but not in an obvious way, how gentlemanly but not in a cheesy way, how open and odd.

“He’s really funny, and he lives with his parents, too, and he also has OCD and a bad immune system, and he also loves Robyn, and he seems like he’d make a very good boyfriend.”

“Oh, God,” my mother said, mock-rolling her eyes. “We can’t handle two of you.”

“Slow your roll, kid,” my father said, but I could see a smile creeping onto his thin stern lips. “I’m glad you had a nice time.”

The next afternoon, Jack and I met again at the one greasy spoon diner left in Tribeca, a silver train car protruding from the side of an old factory. He was leaving on the tour bus at six that night, and so we sat across from each other, trying to stuff as much as we could into the hour we had. As we finished our grilled cheeses, he realized that he’d forgotten his wallet. “This is so embarrassing,” he said. “Because Jackie’s girls never pay.” This was, I thought, the funniest thing anyone had ever said.

But before he could come up with a plan, his tour manager knocked on the window, shrugging like, “What the fuck, dude?”

“Now?” Jack mouthed.

“Now,” she mouthed back, her dark bouffant and tilted goth eyebrows standing out in the dusky light of Church Street.

I told him I was happy to pay, as I squeaked my way out of the vinyl banquette to get cash at the ATM outside. I was wearing the same striped boat neck he’d showed up in the night before—to prove I’d been telling the truth when I said I had it, too—a pleated miniskirt, and a cropped blazer that was very 2010 for 2012, my hair twisted and pinned. I tried not to betray that I’d been thinking about him, almost feverishly, since the previous night, watching YouTube videos of him at the office.

Months earlier, my mother had sent me to see a psychic who lived in a tiny tenement apartment on Prince Street. She was “the real deal,” said my mother—who values psychics over doctors and therapists, one of the innate contradictions to her almost aggressively practical nature. She had been practicing since the early ’80s and was the author of a book called Small Mediums at Large (she was, indeed, barely four ten). As she pulled cards, she asked me what I wanted to know.

“Will I ever find love?” I asked, before I could even consider what I wanted to know. I was embarrassed by how quickly it erupted, the need and the hope.

She closed her eyes. “He’s coming,” she said. “He plays the guitar—I see his hands. And I see…him laughing through a pane of glass.”

On my way back to our table from the ATM, I passed the window and noticed him on the phone, head down, nodding. I scratched on the glass, and when he didn’t see me, I banged. He looked up, and I smiled. He turned the corner of his lips down in a mock-frown and shook his head “no,” wagging his finger like I was a little kid caught defying parental orders.

And then, through the pane, just like the small medium had promised, he threw his head back and laughed.

By the time the third episode had aired, it was becoming clear that people were having a strong response to the show. It was the funniest thing on TV. It was not funny at all. It was more New York than New York. It was limited, white, and privileged. The cast was a bunch of “daughters of ”—blessedly, the term nepo baby had not been invented yet, but the fact that we all had parents with various affiliations to arts and entertainment was a constant point of conversation. Never mind that nobody watching HBO had ever heard of my parents, unless they had trawled some of the quieter corners of the Museum of Modern Art and really studied the wall tags.

“What about me?” Adam asked, right around the time when Gawker began referring to us all with inventive nicknames like “Brian Williams’s Daughter” and “David Mamet’s daughter” in the near-constant output of derisive coverage. “My father manages a Kinko’s in Indiana; does that count for nothing?”

It drove my mother crazy. “We’re artists !” she would shriek. “We’re hand-to-mouth! We figure it out—SOME YEARS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS. Doesn’t anybody understand that?”

No, Mom. They don’t.

