Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 8

Hard Being Easy

One of my favorite old-school directors, a cinematic hero who has worked both on the gold and silver screens, once told me: “When you’re on a TV show and it’s workin’, honey, it’s the best job you’ll ever have.” He said this as he drove me home from a business dinner in Brentwood, where we did no business, right before he leaned in to try and kiss me across the front seat of his Benz. I opened the car door and did my first and last tuck-and-roll onto the sidewalk. I can’t watch his movies anymore—movies that used to bring me such comfort, playing over and over in the background—but he was right.

In a way, Girls became something like an office job—if your office job involved performing dozens of sex scenes a year in front of a crew of aging Irish-American bros who repped their union like it was their favorite sports team, or staging elaborate fights with your TV friends in which you got to scream the things you could usually only whisper to yourself, or pretending to snort coke off a dirty toilet at eight a.m. , or forcing yourself to think about your father’s death so you could muster real tears (to this day, it’s the only thing that does it—something I’ve chosen not to explore more deeply).

Often between takes, I sat in a director’s chair wearing only a bathrobe, my unshaven legs dangling, my feet barely touching the floor, like a child who had been given control of a Fortune 500 company.

For the first year, I was able to hide behind my greenness, and my questions—about how to do what we were doing—seemed adorable. But after a while, I knew enough to act like I knew.

When I was asked to make a pilot, I figured that would be the extent of it. There was no way, I thought, that once it was complete, it wouldn’t become apparent to those in the C Suite that this wasn’t anyone’s idea of commercially viable. When they ordered a season, I couldn’t believe they were letting us keep this charade up for so long. And when that season yielded a second, and the second became a third (and with the third came a bigger episode order, plus increased press expectations, plus nicer dressing rooms), it seemed like Girls would just be my life from now on. When anyone asked how long we’d go on for, I’d shrug and say, “As long as they’ll let me.”

Now, at twenty-six, I was heading into season three—I had a boyfriend, an apartment, a full-time adult job. At first, I treated all the opportunities—the second slot on the Jimmy Fallon couch, a Q and A with The New York Times, a last-minute invite to the Met Gala—as if they were once-in-a-lifetime chances, something I’d be listing at the top of my résumé for the rest of my years. Often, when I told my parents about a new ask, my father would say, “Is that something you have to do?” It was embarrassing to admit that no, nobody was holding a gun to my head—I wanted it. Admitting that all of it felt novel, fun, and affirming would mean that I was an easily corrupted person with a bottomless hunger for success. And so I told him only part of the truth: “You need people to watch the show so that you can make more of it.”

“But you’re already making more of it,” he said. And he wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t understood, at the beginning, that public exposure begot more public exposure, that press begot more press, that parties begot more parties.

A lot was exciting: Every free garment, no matter how hideous, felt like a triumph. There were easily gotten restaurant reservations, invitations to dinner parties at the homes of “culture shifting” people in their thirties, forties, fifties even—people who had spouses and pepper grinders and pastel-enameled Le Creuset casserole dishes. There was the sense that with every day came some article, invitation, or nomination, that I was always besting myself. The trajectory, at this point, seemed to move exclusively upward. It was enough affirmation for a lifetime, and certainly enough to make it easy to cast anyone coming at us with a critical eye as disgruntled, jealous.

There was the part of me that remained full of doubt, anxiety, and just wanted to make the right face and get out of there. But then, of course, there was the part of me—a part I was far less likely to admit to—that felt a sense of having arrived, of being necessary, of knowing, once and for all, that when I died I would be leaving some piece of me on the earth to be rediscovered. My obsession with mortality had always defined me—I spent a lot of time wondering why we try when we’re all just going the way of the dinosaurs. There was something tidy about visible success that had at least the temporary effect of eliminating these questions. People remembered the dinosaurs, and they would remember me.

I would say my friendships got weird once the show was a fact in the world—season one had been a glitch worth celebrating, season two a shock we could all appreciate, season three and this was just the way of things—but in a sense, they always had been. I had childhood friends, sure—Jemima chief among them—but I had always occupied the role of observer, follower, occasional clown. It was only when fame entered the equation that the party came to me.

