Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 9

Female Author

I hadn’t planned to write a book—the essays simply started to pour out in the moments between big moments, a place to express myself that couldn’t be touched by anyone else, that wasn’t subject to the collective creative process that television will always be, no matter how personal. Just like I’d poured my thoughts into marble notebooks as a teen, I talked about things I rarely shared in life—the man I had been with before and the way he manhandled my body, the previous sexual assault in college that defined the rest of my intimate life, and the pelvic pain from endometriosis that had become a more and more insistent part of my daily life. It felt safe, spilling it there. In my writing, I was my best and truest self.

Selling the book in the fall of 2012 was a surreal process in which I met with nearly fifteen editors, including Anthony Bourdain’s imprint at Ecco, a meeting that I’m still shocked didn’t result in a pregnancy purely from the fumes of his masculinity. But ultimately, I decided on an editor—the same one I have to this day, whom I chose for so many reasons, one being that he wouldn’t want to be mentioned here—and it felt like the first decision in a long time that had been only mine. I liked the feeling. But no sooner had I celebrated, the amount of my advance was leaked, and a new wave of press rolled in, a new wave of New York hipster media consternation. My proposal was leaked, and—foolishly imagining that documents remained with the people you sent them to—I had included things I wasn’t even sure I was ready to share. It had seemed so abstract until it wasn’t.

After the advance was announced, Jenni had called me to her office at the Apatower. There was a tone she had, a tone that indicated I had, in some way, deceived her. She looked at me across the desk warily: “You said you were writing a book, but it seemed more like a little project.” It was a little project, I explained. I had been as shocked at the numbers offered to me as anyone.

“But now you’re going to have to take it really seriously, with that amount of money on the table, and what does that mean for our work?”

“It won’t take away from the show,” I said. “I mean, I already wrote most of it, at night.”

“Well, that doesn’t feel very good, either,” she said. She never liked secrets—she would often respond to social activities I only told her about afterward with a raised eyebrow. “Ah, you were secret hanging again.”

When the book came out, we carved out space for a tour. I hit the road, my sibling taking his first post-college job as the coordinator of the talent who opened for me at theaters around America and Europe, a job he quickly abandoned when—in London—he met a contestant from The Great British Bake Off and disappeared to her bedroom for the night. The next morning he was unreachable, and I was preparing to leave him in the UK when he arrived at our gate just minutes before boarding, hair mussed, hat low.

I was already a right-wing punching bag for my work with Planned Parenthood and the Obama campaign—work I did with a sort of blithe slutty persona that was practically designed to infuriate a certain kind of man. And so I knew the book would be criticized by those men, by people whose politics fell firmly to the right of mine (as well as people whose politics fell more to the left, an irony that made my brother refer to me as his “favorite little centrist”). But I was shocked when a conservative media site analyzed the book carefully, pulling choice passages and coming to the conclusion that I had engaged in sexually inappropriate childhood behavior with my sibling.

I was shocked by what I read, but initially unafraid—it seemed to me that any logical person who engaged with this article would understand it for what it was: an attempt to cherry-pick sections to create a narrative that spoke to the idea that I—and by extension, the majority of feminists—were not crusaders for justice but, in fact, wanton perverts.

I didn’t consider what I’d written to be particularly salacious. And anyway, what about the things I hadn’t included? I’d decided against describing the time, age four, I announced to a group of near-strangers that my punishment at home for misbehavior was having “a fork stuck up my vagina.” (It was not.)

I don’t know where I came up with that, but I’ve always been confused by anyone who doesn’t recognize that children are inherently innocent, and yet their imaginations are endless and deranged. Well, I’ve never been any other child but me, at least not this go-round, but I’ve always been possessed of a dense imagination. It feels as if I was born with the endless souls of generations of tipsy, provocative women inside me. That may very well be. Now I knew enough to bat them back. But I had decided this one story—a family favorite, which my father had to be stopped from sharing with a New Yorker reporter— perhaps had the possibility of being misperceived. Oh, how we laugh.

