Famesick by Lena Dunham review – when celebrity causes side-effects

The Girls creator has endured brickbats and breakdowns – but she doesn’t always make it easy to feel sorry for her

At the end of last year, Netflix released Too Much – a sickly, indie-sleaze romcom about an American transplant who falls for a troubled British muso. It was created by Lena Dunham and her musician husband Luis Felber, and apparently loosely based on the couple’s backstory. It felt, to many critics, like second-screen fare, decidedly Lena Dunham-lite. Was this really the same person who had given us the spiky, self-absorbed world of Girls, the millennial Sex and the City complete with brutal situationships, toxic besties and, er, one of the main characters accidentally smoking crack?

Famesick sheds almost all the Richard Curtis-isms to find that old, controversy-courting Dunham alive and – if not exactly well – then learning to cope with it. Her second memoir (Not That Kind of Girl was published in 2014) charts the chronic illness and seemingly unending stress that came to define her 20s and 30s after she had snagged her own HBO series aged just 24. The afflictions described across its 400 pages include – though are not limited to – OCD, colitis, the connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, endometriosis, early menopause, PTSD and addiction to both opioids and benzodiazepines. At one point, Dunham accidentally sets herself on fire; at another, she panics about how Vogue will cover up the impetigo on her face, “a waterfall of golden blisters, turning a sickly green as they dried”. The book is scattergun and sometimes lacking in self awareness (who cares that Dunham had to give her designer booties up, like contraband, when she entered rehab?). It’s also undeniably frank and exhaustive: a lifetime of therapy condensed into something you could conceivably rip through in a weekend.