As the show occupied more and more of my time, invitations that used to seem inevitable stopped. I would hear about a weekend upstate or a dinner party downtown and wonder why I wasn’t included. Isabel, Audrey, Joana, and I no longer argued in that easy way longtime girlfriends do—about a borrowed dress, a misfired compliment, a boy. Rather, when we met up—something I had to carefully schedule, since my year went from preproduction to filming to editing to press and back to prep again—we spent the first hour chipping through the layer of ice that had formed on our dynamic.

My mom’s old art school friend Robert had a saying: “You know you’ve made it in this town when your phone stops ringing.” Robert had made a small fortune in the ’80s, designing and licensing housewares to midlevel department stores across America. While the rest of their cohort scraped by, he bought a massive house in Greenwich and a duplex in SoHo, shopped at Double RL, and vacationed in castles in Morocco. The fact that he died at fifty-nine after being shot up with heroin in the bathtub by a twenty-year-old he was dating, only to have his house pillaged for diamonds before any family could arrive, was not particularly comforting. The fact is, I still wanted my phone to ring.

I had friends, sure—cast, crew, a small raft of people who seemed to see my inner life as real, no matter how unreal the world around me became. But it was the dynamics with the women I’d known my whole life—my mother chief among them, the original frenemy who all would try and emulate but none could best—that seemed to atrophy in profound ways.

The assumption, it seemed to me, was that I had everything I wanted, or that anyone could want—financial security, professional adulation, a love affair that enchanted the press and presented on Instagram as sweet, nerdy, and stable. And so no one ever asked any questions. It felt as though they assumed I was immune from the exhausting realities that dominate your twenties, the micro-failures and massive questions about where you really belong. I knew that my situation made certain aspects of my life—financial, professional—seem like they had already been solved. And in many ways, all of the most obvious ways, they had. I was also aware—made sure to let everyone around me know I was aware—about just how much of that was luck.

But no one ever excavated the backstory, considered the toll of the work, the press, the pressure. As I listened to people my age describe what was currently torturing them (a roommate, an HPV diagnosis, issues with shipping out their line of homemade soap) I would think of the several hundred adults who relied on me to feed their families. I could never say what I was thinking, because it didn’t match the story they were telling, and I could only seem ungrateful.

No one ever expressed very much curiosity or reached for my hand. And I didn’t feel like it was my right to ask for that. Mentioning my successes, especially to complain about them, seemed that it would only make me more alien. And I was used to feeling alien. Often, returning home from a meal with friends where they celebrated job offers, new roommates, escaping a hookup gone wrong but asked me nothing, I would berate myself for feeling slighted, thinking: We only get a certain amount of what we need in this life. At one particular birthday party, during which I was on doctor-assigned vocal rest because I was regularly losing my voice, I had to communicate to the other guests on a notepad. I later heard—in that “I have to tell you, just so you’re aware, really no offense” way—that my friends had considered this behavior to be attention-seeking and wondered why I’d bothered to come. What to me seemed like a representation of my commitment to maintaining normalcy in our dynamics—showing up even without the ability to make words—was to them a showy affectation meant to highlight just how important I thought I was. We had stupid arguments, and I cried. One night, a group of women I loved played a game of “phone roulette,” in which you have to flip through your contacts and then call whomever you land on, attempting to maintain your façade. I answered, delighted to hear from someone I loved, as she awkwardly said, “I’m just saying hello.” I could hear giggling in the background.

Ten minutes later, she called me, weeping, saying, “They made me.” Who was they ? She listed every woman I’d considered a close friend over the last decade, a dinner party I had not been invited to. “I’m sure they just thought you couldn’t come,” she said over and over again through her tears. I wound up comforting her.

Jemima was the only one who remained—probably because we were on the same ride, shopping in the same aisle (Prada) and dealing with the same dissonance. At twenty-six, I was a boss of 200, and she was a mother of two. Neither of us fit into the social order in a way that matched the flow of our friends, who were still deep in the mayhem, getting high, getting fucked, getting abortions, getting new friends and then new problems. We were high up in our gilded tower in Brooklyn Heights, venturing to the places our peers lived only to emulate their lives on camera.