My parents were constantly shuffling the pieces on the chessboard, bargaining with their bank accounts and the impracticality of their chosen careers to keep us in the city, whispering behind closed doors (well, just whispering—in our loft, there were no doors, save the broken sliding one on the single and always occupied bathroom). Would they be able to cover another year of tuition for their anxious child who needed “very special attention” in order to graduate from ninth grade? Would this finally be the year we had to leave the city and finally enroll in Lyme-Old Lyme High School? This description isn’t an attempt at a pity party—nobody in our family ever doubted how lucky we were that my parents were making their living as artists. Even as small children, we had it drummed into us, what a privilege it was to work for yourself doing a job that was actually a calling. But artists are masters of illusion—ever since the days when they installed themselves in Renaissance courts under patrons and had to dress the royal part, they have made something out of nothing, created profoundly full and decorated lives from the scraps they receive off the fat ham of true wealth. My parents were no different, and it’s evident in the story behind every item in our home. A trade. A hand-me-down. A shocking deal on an item hunted down and procured under an absurd circumstance. My mother, especially, took pride in this balancing act—she had to, so that she could remain fearless.

Because of me, my mother felt her own story—the one she told herself, about how she’d made it work as an artist despite the odds—slipping away from her. But having just enough to maintain the sheen of cultural currency was the same, to any onlooker, as the currency itself. The Internet wasn’t dealing in nuance.

The first time my parents were mentioned in the press as “Lena Dunham’s artist parents,” it was cute. When it made its way into chatter at openings and dinners, less so. When an image of my father’s work was highlighted in an article as clear evidence of the kind of left-wing perverts who produce a sex-obsessed narcissist, it stopped being charming and started to undo every narrative thread that had kept us intact.

“Your parents must be so proud of you,” adults would coo—at meetings, at photo shoots, on national television.

But I wasn’t so sure. Somehow, the people I had spent my whole life trying to emulate and impress seemed more inconvenienced than awed, more shaken than stirred. We had always been able to talk about everything—it was the superpower of our household, the way we got through every twist and turn. But it became clear to me quickly that you couldn’t ask your parents how your fame made them feel—not directly. It involved too much shame because it forced them to admit how much of their own self-image rode on their own highly specific public identities, niche as they were. To admit that my success disarmed them was to admit to the most vulgar and wanting parts of themselves. It’s hard to express the mixture of pride and loss that comes along with having a child become famous, especially in a household where their careers were the driving force of our lives—where we traveled, who we socialized with, what we valued, what we disdained. One of the things we disdained—though we had never really said it out loud—was the commonness of wanting to be seen. We could speak abstractly about wanting the work to be seen. But “the work”—their art—wasn’t them. They had made it, but its life really began once it left their hands. In my case, I was the product.

And then there was my sibling, a freshman at college, prodigiously avoiding the Girls viewing parties in their dorm, noticing increasingly that certain kinds of social strivers were taking an unusual interest in them.

“Why the fuck am I being invited to a party at Emma Watson’s dorm? I’m just a random freshman.”

I noticed them ceasing to come home for breaks, instead choosing to accompany their new girlfriend—a well-built tennis player with a lion’s mane of golden hair—back to her house in Phoenix for holidays.

When Brown asked me to do a visiting artist talk, I grabbed the opportunity, thinking Cyrus and I would spend the weekend watching TV in the fancy hotel room the university had gotten me. I did my lecture, looking for them in the audience but realizing, halfway through, that they weren’t there.

Back at my hotel room, I called and texted.

“I’ll be there soon” they texted once, then again, and then silence. I finally fell asleep above the covers, surrounded by the feast I had ordered us. Cold, congealing steak au poivre. Now-gummy potatoes au gratin. A lonely piece of flourless chocolate cake.

The next morning, when my cab came, I left Providence without ever having laid eyes on them.

Season two began filming just as the media storm kicked up around the show—a blessed distraction from searching my own name on Twitter and counting how many times I could find the words “fat” and “ugly.”

Jack and I saw each other whenever we could—increasing the intensity between meetups with a constant stream of texts. When we did see each other, it was always near wherever he was doing radio promo or rehearsing. Our fourth date was at his concert; our fifth at Grand Central Oyster Bar, where he was shooting a music video in a military-green button-up and the tightest pants I’d ever seen on a man. He put his arm around me and shared his clam chowder, and when it was time for me to leave, he ran down the ramp after me to kiss me one last time, like that photo of the sailor grabbing the woman as the end of World War II is announced.

