Reading Diary: Late Spring Edition
So, I read two of the year’s hot memoirs: Famesick, by Lena Dunham, and Strangers, by Belle Burden. Maybe you’ve heard of them? Both have gotten a ton of press coverage in New York outlets, in part because the authors have privileged New York backgrounds—and this is something that both women address in their memoirs in a way that is unusually self-aware.
Let’s start with Dunham. I first became aware of her in 2010, when I saw her debut feature film, Tiny Furniture. Her indie filmmaking seemed to come out of the so-called mumblecore aesthetic, but it felt like something new, too. Her screenwriting was more refined and openly autobiographical. She struck me as a prickly, odd artist and so I was surprised and a little disappointed when she signed on to make a TV show for HBO. Her vision didn’t seem suited to television, but then Girls premiered and it was good. Really good. It was still spiky and raw, like Tiny Furniture, but it was funnier, and had a stronger narrative. I think I was most impressed with the variety of jokes. There were witty one liners, observational humor, sight gags, physical comedy, and dramatic irony. But there was something dark and unsettled, too, which made the show feel weightier than other sitcoms.
I am not an especially online person and I was really not online much when Girls was first on air because I’d just had a baby. So I felt confused when it started to become clear that people were annoyed with Lena Dunham and with the cast of Girls, generally. I remember chatting with a woman who was much closer to Dunham’s age than I was, and she was quite irritated that Dunham and her young cast mates were the children of semi-famous people who were well-connected in the art and media world. She’d had an idea that the actresses in Girls were just like her, and felt she’d been tricked. She resented Dunham’s privileged childhood and sudden fame; to her, it made the show feel less authentic.
I didn’t really understand this young woman’s feelings of betrayal. I am generally not bothered by nepotism in the arts; it’s very common, in all walks of life, for children to follow a career path similar to their parents, so why should the arts be any different? But I soon realized that nepotism wasn’t really the issue with Dunham; from the beginning, it seemed to really bug people that she was famous. She hadn’t paid enough dues, or else she wasn’t pretty enough, or thin enough, or humble-seeming enough. She was online too much, paying too much attention to critics—or else she wasn’t paying enough attention, and she should listen to her fans. Whatever she did, the consensus seemed to be that she should be doing something else.
In Famesick, we learn that Dunham herself was not comfortable with her celebrity, and not skilled in handling her newfound powers. (I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m blaming Dunham for the haters. I just mean that fame came on so quickly, and was so isolating, that she never had a chance to acclimate to its thin air.) I didn’t understand, until I read Famesick, exactly how young she was and how much responsibility she took on when she created Girls. The first half of Famesick is fascinating as Dunham describes how she made Tiny Furniture, how she pitched Girls, and how she wrote and cast the pilot episode. Although HBO paired her with a seasoned show runner, Jenni Konner, and although Dunham had Judd Apatow in her corner as a producer and mentor, the success or failure of the show was largely on Dunham’s shoulders. Her talent was the engine.
One thing that surprised me, but then made sense once I thought about it, was that Dunham did not originally plan to star in her show—this was an assumption that HBO executives made, based on the fact that she’d starred in Tiny Furniture. It didn’t occur to Dunham to question HBO’s assumption. Only her father, Carroll Dunham, hinted that taking on such a role might not be in her best interests. Here’s the story from Lena’s perspective, which I will quote at length because I think the whole thing is illuminating to her auto-fictional project, in general:
I had played many versions of the same Lena-adjacent character in my work—I’d called her Georgia, Ella, Aura, all simple feminine names that seemed vaguely analogous to mine. They weren’t me, exactly—they were funhouse mirror versions, Lena if she’d ignored all her therapist’s advice and didn't have the motor and compass of creative inspiration. In the Girls pilot, the character was “Hannah.” I assumed Hannah would be played by a polished professional, so was shocked when everyone—from Judd (Apatow) to Jenni (Konner) to the brass as HBO—casually mentioned that I would be playing Hannah, as if it had been discussed already. “I think they . . . cast me today,” I told my father over dinner, smiling nervously into our favorite Pakistani takeout. When my father—forever looking a gift house in the mouth—asked whether I’d considered the effect this would have on my life, I’m sure I denounced him as roundly unsupportive and/or stormed into my room, which was still about fifteen feet from his. [Dunham was still living with her parents when she made the Girls pilot.] The next day, I gladly accepted the role I hadn’t known I was writing for myself . . .