I knew us “Girls” were going to be misunderstood from the first time we stepped out onto a stage as a foursome—it was on The View, where Barbara Walters presided in a series of suits so well cut they could have maimed us.

“There’s a lot to talk about in this show,” she said backstage. “I mean, anal sex in the first episode.”

“Do you mean sex from behind?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “Anal sex.”

I still think about this all the time—who told Barbara Walters that the only kind of sex you could have from behind was anal? What had her twenties looked like as a result?

In the dressing room after the show I met an actor I had loved as a young teen—he was a bit of an American Hugh Grant, famous for that sort of chattery charm, an ability to woo his onscreen paramours with his fast-talking, hand-flapping anxiety.

Ostensibly a comedian, he was there to promote a gothic-tinted movie where he made a dramatic turn. He wore a dark overcoat, his skin pale and dry, and I noticed that his hair was dyed a deep, aggressively consistent brown that, under the glaring studio lights, looked suspiciously aubergine—or was it plum?

We talked—he asked about what we were there to promote, what I’d done before, and suggested that we exchange numbers. “Creative people should know each other.” I was thrilled, imagining telling my parents (whose house the limo would drop me back at in just under an hour) about this iconic Hollywood figure and his interest in my future.

That night, laying on the mattress on the floor, so close to my parents’ room that I could hear my father clearing his throat every ten minutes as if on cue, I stayed up until four a.m. replaying the day—our hair, shiny and blown out; our fingernails shellacked in varied shades of nude, taupe, and ballet pink; the way the thick silk of our new designer dresses nipped our waists in and seemed to add inches to our frames. It had felt good—perhaps a little too good—clutching hands and stepping on to that stage, our heels clicking in time like we were ’90s supermodels closing a show in Paris. As I drifted off, smiling a little bit to myself, my (still very new) iPhone dinged. I picked it up to find a message from the actor—I had saved his number carefully, first and last name.

It said, “u up?”

Barbara wasn’t the only person misunderstanding us.

Most of it I brushed off, the assumption being that these trolls were jobless men with sausage hands slamming comments out from their mothers’ unfinished basements. But I hadn’t expected the swift and vicious hammer of the people who were ostensibly my peers.

“New York Media” in the early 2010s was a very specific kind of shark tank, as blogging exploded and young writers—as hungry as the character I depicted on my show, but far more savvy—jockeyed for hot takes.

“I saw Lena Dunham serve her dog salmon on a china plate” should not have been a headline, but it was. Anything was a headline, and the story below it was usually written by someone I had once casually known, laughed with at a party, slept with the same cringey guy as. It was easy enough for the people around me to write it off as jealousy, but hatred feels like hatred, no matter who’s directing it at you.

“They’re a bunch of jealous losers,” Jenni would sigh every time a new headline caused me to stare blankly ahead, swallowing hard with panic. She encouraged me to ignore it, to look at everything magical that was happening around us and not whatever bullshit was circulating online. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that of course it was easier for her because—when she did take the time to scroll—it wasn’t her name she saw blinking back at her. While everyone involved with the show could feel the intensity of the response, I was the one whose identity had to hold the weight.

I’m not sure who told me that caring was weak, that feeling it was a way of letting the terrorists win. I must have just put that together the way a little kid makes logic out of things they can’t understand. The same part of me that was eight years old, sure that stepping on cracks in the sidewalk would kill one of my parents, was now in my midtwenties and sure that allowing myself to feel the totality of this attention, to grieve the loss of my own innocence about just how cruel people could be, would have equally disastrous effects.

And looking back, it was Jenni’s job to keep me moving, to make sure I didn’t have another psychological episode that sent me hurtling home to mommy. Hindsight tells me that wasn’t the right job for the person I also considered to be my best friend, my touchstone, the adult defining womanhood for me.

Jenni turned forty a few days after I turned twenty-six. “I should be embarrassed that my best friend is so young,” she said on one of our long afternoons in bed together in some hotel or another. I lived for the moments when we were alone, without the pressure of the set, the possibility that she was coming to tell me that a take wasn’t working, or something I had said had gone viral, or that Adam hated his new haircut and had punched a hole in his trailer wall. In those moments, she went from confidante to zookeeper, sister to headmistress. But when we were alone, in our sweatpants, ordering half the room service menu, she was safety—the only person who knew the pattern of my days, the pattern of my sleep, what I was and wasn’t capable of. There was nothing I wouldn’t have done to hold on to that—no favor too big, no request I didn’t rush to fulfill—and I wasn’t shy in telling her that she was holding my life up like Atlas.