And yes, at first it seemed laughable, a single article by a disgruntled man who found my body politic alarming (what’s even more alarming is that these very men now have the ear of the most powerful leader in the world, that they define America). Coming from where I came from—where adults overshared at dinner parties and my parents took me to see performance art where women writhed and yelled and jerked off—I couldn’t grasp the idea that anyone would take the accusations seriously. I still believed in art as a space of uncharted freedom.

“There are no bad thoughts,” my father had always told me. “Only bad actions.” I extended his catchphrase to mean “There are no bad stories.” As Nora said: Everything is copy. If you had lived it, I thought, surely you could tell it. I believed in that desperately. But if I ever wanted a lesson in the way that a willful misperception can escalate and become a funhouse mirror for people’s sense of their own righteousness, for their unbridled rage, this was it. (I did not, by the way, really want the lesson.)

As the story cascaded, I mounted every defense I could: I took to Twitter to cry smear campaign, male bullshit, to say YOU’re the creepy ones for even thinking this. And while I do believe there were people who were genuinely agitated by the phrasing and what it evoked for them, who felt betrayed by the words—and to them, I am sorry—I believe there were many more who saw the chance to eradicate someone who had heretofore been only a nuisance to them, whose picture they didn’t care to scroll past, a person they deemed unworthy of her accomplishments and her adulation, who was taking their chances and their cash in the zero-sum game of life. What crueler accusation could be leveled?

My parents’ initial response was similar to mine—who would be stupid enough to take this seriously, crude and cruel enough to consider this worthy of discussion? But as the days went on, it didn’t de-escalate. It multiplied, until no one could pretend we were not at the eye of a storm.

“This is…such bullshit,” my father muttered, muttering “bullshit” over and over until it was just the word “shit.”

“Isn’t there someone who can explain this better than you can?” my mother wondered, a good postwar Jewish girl always looking for the best expert.

They didn’t like what was coming their way—even people claiming to defend us said things like, “Don’t blame the kids; this is an issue the parents really should have handled.” But I knew they would survive, that their pride in what they viewed as our intellectual exceptionalism—a quality that Jack often pointed to as the reason having dinner with us was worse than watching PBS (a channel that, for the record, I really enjoy)—would carry them through. They’ve always loved a reason to distrust the outside world.

They weren’t the ones I was worried about. Amid all of this, I watched my brother—just sprouting wings, getting out from under the type-A straight-girl drag he’d worn for all of high school—retreat just as he was meant to be emerging. What I had been guilty of on the page, what the Internet should have charged me with and given me a short sentence for, was poor phrasing, maybe a second count for TMI. What I was now guilty of seemed to be a laissez-faire attitude about what was mine to confess, which had derailed the life of the person I had felt most tasked with protecting.

From the minute Cyrus was born, I felt that it was my destiny to care for him. At six, as I fed him his bottle, I asked our mother, “Can’t we just tell the baby that I’m her mother when she grows up?”

Looking down at his face—the high forehead with the massive Kahlo brow, the strongest eyebrows I’ve seen on a baby to this day—I laid my cheek to his and whispered the kindest words I could think of: “You’re a princess, you’re a queen, you’re the queen baby.” Little did we know we had a king on our hands.

As he grew, he became more of a mystery to me, harder to reach. He was nimble with facts and ideas and reserved when it came to displays of affection, even as a toddler shying away from cuddles or coos. He was oddly serious, which had the inverse effect of making him very funny. At a certain point, he took to wearing suits and driving caps, like an eight-year-old Bill Murray in Caddyshack.

What I was trying to capture when I wrote about him was what a mystery he had always been to me. It was ironic that as a six-year-old, I’d wondered if he had a vagina, when what I didn’t understand for the entirety of our shared childhood was that he wasn’t my sister.