The first time we had sex was three months in. I could feel how intentional he was being, that he wanted to know me. He wasn’t like the horny boys racking up body counts I’d gone to college with, or the casually cruel man who had taken me to back alleys, or even the VJ who had courted me aggressively but avoided intercourse because “it’s a promise you make with your body.”

It was after his sister’s thirty-second birthday party at an International House of Pancakes on the east side. His mother asked us to pose for a picture, and I wrapped the string of a red balloon around his neck and looked at him skeptically. I was wearing a leopard-print minidress with a neon orange collar, and he was in his favorite mint-green pants, and later, when he left for tour again, I would stare at the picture trying to decode his look back, trying to divine—from this brief glimpse at us from someone else’s perspective—how he really felt about me. He said a lot about a lot, but not much about that. I could feel it mostly in the way he wrote my name when we texted: “Goodnight, Lena.”

I had felt many things in my time—lust, jealousy, humiliation. But this was the first time I knew, with a certainty that felt almost religious, that I wanted to be loved.

After the party, we went back to my new apartment in Brooklyn. I explained that I had kept one cabinet the same blue the apartment was once painted, because the small medium at large told me it was a way to honor and cohabitate with the ghost. “See,” it told them. “I want you to feel at home here.”

By that cabinet, which held all my grandmother’s milky green dishes, we kissed for a long time, quiet and focused, until he scooped me up and carried me to the bedroom, where I located a free condom I was given at a press event. We laughed because the condom was bright red. The sex itself was awkward and giggly, as if we were both too familiar and not familiar enough, and halfway through I developed an ice-pick migraine just above my right eye and cried out. Thinking it was a cry of ecstasy, he moved faster. Looking back, it was one of the first times I realized that pain and pleasure are often indistinguishable to the outside observer.

Afterward, lying in bed, I touched his face: “You really took charge there.”

He nodded. “It was time.”

The next morning, he left while it was still dark, for a performance on Good Morning America. When the sun came up, I took a picture of myself, squinting and topless, touching the dent he’d left in the bed and sent it to him.

“Come home soon,” I said.

By season two, cast dynamics were making themselves clear. Jemima and Zosia had bonded quickly in season one and made the very big mistake of moving in together, Zosia taking the spare room in Jemima’s apartment. What began as a love affair—scouring flea markets, matching tattoos—ended in heartbreak when Zosia began to casually date someone Jemima said she had claimed dibs on, despite the fact that she was married with a child.

Jemima, meanwhile, didn’t like having me as a boss. One day, as she drove home from set, she called me to announce that she was quitting the show: “I never signed up for all this. It was meant to just be, like, a fun thing. Nobody is going to take me seriously as a painter. I hate learning lines. So can you just write me out?”

When I told Jenni and Judd, they reminded me that she had, in fact, signed up for this—seven years of it, in fact, contractually. I was terrified of the prospect of having to remind her of this, and begged them to let her go: “I’ll write an amazing exit—her character is meant to be a flake anyway. We can bring in someone new.”

But before it could boil over, she walked into my dressing room without knocking: “I don’t want to quit. I was just afraid to tell you that I’m six months pregnant.”

I looked at her stomach, poking out of her stirrup leggings—how had I missed it? Maybe it was because, even without child, her weight changed like the weather. Sometimes she was soft and zaftig, other times sinewy and hard, but when I looked at her, all I ever saw was the most beautiful girl in the world. We spent the rest of the season shooting her behind bookcases and under the covers, in bathtubs from the neck up, wearing massive satin caftans. Between takes, I cradled her belly, wondering if she meant it when she told me that one night that she felt roped into something she hadn’t understood the gravity of.