It was Jemima, Jenni, and Jack—the three Js—who defined my world, and in relation to whom I defined myself. Each, I reasoned, was my soulmate in a different way.

Despite the constancy of their presence, it felt like I was always in trouble with one of them for something: A dinner I arrived late for and left early. A messy breakdown I couldn’t predict or control—but which only ever happened after we called “wrap” for the day—and the endless cycle of reassurance I required afterward. The only thing I could promise was to never miss a deadline.

From the minute production had begun, it felt to me like I was always running miles behind, that I woke up sprinting and went to bed with my legs still kicking and still I was never fast enough to avoid disaster. Whether it was an interpersonal failure, the inability to keep my neuroses under control or some press mishap I hadn’t seen coming (and I never saw them coming), I was never just existing, always dealing. I became used to the adrenaline spikes and profound episodes of fatigue that made this life possible. At night, returning home, I was so tired that removing my shoes and clothes felt Herculean. Firefighters talk about adrenaline dump—the exhaustion that comes after performing dangerous, heroic feats. It’s why, after rescuing three children and a dog from lapping flames, they will often emerge from a burning house and—the moment the job is done—sink to their knees. I wasn’t saving anyone’s life, but I knew the feeling, the anxiety that powered my days emptying and the thick, soupy fatigue that followed.

Jenni, Jack, even Jem—they just wanted to make me better, stronger, into an adult who could balance her schedule, her checkbook, her obligations. They wanted me to be the evolved, present person they knew I was capable of being. Jemima focused on my style—women needed certain items like the right jeans (no stretch), elegant flats, and a few funny but tit-flattering vintage T-shirts. A vintage ruby ring didn’t hurt. Jack, on the other hand, wanted to be sure I knew how to work the washing machine and was always in awe at how able I was to boss my way through work and then somehow get lost in a seven-block vicinity of where we lived.

Naturally, my parents pushed back against my mounting idolatry of these people. They had always been suspicious—it was their nature—especially of anyone who was trying to change any aspect of my essential nature. My mother, the same woman who had told a drama teacher at an eighth-grade parent-teacher conference that if she didn’t want me to improvise, she was “missing out on some pretty amazing shit.” Imperfect as they were, they would defend my right to imperfection to the death.

Unlike the friends who had given up on my being present in the same way I once had, my parents still expected me to show up totally. The excuses that worked in other places—deadlines, late shooting days, fatigue—didn’t work on them. They weren’t just determined to keep our family in order—they were determined to keep me from becoming, as my father so gently put it, “the kind of narcissistic monster who thinks the sun shines out their ass.” I didn’t want to be that, either, but it was hard to explain to them the weight of the expectations at work, the density of what I was trying to get through every day.

They wanted time with their daughter—not, as my father once hissed, “with Lena Dunham herself.” They wanted us united in the safety of our nuclear quad, to have a routine that remained ours. They wanted me to be careful of how many interviews I did or how many awards shows I attended. They wanted to leave the Emmys early, because standing around in black tie is embarrassing. They wanted me, the me they’d made. But I had a new higher power now—people who loved me completely in my newly awakened form. And so, they’d have to revert to second place.

The tension often meant that it fell to Jenni or Jack to explain to me the unreasonable nature of my parents’ expectations. Jack thought they wanted too much input in my decision-making, that a parent’s job was to blindly celebrate you, that they didn’t show enough joy at my achievements. Jenni felt that they weren’t allowing me to start my own life, that the expectation of togetherness was stifling and perhaps selfish.

Jenni was the only one who saw my life in 360 degrees, and so Jenni was the only one who understood—and my reliance on her became more intense the less I felt that anyone else understood.

And sometimes I missed my parents when I was with them, sharp pains of nostalgia that nearly made me sick, even though we were together, just having dinner, like always.