As I made my way through Famesick, I came to see Dunhman’s decision to star in Girls as the most damaging of her career. (This is my own theory, not Dunham’s.) I’m not suggesting she was a bad actor, or that the show would have been better if she’d cast someone else to play Hannah Horvath. But I do think it would have been a lot better for Dunham, in terms of holding herself together, body, mind, and soul. It’s vulnerable enough to write autobiographically but to add to that the vulnerability of playing a version of yourself takes nerves of steel—which no one has at age 24. I can’t think of any other filmmakers who have taken on such an artistic challenge except for Woody Allen, who Dunham was often compared to when she started out. But Allen waited until his thirties to create characters that were realistic. The movies he made in his twenties, when he was Dunham’s age, were mostly silly comedies in which viewers were unlikely to conflate the characters he portrayed on screen with Allen himself. Greta Gerwig also comes to mind as an actress who wrote and performed roles that seemed at least semi-autobiographical, but in her most personal film, Ladybird, which she wrote and directed, she cast Saoirse Ronan to play the title character.
I want to pause here for a moment to talk about Dunham as a writer. Generally, she writes in an autobiographical mode, but she has many ways of doing it. She has authored screenplays, personal essays, comedic essays, and memoir. There’s also all the writing she does online on social media and now, Substack. I think she’s most expressive as a screenwriter, but she is very much in control of what she is doing in each genre—even on Substack, she understands the parameters of the form. I don’t think she ever gets enough credit for her literary discernment. Some of this is the typical way of the way people view women’s autobiographical writing as less constructed, less intellectual, something that just “pours out” or is “therapeutic” but I think some of the negative perception of Dunham’s work has to do with her taking on the role of Hannah Horvath. Dunham lost a layer of interpretation when she put her own body on the line. Viewers had a hard time separating Lena from Hannah. The sex scenes that Dunham wrote for her characters seemed to confuse things even more. Her artistry as a writer got lost as viewers focused on Dunham’s body and what they viewed as self-exposure. There was a lot of online discourse. Some of it quite cruel.
All of this was very difficult for Dunham to process, for obvious reasons. And on top of it, she had a big, big job. Her stress levels were through the roof, exacerbating pre-existing illnesses and imbalances. Her health fell apart, and she became addicted to a variety of medications and drugs as she tried to soldier on. The second half of Famesick is distressing. There were times when I had to take a break from reading because it was so sad and intense.
I’ve heard Famesick described as a burn-out memoir but that doesn’t feel quite right, even as Dunham herself describes her struggles with illness, addiction, fame, and people-pleasing as something that could have been addressed with better professional boundaries. I mean, yes, of course, put that phone down, Lena! Get some good sleep! But I think that Dunham’s situation goes beyond burnout. There’s something extreme and exceptional in her relentless drive to create. The other side of Dunham’s remarkable creativity is self-destructiveness. She never quite gets to the heart of her harmful impulses in Famesick, but I think that’s difficult to write about directly. It’s likely that Dunham attempted to express those shadowy sides of her psyche through the characters in Girls—especially Adam. And maybe that’s what made people so uncomfortable with the show, but also drawn to it.
