Two weeks ago, during the auspicious week of my birthday, I went to the Lena Dunham book party. Since then, the two copies of Famesick — one of which was 1 of the 2 last copies Nicolaia Rips and I found at the party, their jackets sticky with non-alcoholic wine, the other mailed to my old apartment in Bushwick — have been stacked on my bedside like bibles.
“I haven’t started it,” I admitted to a colleague yesterday while waiting for the elevator. “It means too much to me.” It’s a sentiment I’ve seen other readers say online amidst posts of Lena’s wonderfully unabated Substack press tour — the idea that once you start something, it means it will invariably end. “I’ve been rewatching GIRLS,” he said. “Like everyone else.” I shrugged. “I never stopped watching GIRLS.”
When Book Gossip writer Jasmine Vojdani—who wrote a brilliant scene report about the party in last week’s newsletter that will tell you more about the party than this delayed diatribe — asked me, on the record, what I was looking forward to reading most in Famesick, I stammered something about how I want to know how she felt after the release of Not That Kind of Girl, the candid, controversial 2014 essay collection I devoured my senior year of college.
I honestly hadn’t thought about what would be in the book. (That’s probably why I keep calling it the “Lena Dunham book party.”) I didn’t care — I’d read, gratefully, voraciously, whatever she wanted to share. Which is a lot: Famesick charts her rise to fame in her early 20s and the subsequent wreckage on her brain and body, covering everything from the GIRLS origins to her relationship with Jack Antonoff to chronic illness and sobriety.
Various literati, media girls, and local celebs descended the literary landmark The Algonquin Hotel, which I’d been curious about ever since reading about it in Valley of the Dolls. By 5:40pm on the balmy, sunny Monday, the room was already packed, work laptops and overcoats abandoned in a corner. Among the crowd was Alison Roman, Josh Safdie, Zadie Smith, Audrey Gelman, Cyrus Dunham, Jeremy O. Harris, Lili Anolik, Larry Owens, and Dunham’s parents Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons. (As an aside, my boyfriend, a painter, refers to Lena Dunham as ‘Laurie Simmons’ daughter.’) The event promised “gentle gossip.” I heard a rumor about a media throuple.
The first time I interviewed Lena was in 2021. While working at Nylon Magazine, I interviewed a handful of idols: Drew Barrymore, Pamela Anderson, Ottessa Moshfegh, Avril Lavigne, Diablo Cody. I maintain that the only person I can imagine being starstruck for is Kim Cattrall, but no interview subject has meant more to me than Lena Dunham.
I conducted the interview at Bryant Park, chatting with her and her now-husband Luis Felber, a singer-songwriter who performs under the name Attawalpa, on speakerphone while balancing my laptop on my knee to record the conversation on GarageBand. I was undergoing Invisalign at the time and had probably just been to my orthodontist. (If only I had belonged to the Wing, whose Bryant Park location was still intact…) It was the first public interview she and Luis gave together; they were sweet and tender, in a new, gooey love way, while talking about their intimate iPhone music video for his song “Tucked In Tight.”
The next time was in 2022 in an even less appropriate location. I didn’t have my shit together, in a global sense. I had two jobs and no health insurance and found myself (frequently) in the Lower East Side, unable to make it home in time to conduct the interview. I huffed up to the second floor up of the Whole Foods on Bowery and took a spot facing the window. Maybe she’d think I lived in a loft. When she came on the screen, she was sitting on the floor of her hotel room eating room service. She apologized for being late and for eating on camera. I considered apologizing for being at the Whole Foods on Bowery. We talked about Sharp Stick, her first film in more than a decade, about the sexual awakening of a 26-year-old virgin, an unlikely hero’s journey that was original and compelling.
“She’s exactly how you imagine her to be,” I told my friends. “Brilliant. Hilarious. Kind of overshares.” Now that I’ve dealt with my own internalized misogyny, I kindly remove the “over.” Now, I recognize the compulsion as an act of generosity.
At the Lena Dunham book party, I ordered a glass of white wine, which was off. Halfway through I realized that it was missing an ingredient: alcohol. Dunham celebrated eight years of sobriety three days before the party, and it was fitting that the bar was auto-sober, with an option to specify if you wanted alcohol. (Reader, I did.) The signature drink of the evening was Not That Kind of Mule, a take on the Moscow mule made with strawberry and mint. I chatted with Nicolaia Rips, the only woman in the world who can look as cherubic and fresh-faced coming straight off the plane from Coachella. Magdalene J. Taylor, Emily Leibert and I bravely went where nobody else did: the appetizer platter, as we tried to figure out if a tall silver-haired man was famous before concluding he just works at Substack. The agent Abby Walters was wearing a sachet so dainty she could hold it with one finger. “A bag should be held with one finger,” someone remarked. It felt, finally, like spring.
Lena took the couch for a Q&A with her C-Word podcast co-host Alissa Bennett. I was in the back of the room and couldn’t see. The room was long; I am short; the crowd was dense. But I was riveted.
“I think it started to be like, Here, take a piece of me.” She said, of writing confessionally, “but it was at a great cost to my own sense of self.”
She remarked about being about to turn 40. “God I can’t wait to be 40,” I whispered.
By 7:30, most people had cleared out, including Lena, out the side door, a comet of pink Chanel. I didn’t catch more than a glimpse, but it didn’t matter. She was there — after everything, she was still there.
“God I can’t wait to be 40” — I feel this
I've been frugally watching GIRLS and reading Famesick—like a Thai squirrel in AC hibernation.