The first awards season—which occurred between seasons two and three of Girls —had seemed to go on and on—from the pure excitement of the Emmys, our first awards show where I shook with excitement seeing celebrities I didn’t even realize I cared about (“You mean everything to me!” I shouted at Next Top Model ’s Janice Dickinson, from a place deep inside me I hadn’t known existed) to the Golden Globes, where I heard my own name called in slow motion and beamed at Leonardo DiCaprio on my way to the stage as if we went back lifetimes. These moments felt joyful, impossible—all of us Girls clinging to one another, tittering with joy as Daniel Day-Lewis nodded and said, “Congratulations, girls.”

“Does he know that we’re the girls,” Jemima asked, “or do we just look like a group of girls?”

But it didn’t stop there. There were brunches and luncheons, niche awards shows that happened before and after the big awards shows, parties thrown by brands I’d only ever seen in the pages of fashion magazines, borrowed gowns for three or four galas a week and countless press days, custom dresses discarded on hotel floors and then bagged up to be sent to temperature-controlled storage.

Somewhere in all of that, I broke again. I wondered when I would stop feeling like a bad purchase, like a faulty doll that needed to be sent, again and again, to the American Girl Doll Hospital. What was it about me that could not handle what my new friends—the Emmas and Jens and Bries—seemed, from my vantage point, to handle with such grace?

In February 2013, Jack’s band was rehearsing for a stadium tour at Prince’s famed Paisley Park compound. I had flown to freezing Minneapolis to be near him, trying to reset my bearings (at this point, I was still putting myself on planes at every available moment to make sure I didn’t leave his consciousness). But he was gone all day and most nights, too. I went once to the warehouse where they were working, touched the fuzzy purple walls—and left. Then I lay alone under anonymous white sheets at a Hyatt near the airport, looking out at an icy parking lot.

In the space between the end of season two and the start of three, I had edited and promoted the new season, but now there was a whole other job on top of that—the awards circuit, an endless string of celebrations that everyone considers a blessing even though they’re really just parties, dozens and dozens of parties. If the space between seasons one and two had felt intimidating and unknown, now there wasn’t even time to consider just what was making me so fucking anxious. I had done talk shows and talk backs, panels and parties. Vulture had run an article about the face of shocked glee I made whenever I encountered a celebrity. Lena Dunham, mouth wide in awe, next to Ben Affleck, Mia Farrow, some cast member from The Office. It was noted that I walked in heels like a baby giraffe, that I should have had the money by now to fix my teeth, that I wasn’t as ugly as everyone said, that I was uglier. My acceptance speeches were dissected—did I have a lack of humility, or was I feigning too much? Was I fun and real, or messy and exhausting? Did I have a bad case of “they like me, they really like me” syndrome, or could I be forgiven for being shocked?

In that hotel room in Minneapolis, unsure if it was nine a.m. or nine p.m. because of the cold dark, I was frozen with fear about the fact that in three or four days, I’d be sent back out for more. Winning required press about winning. Celebrations led to more celebrations. I scanned my own name on Twitter, as if I might see something that would buoy me, but all that stood out were pronouncements about my bad body, irritating voice, clearly horrific politics, inability to walk in heels, poor sense of style, and the fact that anyone—literally anyone—was more deserving of all of this than I was. The defenders, kind as they were, got lost in the density and diversity of insults—some of them misspelled and goofy, still more articulate enough to echo the demon voice that had been following me for longer than I cared to admit. Now, from bowels of the Internet, it whispered new things, things that had never occurred to it before it was fed.

I dialed my father’s number, slowly, one panicked digit at a time. He answered on the first ring these days.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I wailed before he could even say hello. “I feel like I’m in a car driving away from my own soul.” Jack wouldn’t be back for another ten hours, at which point I’d put on some clothes and wash my face and try and act like I’d had a relaxing day in the Minneapolis Hyatt. I was still trying to be what I thought he wanted—someone supportive and supple, who could bounce back, who could order us a perfect room service meal and be ready to laugh, seduce, compliment.

“Then don’t,” my father said. “Just stop. Tell your ‘people’ you’re done for the moment. I saw you on that last talk show—you weren’t there.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “Did I do a bad job?”

“You didn’t do any job—you weren’t there.”