I could write more about Famesick, but let’s move on to Strangers, by Belle Burden. Unlike Dunham, Burden kept a low profile for most of her adult life. Her parents were well known in New York society, and if you follow fashion, you may have heard of her grandmother Babe Paley, a style icon. Burden grew up wealthy and lived according to the rules of her class. She was a good girl who did well in school, obtained a law degree, and was hired by a white shoe firm. There, she met her husband, a lawyer that she refers to as James. She and James had three children, which she quit her job to raise. Her life, she thought, was wonderful—even when Covid hit, she was of the fortunate class that could jet off to a second home to shelter in place in luxury. But suddenly, her marriage fell apart. James, it turned out, was having an affair. He left her abruptly during lockdown, telling her he had no interest in her or their children, and that she could finish raising them on her own, considering they were practically grown up. (All were under the age of 18.)
To say that James’s sudden disappearance left her reeling does not even begin to convey the damage done to Burden’s sense of self. What emerges is a story of woman waking up to the consequences of her isolated privilege. Burden finds herself stranded in a world of married couples, clubs, and private schools, all of it scaffolded by inherited wealth. Burden is frank about the role of money in her life, explaining how many of her expenses, including large real estate purchases and school tuition, were paid for through trusts provided by her family. She finds herself hobbled by a bad prenup, which she herself authored. Some of the suspense of the memoir comes from the legal battle that ensues. But the narrative arc is mostly centered on Burden’s journey of self-discovery. The title refers not only to James—whose betrayal comes out of the blue—but to Burden, who realizes that she has become a stranger to herself and to many of her friends.
Burden has a very clear, direct prose style but she can be discreet. You never really find out what’s going on with her children, a choice I appreciated for the kids’ sake, but I did wonder what I was missing. You also never get a handle on James. His behavior remains opaque throughout the book. There were times when I wished Burden would speculate wildly, but she gives you enough that you can develop your own theories. I can see why this is a book club favorite.
Okay, very quickly, two more books: First, continuing in my reading about Christianity, I picked up Jenna Kadlec’s memoir, Heretic, about leaving the evangelical church after coming to terms with her queer sexuality. Kadlec, who grew up in the church and married a pastor’s son, had to remake her life completely, excavating years of shame and repression. This memoir has an intellectual bent, with Kadlec looking at how American culture, in general, has been shaped by evangelical Christianity. Something I learned from this book is that the evangelical habit of interpreting the Bible literally (as opposed to symbolically) influenced the legal theory of Constitutional originalism.
Related to the above, but a lot more fun, I also read Secret Lives of Church Ladies, by Deeshaw Philya. This a highly entertaining debut short story collection—deep, funny, and real. Its stories are centered on Black women, all of them with a relationship to Christianity, but estranged from the church in some way, usually to do with sexual secrets. Many of the stories are in the first person and have a confiding tone that draws you in immediately. I knew this book was a word-of-mouth hit in 2020, but I never got around to it until now—and it’s just in time, because Philya is coming out with a novel this fall, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman. I requested a galley of it through Netgalley and was amused by the note that came with it:
We can’t wait to hear your thoughts, but fair warning: This book will have you clutching your pearls and your edges. This book is the group chat after the group chat. This book is messy, but she makes it look expensive. This book is giving “bless your heart” with a side of side-eye. This book is strictly for the grown and sexy. This book has receipts, and she’s not afraid to show them. This book is not a whisper; it’s a choir.
I can’t believe I’m quoting marketing copy, but it’s so much more playful than the usual description of a novel as “propulsive” or “electrifying.” (I pray that I am not quoting something written by A.I.)
Okay, that’s all for now. I’ll be back next time with more thought on movies and/or books.
❤️ Link Love ❤️
An insightful essay about how online discourse affected Lena Dunham’s career. [gift link]
Chloé Caldwell’s substack post about her friendship with Dunham, which she alluded to in an essay in her book, I’ll Tell You In Person. I was so happy to read this post because I thought about Caldwell’s essay when I was reading Famesick and wondered if there was more to the story. (There is.)
Manohla Dargis’s 2010 review of Tiny Furniture—excellent and prescient. [gift link]
I could not stop laughing at SNL’s parody music video “My Room” starring Olivia Rodrigo. It is very silly but also kind of terrifying.
Speaking of SNL, this essay explains why Ashley Padilla is so funny. [gift link]