“Just breathe.” Lena Dunham, Emmy-nominated “Girls” writer-director and author of “Famesick,” guided us in meditation, tucked under the covers of an IKEA-budget coquette bed modeled after her own.
“Start to consider that every part of your body will one day be food for the worms, unless you are lucky enough to be cremated by someone who still cares about you. Actually? Let’s release that. We don’t need to think about that. We are here in community.”
Flanking both sides of the bed were two squiggly-shaped, warmly-lit lamps, with a photo of a younger Dunham pinned to one. Nearby stood a lattice partition, draped with a nightgown.
It certainly felt intimate; the orchestra section of Boston’s Wilbur Theater arranged like a cabaret, the dress code “pajama chic.” Naturally, Dunham stepped out in a starched Hillary Clinton-esque skirt suit. “I did my favorite thing, which is to make a rule for everyone else and then make myself the exception,” she remarked.
The third stop on her book tour, Boston is home to, most notably, Dunham’s gynecologist and Ben Affleck, her dream man. “Downing a Slurpee as he drops his kids at school at 7:30 in the morning,” Dunham mused. “That’s sex on a stick.”
In her latest memoir “Famesick,” Dunham delves into her sexually tumultuous relationships (alas, no Ben Affleck), her relationship to fame and her struggles with chronic illness in her signature unfiltered stream-of-consciousness style. Around 1,000 people — an unexpectedly diversely-aged crowd of predominantly women — took their crushed velvet seats with book in hand on Thursday evening.
In true sleepover fashion, after a few games of f–k-marry-kill with the audience, Dunham and the crowd shifted gears to, best of all, gossip. Prior to the event’s commencement, audience members were given the opportunity to send Dunham a question via voice-message for her to answer during the show.
The question that boomed over the loudspeaker, which hit all the criteria of a gossip fest — a breakup, a reunion kiss and a looming move — transported us instantly to a slumber party, pigtails and all.
Dunham’s advice? “Block him. If he figures out how to get a message to you another way, he’s the one.”
This follows a longstanding pattern in Dunham’s writing: realizing that life moves in brushstrokes that we can try but will fail to control. “If you guys want to be together, you’ll just get back together … If you want to be broken up, you cannot keep grabbing these little crumbs. It’s like saying, ‘I don’t want to do heroin anymore, so I’m gonna do snippets of it every couple of days.’”
It’s a tough love between Dunham and her audience, but consequently one more fervent and loyal. If the crowd wasn’t roaring with laughter or applause, they were listening quietly and intently as Dunham read a passage of “Famesick.”
Olivia Herbert, a 25-year-old who came to the event with her mother, Marsha Herbert, turned to her mother saying, “I feel very proud that I brought you into the Lena Dunham world.”
Deirdre Roach, a young 20-something with an avian tattoo sleeve and a double nose piercing (such person composed about 50% of the event), shared her relationship to Hannah Horvath, Dunham’s leading role in “Girls.” “I kind of resent [her] self-absorbedness, but also it’s because I am self-absorbed and I don’t like seeing it reflected,” Roach admitted.
“Anything [Dunham] does, I’ll follow,” she concluded.
Dunham, who will be 40 in a month, feels excited, sharp and alive. “I think I have five to seven good years left in me,” she quipped. Dunham now feeds off jolts of energy from befriending young people, likening it to the little spark of “I still got it” that comes with being catcalled.
Her newest young friend is Emily Sundberg, Brooklyn-based writer of the Substack “Feed Me” and a Gen Z blend of Marnie Michaels from “Girls” and Charlotte York from “Sex and the City.” At the event, Sundberg tucked under the covers next to Dunham. The two remarked on young people’s absence of curiosity these days — “a lack of enthusiasm for other people’s experience,” as Dunham put it, the nectar she craves as a writer.
Sundberg told the audience to combat writer’s block by “getting out of bed.” Dunham just shook her head.
Lena Dunham is a bed person. After spending a large portion of the last ten years horizontal from chronic health issues, disordered eating and HPV, she is finally embracing it onstage. “If all this polyamory can be out in the open, why can’t we all admit that we’re bed people?” Dunham said.
“Famesick” details more than Dunham’s quasi-romance with “Girls” co-star Adam Driver. It’s a look into the mind of a woman who knew she wanted success before she knew what she wanted to be successful at — and ignored her body in the process of achieving it. Dunham writes, “[I] was unsure where I was going, but too guileless to think it was anywhere but up.”
Dunham assured the audience that, in a roundabout way, her fluctuations in health have made life a little less scary. “It’s like those people who got locked on the cruise ship during COVID and were scrabbling around for one last rind of cheddar cheese. And then you go back to your house, and you love it there,” Dunham said.
Even within the comfort of her own bed, the thought of a family lingered like “this hum in [her] brain.” Unable to have children following her hysterectomy in 2018, Dunham decided, “I’m going to focus on raising the most thoughtful pig I can. And I adopted my pig, Victor.”
“I feel very connected to [pigs] because they’re noisy and they’re emotional, and they have a lot of trouble moving around and putting up the weight of their own body,” Dunham said.
The question of weight constantly loomed around Dunham and was only exacerbated by her skyrocketing to fame — where co-workers, most notably her “Girls” co-showrunner, Jenni Konner, urged Dunham to binge-eat, placing the success of the show on something so fickle as weight.
In “Famesick”, Dunham recounts Konner’s words: “It’s not funny if you’re too thin … if we lose it, we don’t have a clear voice.”
Dunham’s pig ownership is an act of healing, even if, “let’s face it, 97% of you have honked down on a bacon sandwich today.” Companionship can be found in the most bizarre places and things — such is Dunham’s message. In struggle, there will always be something to lean on; Hannah Horvath had Marnie, Lena Dunham has her pig and as girlfriends and best friends young and old sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the audience, perhaps we had each other.
The women in the audience filed out of the theater, off to their individual lives – perhaps to go have a three-night stand in a stranger’s brownstone or get into a screaming match with their mother, which, beneath the yelling, is rooted in the purest of love. But for that hour and a half, we were unified.
Dunham tells us to write, to share, to be witty and full of moxy. So there we sat, two young aspiring writers, frantically jotting in our journals and dressed in skirts stained from our scarfed-down pizza dinner — trying to do just that.
Dunham concluded the meditation session with a threat issued in dulcet tones. “Community is a big buzzword right now. Emily’s part of my community. Now you’re part of our community. That means we will F—ING kill for you.”
Cue a montage of Dunham’s pig.
Sally Mendelsohn and Beatrix Worthington can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected], respectively.