He talked me through the next steps like a firefighter communicating with a woman in a trapped building. He told me to get my laptop. He dictated the email, which I sent to PR and my agent and cc’d Jenni: “I am on the verge of exhaustion. In order to preserve my creativity and give season three what it needs, I have to clear my upcoming engagements. Thank you for understanding.”

Everyone understood, because they had to. They made it clear that there were people to apologize to, situations that needed handling. They proved their own necessity by “handling” them. I used the next few weeks to try and get my head on straight, but the shame of having failed at my duties created an entirely new set of worries.

A month later, when season three began shooting, Judd called from Los Angeles to say that the footage we had shot thus far felt “a little lazy”—the camera was barely moving. My performance was a bit stiff. It was missing big comedy moments. There were things we would want to reshoot.

“Of course,” I said. “I can do better,” I said.

I sat in the diner around the corner from my house and wept—not because it was unfair, or he was wrong. He was right—he was always right, he had an instinct for comedy and truth that was unerring. And a stationary camera can be a beautiful cinematic choice. A performance can feel skillfully contained. These are choices. What he was intuiting was that I wasn’t making choices. I was still on party autopilot, smiling and nodding, my mind somewhere else entirely, and even I couldn’t tell you where that was.

The problem wasn’t just that I was burned-out. I was burned-out and too afraid to say it, as if admitting to the issue would be the confirmation everyone was waiting for that I wasn’t fit for the job. Looking back, I think the main person who had been waiting for that confirmation, fearing that reality, was me.

I had a chance here—to admit that I was terrified, addicted to work but physically exhausted, rattled by the attention and overexposed, overstimulated by the intensity of my new public life yet under-stimulated when it came to doing typical things that might make a twentysomething feel whole. I needed to journal. Maybe start a small herb garden. Throw a dinner party with takeout Chinese. Admit to a friend my age this wasn’t as fun as it looked. But, all out of ideas, I could only berate myself about the dailies and swear, harder than I’d ever sworn anything before, that I wouldn’t let it happen again.

Looking back, this may be the moment my body started to scream—sure I wouldn’t listen, sure I couldn’t listen, it took the job upon itself of stopping me in my tracks.

I was still sick with the guilt of canceling a Jimmy Kimmel appearance a year later, between shooting seasons three and four, when the promotional duties for season three made the previous year’s look like a vaguely demanding small-town book club.

In the winter of 2014, my publicist texted me: “CALL ME!!!” This could only mean two things—I was in trouble for something unexpected, or we’d leveled up.

It turned out to be the latter—I’d been offered a Vogue cover and a chance at hosting SNL within a week of each other. Vogue had been a bible to me as a child, an escape into a curated world of fantasy and glamour. It dulled my anxiety with its pages and pages of beautiful unreality. When my publicist told me, she was near tears: “This doesn’t happen in comedy,” she kept saying, again and again.

Later in my youth, SNL had done a similar but different job for me, showing me a world of freaks who, week in and week out, played characters who didn’t have to be sweet or beautiful. I would stay up until midnight to watch the Comedy Central reruns of the show on the small flat-screen TV our landlord had abandoned in the basement of our family’s Brooklyn rental, a short-term solution where we ended up camping out for five years. Not wanting my parents to know I was awake, I’d plug stolen Delta Airlines headphones into the TV and sit inches away, studying Cheri and Ana, Maya and Amy and Tina.

It’s important to note that I didn’t have to accept these offers—although turning them down would have confounded the people whose job it was to keep my public image rising and been a slap in the face to everyone who had been working so hard to make this show not just a work of art, but a “moment.” I wanted to do them. It didn’t matter how tired I was, how bruised. It was easy to imagine—the same way I’d imagined it as a little kid, staring at a Christy Turlington cover so I could mimic her face for school picture day or idolizing Molly Shannon sniffing her own armpits—that these would be the things that made me feel, finally and totally, like I deserved this, like I was where I belonged.

The only person who would ever consider suggesting otherwise was my father, and he was such a naysayer that if I listened to him, I’d be living in some little troll house under an obscure bridge, making my art for the birds. And even he wanted his work to be seen. That was something our whole family had in common, even if our ideas of what that looked like were different.