Allison was, no matter the occasion, reliable, prepared, and as full of gusto as any theater kid you’ve ever met, but with an edge that was surprising but never unkind. We gave her the nickname Twenty Questions, because she was so determined to understand Marnie’s motivations, her history, and the choices—often baffling—that she made. She was also the only actor who had put a “no nudity” clause in her contract—“Side thigh is fine,” she once said—which makes the gusto with which she approached even the most confounding sex scenes even more impressive. I knew, in any situation and at any hour of the day, I could look to her for strength and camaraderie. Early on, she had bought me a tank top that said: Always and Forevs, Down for Whatevs.

Every cast member processed the intensity of the reactions to the show in our own way. Allison had an ability to understand public perception that came from growing up in a house where fame was just a fact. Jemima was almost bemused by blowback, or at least she pretended to be. Zosia seemed to float above it, with the studied distance of a very young person who had been forced to raise herself in very adult ways.

And me—I was living on the Internet, despite pretending that I wasn’t. Instagram was brand-new, and Twitter was only just coming into its insidious final form—and although there was praise, it was hard to receive when so much of what I saw was enough to confirm every suspicion I’d had about myself since preschool.

There was the obvious—I was fat, my face was mid, my voice was grating, there were plenty of hotter, better actresses to watch—and maybe no uglier or worse ones.

And whenever I read something bad about myself? I posted. Sometimes I commented on it directly. Other times I just posted a goofy picture with a caption designed to show that the best revenge was a life well lived. Sometimes, I’m sure, I was straight up begging for an ounce of praise to erase the ache that came from filling my head with other people’s disdain.

But the best medicine was Jack. Here was this boy—no, at twenty-eight, he was a man. He had strong arms, and good instincts, and models on video shoots who slipped him their numbers on napkins. I didn’t realize it then, but as our relationship deepened, I relied on him for more than companionship and affection. His care for me, his choosing me, was an assurance that I was beautiful, lovable, being signed off on by someone who had every choice in the world and had made this one.

One day he drove three hours upstate where we were shooting just to spend two hours with me and turn around. In my anonymous hotel room at the Hyatt, we kissed and ate room service club sandwiches, and I pulled up my red dress as he put his head between my legs.

After he left, as I sat alone, smiling as I remembered his hands in my hair and the way, when he finished his food, he had jokingly thrown the plate across the room. He had driven all this way—he must really like me, right? Sure he had to go; he had an early morning—but would he have touched me like that, kissed me in those places, if he didn’t want to do it again and again and again? As I sat wondering, hoping, praying, I was interrupted by the ding of a text from my well-meaning aunt: “Nora Ephron!? Oh no!”

Confused, I opened my computer and googled her name to find a sea of obituaries. I didn’t understand. Just two weeks before, we’d had a lunch planned.

“I’m stuck at the office—I have to rewrite all of episode three :(” I’d texted her. “Any other days this week work?”

“Write away,” Nora wrote. “I’ll see you around, honey.”

Jack called every day on tour that summer, from Kansas and Kuala Lumpur, Indiana and Indonesia, from hotel phones and his drummer’s phone when his died. I cooed with sympathy when he described trying to find a plain turkey sandwich on a European train and laughed when he told me that in Germany, the band had been forced to shoot a television commercial wearing matching black turtlenecks, like they were characters in those Saturday Night Live sketches about the performance artists who call themselves Sprockets. That’s the kind of reference we both loved, since we were two lonely kids kept company by the type of art we were now trying to make. That’s where we really came together, in our collective memory of the culture, touchpoints that felt uniquely ours. I’d never met someone who liked what I liked and liked it so much. Liked me so much.

Home for Fourth of July, he lay across my bed in the morning, head in my lap, as I bit my lip to keep from saying, “I love you.” Instead, I asked, “Do you, uh…want to be my boyfriend?”

He looked at me quizzically, thick eyebrows knitted together, and then shrugged. “Why not?”

Everyone at work seemed to notice the joy that suddenly infused my every move. I came to work beaming and left that way, too.

