Between the Lindy West-memoir discourse and this, I really wish we could hit pause on the confessional TMI memoir where everyone collectively gets the ick but no one can stop watching the trainwreck. So, yes, Lena Dunham has written another memoir. This one is called Famesick. Lena stepped back for a time – she moved to London, she got married, but she’s still around, in general. And she hasn’t changed, she’s just less in-your-face. People have been circulating excerpts from Famesick for days but I’ve mostly avoided them. But here, I guess we should talk about some of this stuff about Lena’s relationship with Jack Antonoff. They dated for over five years, from 2012 through the end of 2017. In Famesick, she obliquely references the long-standing rumors about Jack and Lorde – Jack produced Lorde’s Melodrama, and many thought that Lorde was one of the reasons why Jack and Lena split.
Lena Dunham is looking back at her ex-partner Jack Antonoff’s relationship with a “teen pop star.” The Girls star and co-creator, who dated the producer and Bleachers frontman for five years, recalls the moment she told Antonoff that the “closeness” he shared with the artist had begun “striking an odd note” in her new memoir, Famesick.
While Dunham does not divulge the artist’s name in her book, it is widely suspected that she is referring to Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Lorde. Antonoff co-wrote and co-produced the New Zealand musician’s 2017 album Melodrama, and the collaborators fielded romance rumors — which they denied — in the months following the record’s release and Antonoff and Dunham’s split in early 2018.
In her book, Dunham recalls FaceTiming Antonoff while visiting her grandmother only to find him in “the recording studio in our apartment, where he was ensconced with a teen pop star I was too oblivious to be jealous of.”
She later noted that Antonoff spent his time “locked in a room with a teen pop star whose needs seemed as massive and complex as my own, and who called me ‘Aunt Lena’ when I hobbled into the kitchen with my walker to grab another bottle of green tea.”
At the time, Dunham was fighting chronic illness related to her endometriosis diagnosis. She underwent a hysterectomy after multiple surgical procedures for the illness in 2017. Dunham writes about returning home from a bone density test one day to find the pop star “sprawled across our sectional couch, weeping into Jack’s lap as he told her that ‘your teens are for experimenting’ in a tone so comforting, it almost brought tears to my eyes,” adding, “It had been so long since he’d spoken to me with that kind of expansive generosity.”
She later pointed out the strong bond that the collaborators had developed to Antonoff, suggesting, “Perhaps their closeness was striking an odd note, that she wanted something from him that he couldn’t give.” When she expressed feeling “like a ghost” when seeing them together, Antonoff allegedly told her “‘You’re just mad because she doesn’t want to be your friend,’” Dunham wrote. “And he was right.”
I remember some of this speculation, and I also remember feeling sorry for Lorde out of the three people involved. She was like 19/20 at the time, a sheltered kid from New Zealand, trying to make her sophomore album with the entire industry breathing down her neck. And Lena breathing down her neck as well. Lorde was looking for a refuge and safe space to work and Lena was constantly shooting her “are you f–king Jack” looks. Meanwhile, in this exact same year, Lena screwed her ex-boyfriend while she was still technically dating Jack.
Dunham recalls pointing out that Antonoff’s “closeness” with an unnamed “teen pop star” whose album he was producing had begun “striking an odd note.” At the same time, she details for the first time embarking on an affair with a former middle-school flame named Nick, which ushered in the final break from Antonoff.
As their relationship deteriorated amid Dunham’s health issues, she noted, “I had never stopped flirting—I mean, I wasn’t dead yet — but I had observed careful boundaries, never taking it far enough that I could be declared out of bounds. If I’d wanted to look, perhaps I may have seen that Jack was not observing them as closely as I was.”
She had “had seen myself as some kind of half wife,” but after a hysterectomy “changed the game” in late 2017, she wrote to a former middle school boyfriend named Nick “with impunity, saying l’d just had major surgery and I needed to be cheered up. ‘Meet me by the bridge? Bring me a stuffed animal?’ I got an answer back in less than a minute: ‘I’m already running.’”
Dunham writes that she “let my lips wander slowly across his face and onto his, and I remembered how my high school friend Marissa’s mother once told us how, when she conducted an affair in the 1970s, cheating on her first husband with Marissa’s father, she insisted on wearing a red velvet cape with a hood everywhere she went.” What she wore was “a sweater the size of an airstream trailer, but I too, was ready to do adultery.”
Kissing progressed as Dunham says she told Nick, “I’ve been through something awful. I don’t want to talk about it, but I need you to f— me and I need you to do all of the work.’ ‘I can make that happen,’ he said.”
Dunham writes that the affair lasted several days. “On the third night, my parents left town, and Nick met me at their place, where he went down on me while I watched the steady flames hiss in the electric fireplace,” she details. “Afterward, we took a bath, washing each other’s hair at the same time, then f—ed again on top of my parents’ quilt. He looked deep in my eyes as he moved over me and said: ‘You’re making me want to cut the brakes on your boyfriend’s car.’”
You can read the rest at EW – basically, as soon as Jack came back into town, she told him about the affair within 24 hours and they broke up. She really loved Jack but, big surprise, she sabotaged herself and her relationship. I suspect that she would never put in those terms though, because that would take too much actual self-reflection. If she was honest with herself, I bet she felt relieved after she cheated because she finally had the best excuse to end it with Jack. As one self-saboteur to another, it feels like scratching an itch when you finally screw yourself over like that. Finally, you don’t have to pretend anymore.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
