What Lena Dunham’s memoir tells us about TV’s double standard

Lena Dunham was just 23 when she sold Girls to HBO. She was 25 when it first aired. The show’s success is now TV lore: Over the course of its six seasons, it won Emmys and Golden Globes and created a new, more realistic blueprint for onscreen portrayals of womanhood. The four twentysomethings at the heart of the show (Dunham starred as one of them) were frequently selfish, broke, and making terrible decisions—and yet we, as viewers, still cared about them. Dunham’s storytelling paved the way for a new era of frank, character-driven TV shows created by women, such as Fleabag, Insecure, and, more recently, Rachel Sennott’s I Love LA.

It’s a remarkable trajectory and yet, Dunham spent a lot of this era (Girls launched in 2012 and ran until 2017) being vilified by the media and the public. It’s a subject that she unravels in her new memoir, Famesick, which came out earlier this week. Strangers frequently contacted her online, she writes, to comment on her “bad body, irritating voice, clearly horrific politics, inability to walk in heels, poor sense of style, and the fact that anyone—literally anyone—was more deserving of all of this than I was.” Once Girls ended, Dunham largely withdrew from the spotlight and moved to England, where she says she enjoys greater anonymity than she does in the U.S.

You might wonder, then, why she has chosen to release a tell-all book revisiting a time where she felt so exposed. On Tuesday evening, I saw Dunham speak in Brooklyn to an audience of largely millennial women. It was clear that being compulsively open remains a big part of who she is, regardless of the consequences. Additionally, she hopes that retelling her experience will raise questions about why, at a time when our society is reckoning with its past, sexist treatment of female celebrities such as Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, young women in the entertainment industry are still judged so much more harshly than their male counterparts.

She spoke at length about the chronic illnesses that she suffers from. These include endometriosis, POTS (a disorder of the autonomic nervous system), and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (a tissue disorder that causes joint pain, dislocations, and fatigue). While working on Girls, she hid her health struggles from everyone around her, for fear that people would question her ability to do her job if they found out. “I was afraid about all of it, and I was so afraid, I was trying to cover it up,” she said. Eventually, she ended up in rehab with a prescription drug addiction. “I was chronically ill and I went to rehab. That is two points off.”

In Famesick, Dunham alleges that her Girls co-star, Adam Driver, threw a chair in her direction when she forgot her lines one day in rehearsals. At other times, she says that he spat and hissed at her. Driver is now a bonafide Hollywood leading man, with credits including the Star Wars franchise and an Oscar-nominated turn opposite Scarlett Johansson in the 2019 film Marriage Story. He is unquestionably a great actor. At the same time, it will be interesting to see if Dunham’s allegations lead to any repercussions for him in terms of public perception. Imagine if Dunham was the one who threw a chair. Something tells me it would not be easily forgotten.

Whatever you think of Dunham and her work, she is a unique talent who changed the landscape of television. She was held to an impossible standard and she did not get everything right along the way (does anyone?). Girls was a hit, in part, because it showed that being flawed and complicated doesn’t make you a terrible person, and yet, we didn’t extend this generosity to its creator. Let’s hope that we treat the young female writers and directors who come after her better.

Ellie Austin
[email protected]

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