He sent me gifts when he was away: Boxes of things he’d collected on his journeys. Sushi magnets from Japan. A thirteen-dollar check made out to me with the subject line, “get yourself something nice for your bat mitzvah,” which I stuck to my pink fridge that Nora disapproved of, using the sushi magnets. A Moomin doll from Finland—Moomins, those puffy-faced white rhino–marshmallow crosses, which live in a proto– Barney & Friends universe of anthropomorphic children’s entertainment.

I loved the Moomin, and when I sent Jack a picture of it nestled below my chin, he proclaimed the Moomin and I to be twins. The adventures of the Moomin became another point of contact, and I sent him shots of her in the office and on the set, sticking her head out of my purse, nestled between my boobs. Moomin became a nickname, a term of endearment, our first assigned identity for the other: “You’re my Moomin.” “No, you’re MY Moomin.”

Only a year and a half ago, I was being called whore and bitch, slut, as I had sex in an apartment with trash bags for curtains. I never told Jack about the man with the cleft lip. When he asked about my exes, I focused on the funny stories, the awkward ones—not the ones where someone inflicted pain, and half of me hated it, but it made me cum. I didn’t think that part of my story fit for a boy who had a single one-night stand to his name, a litany of years-long relationships with smart, successful women. I was his Moomin now, and Moomins don’t get tied up with belts in Flatbush.

So beloved was our Moomin that on his next trip to Finland six months later, Jack came back with bags and bags of Moomin goods—stickers and mugs, books and jewelry, a mobile phone case that didn’t fit my phone, so I displayed it on my bookshelf. I had to unpack it all in shifts, and for years I gave it as gifts to friends’ children or decorated my letters with Moomin paraphernalia.

Jack would do this throughout our relationship—if he learned I liked linen nightgowns, I’d get eleven in one go. When I marveled at moonstones, suddenly I was drowning in them. He always over-ordered at dinner. It was as if he could make up for his absence—the long stretches on the road, the endless days in the studio—with the sheer quantity of goods he procured.

“I love it when you get what you want,” he would say.

Jack’s single “We Are Young” was number one in the world, taunting people into making bad decisions in 7-Elevens internationally. My first season of Girls was being discussed at a very specific kind of water cooler, if not across America, then at least in coastal liberal cities and maybe Chicago, by any young person with a vagina or an opinion about vaginas. We were both feeling the changes in our lives—the ways our old friends disappeared into their real lives. The requests for favors that filled our inboxes, from people who didn’t know us well enough to ask. The invasive questions, the selfies in Starbucks and at airports. We were ambitious and scared and exhausted and hopeful, and we knew that the other one saw, even if no one else did, all that we were sacrificing to do what we loved, everything we were giving up to seem so independent.

And so we embarked on a decisive coupledom, a raft made of strings and Coke cans to protect us from the rising tides of attention, adulation, derision, and money. It was us against the world, or what felt like the world—a world of demands we weren’t prepared to face, people we had never imagined would be looking at us.

One of the reasons Jack and I fell in love as hard and fast as we did was that we had both been inculcated as children with a sense of doom so total that even the moments we should have counted as triumphant—a single taking over the radio waves, coming home late from awards shows with heavy statuettes, the chance to make the art you’ve always dreamed of—seemed destined to be accompanied by dangerous if as yet unforeseen consequences. But for the moment, we were just two very lucky little babies, clinging to each other for dear life.

In the fall, after season two wrapped and his European tour ended, he joined me for a month in Los Angeles as we edited. One day, I got an email from my publicist: Lexus wanted to lend us an “Influencer Car.”

I didn’t know how to drive, and Jack barely used his license, but when the offer came through, it seemed foolish to resist, and so we agreed. A few days later on a foggy morning, a Lexus representative dropped off a shiny black SUV with a complex stereo system and a user manual as thick as a novel. The El Royale employed a valet parker in his eighties named Rodney, who was half-blind and famous for scratching every car he drove, so we committed to handling the car ourselves at all times, terrified to get in trouble with our overlords at Lexus. The truth was, Jack wasn’t a much better driver than Rodney, but he maneuvered around Los Angeles with one hand on the wheel, a burrito in the other, somehow managing a cellphone at the same time. I gazed at him in awe.