“I’d just think about whether hosting SNL is going to add to your life or just put you back into…you know how you can get,” he said. And I knew he wanted to protect me, but I also knew he wanted to avoid having to rescue me, to scoop me off the floor. “Listen, I wouldn’t enjoy it.”

“Good thing they’re not asking you to do it then,” I said. Once someone’s teenage daughter, always someone’s teenage daughter.

The week before the Vogue shoot, I broke out in shingles and impetigo. (For those who aren’t familiar, it’s the fungal rash that covered Amy Winehouse’s face in some of the most famous paparazzi images of her downfall.) The shingles were on my stomach, a cluster of burning blisters that really put a damper on my spirit. Vogue wasn’t asking me to join their pages for my bikini body, sure—but the pain left me disoriented, and the medication made me stupid. The impetigo, however, was on my face, a waterfall of golden blisters, turning a sickly green as they dried.

A doctor was summoned to my room at the Sunset Tower—another doctor I didn’t know, appearing suddenly like Rumpelstiltskin. He inspected me and nodded sagely, saying, “Highly contagious and can’t be covered with makeup.” When I asked how this could happen, he simply shrugged and said, “Your immune system is telling you something.”

The Vogue dates couldn’t be moved, because Annie Leibovitz had agreed to do the shoot, and her schedule could not slide.

I had already done a shoot with her for Vanity Fair a few years earlier, just after Girls season one finished airing, which had begun awkwardly when she asked my publicist if I’d be willing to go totally nude on the Brooklyn Bridge. And while I was in a yes frame of mind in those years, that was—pun possibly intended—just a bridge too far. I’d written a long earnest email back to my publicists, trying mightily to explain the difference between appearing naked in my own work, nudity that had emotional and narrative content, versus standing tits out in a sensual pose while joggers passed and wondered why my mons pubis was so puffy. Finally, the stylist—a funny thing to have for a possibly nude shoot, but she did have heels in mind—had agreed I could wear clothing, and I selected the button-down shirt and flared brocade skirt that my former babysitter Zac Posen had given me for my high school graduation. They added, for reasons I could not understand beyond possible revenge for rejecting their initial pitch, a jaunty beret. And as I was standing on the bridge, in a hailstorm and in the eye of Annie’s camera, behind me a man had jumped to his death. I’d been sobered by the way the crew had just carried on, moving lights, holding umbrellas over Annie.

But Annie Leibovitz still wanted to shoot me, and Anna Wintour wanted Annie to shoot me, and the whole thing was being treated as seriously as if a foreign dignitary was visiting the White House, and so it was determined that rubber gloves and retouching would have to be employed. The show must go on. (By the way, this is the time to note that Anna is, let the record show, lovely and very funny and has given me less grief than all the chubby women in Hollywood combined.)

I was so adrenalized with anxiety that I barely slept, which meant that when my five a.m. pickup came, I was hardly awake. I spent the night looking at every Vogue cover in history, trying to do some kind of academic research that would allow me to feel confident that—even with two kinds of skin lesions and a roaring headache—I could hit the poses and offer the energy that a Vogue cover girl needed.

The shoot was three days, not including the four fittings it took to get the various gowns to work on my body. Even at my exhausted thinnest, every sample size still needed a panel added, every skirt still had an unzipped zipper to hide. In one image, a taxidermied pigeon sat on my head, affixed with bobby pins and some sort of gummy tack. In other images, Adam—I was surprised he agreed to show up, considering his general disdain for promotion outside production—stretched sensually across a bed beside me, lazed in a bathtub, lay across me on a fainting couch, and made ominous eye contact. It only occurred to me years later, when I saw him starring as a centaur in a perfume commercial, that just like the rest of us, he might want to be wanted.

When the cover was revealed, Jezebel —the feminist snark sister of Gawker —put out a bounty on unretouched images of me. They framed it as a feminist issue—let’s prove that Vogue does not care about our fat sister!—but it felt only like the group of seventh-grade mean girls who had pointed out my water bra at the school dance, asking over and over if they could feel it.