Eight years ago, around the time Cyrus came out as trans, he and I were still working to mend our relationship. It wasn’t just the incident around the book—since the moment I’d begun to have a public life, it had gobbled up the space around his private one, however unintentionally. It didn’t help that the champagne fizz of new fame makes even the most generous people temporarily narcissistic, obsessed with their own image and its success or failure. But the book had been a clear turning point, after which he seemed to feel safer being as far away as possible from the ricocheting bullets of my public persona.

When we saw each other, it was loving and playful, but there was an unspoken distance that we did not have the words to address. Perhaps he felt that I would not know how to hold his secrets, how not to fold him into the always unfolding personal monologue of my work. He had trouble trusting people in the world, uncertain whether they were interested in him for the right reasons—ironically, it caused him at times to choose people whose reasons were even worse. And every time I said sorry, it was for the wrong thing. Every time he shared something that was nagging at him, I pushed too hard to fix it, as if by doing so, I could also fix us. There was nothing I wouldn’t have bought him, no distance I wouldn’t have flown to him, and yet I couldn’t give him the only thing he was asking for—space.

It wouldn’t be until much later that we found our way back to each other, the words to describe how the outside reality had shifted our bond, how the attention of people we never wanted attention from had sent us careening away from each other. When the book came out, he was not even himself yet—I was only beginning to understand the person standing in front of me when he no longer wanted to be near me at all.

It didn’t help that the book incident was the beginning of a long cycle of publicly erring and apologizing, erring and apologizing, something I attempted because—contrary to what some believed—I never got into this to offend anyone. I did it to connect. The rage was a secondary symptom, a side effect, an itch in a phantom limb that I couldn’t stop scratching. The one thing I couldn’t seem to do was stop. The one person I couldn’t seem to offer a sincere apology to was the only person who deserved to hear it at all.

I often don’t know how to say what I want to say—about being a sibling, about the pain of wanting to protect someone and failing and knowing it’s your fault, of being willfully misunderstood by the public but—worse still—willfully misunderstanding the person you love most in the world. He was out on the West Coast, needing to figure out who he was in isolation from the many stories I was telling and being told about myself. He didn’t want to go down the rabbit hole with me, but no one else would do. And so for a long time, I clung to Jack and Jenni for dear life. I celebrated them as the loves of my life. And it wasn’t their fault that they could never fill the space left by his absence, by the person I realize now—through at least this lifetime, possibly more—has been my clearest mirror, my truest companion. I hope that we have the rest of our lives to make sense of what happened—as and when it emerges, we handle it.

“Hello,” I say when he calls. “My brother boy. My sibling guy. My queen baby.”

When the scandal with the book broke out, Cyrus and I were in the Netherlands, where I went on a talk show that seemed to last for hours, more and more guests appearing until the stage resembled a clown car and I finally got up during a commercial break and did not return. Although I initially mounted a jokey defense, my back began to seize, then my legs, until getting across the room to pee seemed impossible, as if my body knew what was coming before my mind did. Curled up on the bed like a kidney bean, I summoned my publicist to the room and announced I wanted to go home. Not wanted. Needed. Like I’d done on so many sleepovers as a child, I had to get the fuck out. Now.

The next morning, I rose in the early dawn and packed my suitcase, eyeing the dress I’d planned to wear onstage that night with disdain, a vestige of the silly girl I had been just yesterday. I was already halfway to the airport and two Klonopin deep when I realized I had forgotten my phone at the hotel.

When I got to the airport, I was forced to google-image myself on the desk agent’s phone, since mine was sitting, full of “are you okay” texts, back at the hotel, to prove who I was, and then do the same with the woman at security who needed evidence I was in the Netherlands on business.

“What’s your business?” she kept asking.

“ This! ” I said, again and again, pointing at the screen grab.

“That doesn’t look like you,” she said, tapping a red carpet photo of me that she’d pulled up. In the image, I was smiling wide, hair in a 1940s finger wave, lips red, dress yellow.

She was right; it didn’t look like me. I’d been traveling for a month, and my body had been slowly breaking down. First came the stomachache, a mixture of nausea and dull thudding, like an irregular heartbeat below my belly button. I could only stomach bread. Then my period started and didn’t stop. Then my mouth filled with canker sores, perfect white circles that stung all the time; I chalked it up to travel, to a cold that hadn’t quite bloomed.