I don’t even remember where we went in the car—I think it was to brunch and to a Halloween party, where we fought because I thought he left me alone with his friends’ girlfriends for too long and “I don’t belong on the girlfriend couch”—but I remember how happy we were, pretending to be adults in our big adult vehicle. And at night, on the organic mattress my mother bought for me online “to protect your fertility because mattresses outgas a LOT of very bad shit,” we stayed up late giggling and pinching each other’s ears, telling stories about childhood dreams and bad talent-show performances. We were like a pair of twins whose parents should have put them in separate bedrooms for the sake of their sleep schedules.

When we had sex, it was tentative and sweet, reaching for each other under the covers with a kind of awe that we were simply allowed to touch each other like that. Now we told each other we loved each other one hundred times a day—he’d said it the first time in September, after we went to see Woody Allen play jazz at the Carlyle and we shared soup from a terrine, and once the floodgates opened, they would not shut.

“He’s slow, but once he’s in, he’s in,” his sister once told me. And oh, how I wanted to believe her.

“I love you, J.”

“I love you, Lena.”

Never I love you, too. No period on it. Just around and around in an endless loop, a promise, a tic, a prayer. Outside on the street, we could hear teenagers fighting. We hoped they didn’t scratch our borrowed Lexus.

One of the things I hadn’t known to expect about being famous, as obvious as it now seems, is how many new things people would want from you.

I’m so used to it now—even in my small and specific lane, there are always requests—that one of my Gmail tags is “favors.” I’ve learned how to steer conversations away when they’re headed toward “you know, I’ve always had an idea for a movie…” I’ve had a car-service driver spend an entire two-hour ride giving me the play-by-play of a cartoon film he had written about skunks in love, voices and all. “Do you have a way to get to Will Smith?” he asked, until finally my mother demanded “I NEED QUIET.” I’ve had a doctor pitch me an idea for a reality show while their head was between my legs. I’ve been handed more scripts, novels, pitches, storyboards, and résumé cards than I could ever reasonably read. And I don’t just feel for these people—I feel with them, the intensity of the desire to be seen, celebrated, and known so powerful that it transmits like a contact high. Maybe they’re just awakening it again in me. I have no defenses against it. That’s part of the problem.

In early fame, this problem was crippling. The guilt of being the one who got the thing seemed to propel me into a near-eternal state of generosity. I felt, deeply, that if I didn’t give away much of what I had, then I might never get to keep it. Somehow the idea of drawing a boundary seemed like bad karma. For starters, I had been them once—and hadn’t people been kind to me? And what if my name came up at a party and someone said, “Oh, I know her—she’s a flake. A snob. She’s ungenerous. ” I could handle a lot of accusations, but the idea that I did not give wasn’t one of them.

“ARE YOU COMING OR NOT!?” a distant relative by marriage (now divorce) once texted me about a festival screening of his independent film. It was a film I had agreed to appear in one scene of, then somehow ended up on the poster for. “Don’t fuck me around. I saw your tweet about how you hate mass emails—were you sub-tweeting me? Have you gotten that full of yourself, that fast?”

“I’m so sorry,” I said to this sociopath, making a thousand excuses and then putting on a pretty dress and posing at his step and repeat like I meant it, smile wide, teeth glinting. “Of course that wasn’t about you. I love your mass emails—they’re the good ones! I’d truly never let you down.”

I did this again and again, in dozens of scenarios. And yet it wasn’t enough. New requests always came. There were always new people to disappoint, new ways to fail, new bars not to clear.

It’s impossible to count, over that first year or so of being famous, how many middle-of-the-night emails I got from people I knew who said something along the lines of “I always knew you weren’t really that nice,” or “you could have read the fucking script, would that have been so hard?” or even “you must feel pretty good about yourself, ha ha ha, you’ve got ’em all fooled.”