The images were located in no time, and people seemed a bit disappointed to find out how little had actually been changed. My neck lengthened a little. My under-eye shadows gone. Somehow, the impetigo didn’t seem to register on camera. I wanted to be angry, but—already on the road in France promoting to rooms full of translators—I was just relieved that what they found hadn’t included a yellow-green rash curling its way down my face like ivy.

I returned home from the promotional trip, and I was due at SNL the next afternoon. SNL hosting requires a week of intensive rehearsals and shoots, several of them stretching into the wee-est hours of the morning, and I essentially blacked out from the minute Lorne Michaels shook my hand and I was shown to my dressing room.

I know I arrived prepped with ideas for sketches, characters I’d been doing since childhood (Dolores, the nine-year-old public transit expert)! But when it became clear that my input was not needed—a group of Harvard-educated men had a very clear idea of the way I would skewer my own persona, which mostly involved variations on “she gets naked a lot”—I followed the instructions of Donna, the longtime costumer, when she explained how they’d quick-change me between sketches: “Just go limp, like a rag doll.”

Recently a friend located my signed photo framed on the wall. Above my face—far more retouched than it was on that Vogue cover—I wrote “ SNL, you should be very proud of yourselves.”

The morning of the Golden Globes—my second set of nominations, my second custom Zac Posen gown—I was being laced into my corset when my mother called. “Hi, honey,” she cooed, with a softness I hadn’t heard in a long time. Our calls had become more combative, speedy, always imbued with an edge of disappointment on both sides.

“I just wanted to say how proud I am of you and…” I heard her voice break. I never heard her voice break. Crying wasn’t something my mother did, except for the one time we visited her former summer camp and it had been razed to the ground.

It took her a long time to come out with it—my first cousin, only recently thirty-six, had died overnight, after a history of drug abuse and mental health issues, constant drama that would now be missed because it was what everyone got of him. Jesse, the first grandchild. Jesse, the handsome skateboarder with the chest tattoo, whose attention we had always felt was like being blessed with a pop star’s smile. Jesse, who had taught us about hip-hop and skate parks, 90210 and sugary cereal, who always had a beautiful leggy girlfriend and a hustler’s business scheme. Jesse, who had been lost to us as a family for a long time—my grandmother the only one willing to entertain the increasingly complex lies of a junkie—but this was the first time it occurred to me that some people never come back. Sometimes, they run out of time.

As is tradition in Judaism, he’d be buried the next morning. There was no flight that would allow me to attend the awards ceremony and make it back for the service. I had my publicist tell HBO I would be missing the awards show—it seemed, to me, the first sane decision I had made in a long time. Of course you don’t miss your family’s most painful day so that you can lose an award at a table that serves only bread and champagne. But as soon as HBO publicity was informed of the conflict, a jet was booked—the timing would work, I was told. I could go from the ceremony directly to Tiffany’s, where I’d hand my jewels to an armed guard and then head for the airport. Nobody asked if I was going to be all right to attend. Nobody asked whether I could keep up my game face. I felt some odd pride, as if I must be a better faker than I’d thought—they knew they could rely on me.

At the awards themselves, my corset staunched my air flow, but I was unable to keep my mouth shut about what had happened, what was happening. I remember feeling like a fart bomb, like I couldn’t stop willing people to back away from me. I drank three glasses of champagne, something I rarely ever did, and introduced myself to people who weren’t even smiling at me. The veil between what we think and what we say had broken. Any sense of decorum was abandoned in favor of something more like narration from a rejected Sundance film.

“Hey! How are you?” asked my old pal, auteur Noah Baumbach.

“Well, my cousin died,” I said cheerfully. “I actually have to leave after my award is announced. It’s very sad, but at the same time, he once brought a gun to Thanksgiving. These things happen.”

On the plane, Jack and his sister and I stretched out in the beds, ate the fancy sandwiches, wore the pajamas provided, and watched dumb movies. We were like tweens at a sleepover, giddy to have the space to ourselves. Somehow, my cousin’s sudden death had given birth to the most fun plane ride of my life.

We went right to the temple in the clothes we had—they weren’t respectful, but they were what was on hand. I looked to the pew ahead of me, at my cousin’s six-year-old son, squeezed next to his mother, who was staring dead-eyed in her puffer coat.

“You made it,” my aunt said, as if she’d seen a ghost.