If you're a human being with a pulse, you've likely heard of Lena Dunham's new memoir. Unlike the filmmaker's first book, which chronicled her early life, Famesick takes a closer look at the years leading up to the creation of Girls and its explosive aftermath. Mostly, it offers insight into what it means to become very, very famous in an age where visibility is the highest form of currency — for better and worse.
Like much of Lena's work, the book has divided reviewers. Much of the criticism centers on the missteps she's made, how she addresses them, and what some see as a continued inability to fully reckon with the critiques she's received over the years. Famesick does acknowledge her privilege — and her distress when it’s stripped away. She writes about realizing she’d have to give up her designer gifts to go to rehab, or attending the Met Gala without the ability to drink champagne. In the acknowledgements, she name-drops “TayTay,” while her friendship with Taylor Swift goes largely unmentioned in the book itself. Still, where the New York Times bestseller is strongest is in its examination of fame — a drug more intoxicating than any other — and the way her pursuit of it disappointed her family, even when she could have walked away from it altogether.
That obsession surfaces in several ways. First, through housing. When she first moved to Los Angeles, she chose the legendary El Royale — known for hosting everyone from Clark Gable to Cameron Diaz and Ben Stiller — before booking the Chateau Marmont for the Girls premiere and later living on and off at the celebrity-favored Sunset Tower. She recalls accepting a Vogue cover story at the same time she agreed to host SNL, despite being covered in barely healed boils. There were the endless talk show appearances, even as her father questioned what purpose they served for Girls, a bona fide success that kept getting renewed anyway.
Throughout it all, she kept posting: semi-nude Instagram photos documenting her illnesses, essays for her newsletter Lenny, whose tagline was, “There’s no such thing as too much information.” She was addicted to sharing. And the sicker she became — physically or otherwise — the more desperately she seemed to want it.
Few of us will ever experience attention on that scale, and yet the pressure to maintain visibility is something almost everyone can relate to. Whether we have 50 followers or 50 million, we’re all feeding the perceived demands of an audience. There are sunsets to photograph, outfits to document, updates to funnel into Stories or the grid depending on their quality. Sometimes, the absence of activity can feel strangely stressful. If you’re on vacation and haven’t uploaded anything new, or simply haven’t chronicled the details of your day-to-day life, it can feel as though you, too, are fading into the ether. Even when you know no one really cares, that nothing matters all that much, and that you’re effectively performing labor for free, the impulse to keep up remains.
Rick Springfield, the actor and 1980s recording artist behind “Jessie’s Girl,” wrote in his memoir: “At a young age it’s likely you’ll fall for the praise and adulation and really start thinking you’re the shit and can do no wrong when really you’re just another jerk — or at least I was. A strong family tie is very important.”
The lesson we’re meant to take from Lena’s writing is that no amount of notoriety or money can protect you from real life. Hard times will find you regardless, and if your support system is unstable or your sense of self isn’t intact, the fall can be brutal. If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling, unsatisfied, after taking 400 photos and still not feeling like you got the shot, you might be a little 'famesick,' too.
So where does this leave us? Well, diagnosis is the first step toward treatment. We may never fully escape our online admirers, real or imagined, but we can begin to loosen their grip: checking our phones a little less, keeping photos “just for the memories,” making videos because they’re fun instead of performative. Small gestures, maybe, but meaningful ones. They point toward a life less tethered to a version of yourself that no longer feels entirely real. After all, the game only has as much power over you as you allow it. And that means, at any moment, you can still blow it all up, log off, and walk away.