As far as I could tell, these messages were sent by people who were otherwise sane (though time proved many of those assumptions incorrect). And so I reasoned that it must be that the improbability of my success, the “why her?” of it all, as well as my clear inability to bear it with the humble magnanimity I was going for—that must be what had driven otherwise sane people to write such drastic, caustic missives, such out-of-character character assassinations.

It was also amazing to see that the moment I responded—I was always contrite: I’ve been so busy, please forgive the delay, it’s been insane here, what do you need —how quickly they rescinded their words, how fast they could walk it back and love me again. All you had to do was get on your knees, crawl over glass, show them the wounds, and then promise them your undying fealty. It was that simple and easy to repeat. The only problem was that the moment you had them loving you again, you also owed them again, too. It was like being chased by an unhinged debt collector, who kept apologizing as he foreclosed on all of your worldly possessions.

Perhaps other people who become famous have an easier time with this. They may have grown up with a sense of their own worth, or maybe grown up with nothing and so know to protect what they have. They may be well-adjusted enough to know, and live the phrase “not my circus, not my monkeys.” Maybe when other people bark, they bite. But none of these was me. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, too—to have this big, impossible life and be loved by everyone I met in the process.

As someone whose obsessive-compulsive disorder had me asking, from an early age, whether I was a good person—and, if not, then what would happen to me—I found that these accusations and random attacks from people who had previously seemed to care about me had a profoundly corrosive effect. It didn’t matter if they came in the form of slight negs from friends (“oh, too fancy to say hello?” when you didn’t spot them while walking head down on the street) or an unhinged message from an ex-friend’s ex-boyfriend or even a throwaway joke from my mother, the person meant to love me more than was even reasonable. It didn’t matter who said it, or even the content of what they said. If it even implied that I was, in some way, bad —I could not bear it.

I am, insofar as this is even a healthy response to life, a person who wants to make others happy. I want to make them feel seen, heard, understood, perhaps even bolstered or like their own life had been improved by knowing me or reading me or watching me. When I feel I have failed at that mission, I am overtaken by self-hatred, destabilized too totally to do much of anything.

I had to avoid the feeling at all costs. And so I learned to promise and placate, promise and placate.

It was around this time that I started paying for every meal I ever shared (unless it was with an adult whose wealth was comically larger than mine, like we’re talking David Geffen level). It was around this time that I started lending my apartment to anyone who asked to stay there, giving away the jewelry off my fingers, offering up solutions to any problem mentioned, even if we’d met five minutes earlier. It was around this time that I began responding to any compliment with a returned compliment: “I love the show. AND BOY DO I LOVE YOUR EYES.”

It was around this time that I began to stop anytime someone recognized me and give them not only a selfie, but ten minutes of undivided attention, no matter how late it made me. It was around this time that I began to pack in coffee dates, three or four stacked on my rare free afternoons, with anyone who needed advice, anyone I’d ever interned with or for, old teachers and Twitter friends, anyone my mother said “was actually very smart.” A Saturday wasn’t for recovering, for reading, for dreaming. It was for ensuring that as many people as possible had a positive perception of me.

And life? Life was about not causing offense in the space between waking and crashing back into the hot paralysis of sleep. Never mind that one coffee date beget another, one favor beget another, one check beget another. If you make yourself out to be a bottomless resource, people will frack. They can’t help it. There are so many people with so many needs who think—often rightly—that the world wasn’t made for them. We all have to try and get it where we can.

But I wanted to be the exception to every rule—every rule about famous people, about crazy girls, about how the haves treat the have-nots. When given the choice about whether to displease someone and protect myself or help someone and exhaust myself, I would almost always land on option C: hurt myself badly, even though no one had really asked me to do that. I wanted, I know now, to be loving and loved, to be needed and necessary, to be so generous that I was above censure and so kind that I was above being subjected to anyone’s cruelty.