I was stoned by the time I got on the plane. It was the Klonopin, which had been lent to me by a sympathetic friend to help with the physical pain, which was easier to address than the emotional pain. They gave me two for the trip home, to split into quarters. I took them both at once, what I considered a reasonable dose for an unreasonable situation. At the time, I hadn’t yet had my first endometriosis surgery—just being diagnosed had taken ten years of complaining that my period didn’t seem to feel like other people’s, that I wasn’t like the girls I knew who could swim or dance or even fuck, that I could only lie on the floor and dry heave. That surgery would come a month later, when I could no longer handle the pain. At this point, I still considered myself delicate, a little sickly perhaps, but not sick. This was situational, not constitutional.

“What seat are you in?” the flight attendant asked. He was heterosexual, with a trim little mustache and a smug fucking grin.

“I’m in Nine-A…business class?”

“Are you sure?” he asked, winking.

“I’m sure,” I told him, hard and humorless.

I made my way to my seat and squatted over it, grabbing the armrests and lowering myself carefully as if over a public toilet, until my ass fell with a thud.

“Fuck,” I hissed, taking a deep breath and pretending to riffle through my purse. Sitting up was too hard and so I reclined my seat, trying to find an angle that dulled the pain, which was spreading across my back and down my legs, like a bruise being steadily drummed by an invisible hand. I was trying to forget that I had just bailed on three days of professional commitments and that about five thousand people (so far) who hadn’t read my book, and never would, had tweeted at me to call me a satanic creep. Had you told me I’d still be getting those comments eleven years later, I would have downed the rest of the bottle of pills and chosen that plane as my final resting place.

I closed my eyes, picturing a wide green field and an army coming toward me. I was poised with a sword, bending at the knee, ready from every angle.

I landed in New York, but instead of home I went straight to my parents’ apartment. Cyrus had decided not to come back with me; he traveled on to Berlin to sleep on the sofa of a soulful Norwegian man my father worked with, to wander museums and eat steaks and run out of roaming data. At the time, I considered this evidence of what he didn’t understand—just how much this would change our lives, how quickly it was trickling from the hands of people with one set of ideals into the mouths of people with another. I thought he was young and flighty, a little unserious. Now I think he knew exactly what was going on, was saving himself, doing what we’ve both always done best, which is to lose ourselves in romantic fantasy as an antidote to whatever is crumbling. And, had I been thinking clearly, I would have yelled, “Go, run boy run!” like a wildlife rehabilitator freeing a coyote.

In the guest room, my parents brought me toast and tea, but I could hear them murmuring in the living room, words I could hardly make out: fuck, insanity, international news. My father had already received letters at the gallery where his work was on display, accusations of perversion he’d managed to avoid for a whole career of painting perverted things. He’d even been sent a mysterious note from a group calling themselves “The Lilliputian Society” that simply read, “Carroll, what do you have against us?” (We’re still trying to understand that one.)

For the first two days, Jack was unreachable, filming a promotional music video on a mountain in Southern California with a new young artist called Charli XCX. “I left my phone in the trailer,” he explained when we finally connected. It wasn’t clear when he was coming home—only that it wouldn’t be now. Meanwhile, I was not having a very Brat winter.

“Don’t you get it?” my father said, on the third day I refused to get out of bed. “You’ve won. You’re only twenty-eight, and you’ve been called a racist, a fat whore, an ignorant rich girl, and a child molester. What else is left? Nothing. You’ve won.”

So I tried to think of it that way, limping down the street in my free aviators, a street hot dog in each hand, taking violent bites and daring passersby to level anything at me. Bring it, I thought, even after I went six blocks past my destination—yet another psychiatrist’s office, this one a trauma specialist who had bars on her windows—still without a cellphone.

I actually don’t think I knew how you’d even begin to replace a lost phone.