transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:29] Hi, my name is Chelsea Fairless.

Speaker 2:
[00:31] And I'm Lauren Garroni. And we are back to talk about Lena Dunham's Famesick, A book that we both devoured so quickly that we actually had this recording on the books for like days from now, and we were like, fuck it.

Speaker 1:
[00:45] I read it in 24 hours. There's something wrong with me.

Speaker 2:
[00:49] I think it took me about 72 hours. And I, of course, bought the book and then also listened to Lena Dunham doing the audio book.

Speaker 1:
[00:59] Yeah, I just read the physical book, keeping it old school. It was not a light read.

Speaker 2:
[01:04] No.

Speaker 1:
[01:05] Our protagonist often veers into very freaky Isabelle Hubert territory. But I think that Lena would probably agree with that assessment and take it as a compliment.

Speaker 2:
[01:17] Yeah, obviously the title of the book, Famesick, it comes from the idea or the belief that Lena has that getting sick is not that different than getting more famous. But the book is not what I was expecting. Like the book has more in common with something like Brain on Fire than Wishful Drinking. Like this is an illness memoir.

Speaker 1:
[01:38] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[01:39] More than a like, hey, let me tell you some like funny slash dark anecdotes about making girls.

Speaker 1:
[01:46] Yeah, we didn't actually get a ton of those. Did we get any mention of Andrew Rannell's, for example?

Speaker 2:
[01:52] Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of shocked how little girls is mentioned. Obviously, the origin of the show, there is a whole chapter dedicated to that. But like she speed runs the seasons. Like we're suddenly in season two and then in season four, and then the show has ended and there's still half the book left.

Speaker 1:
[02:14] Totally. Like I feel like seasons one and maybe into two, there's a little bit more time spent on that just because she's sort of adjusting to the schedule of coming to LA to write the show, filming the show in New York, she's working with all of these new characters. But then season three to six, like God knows what happened then.

Speaker 2:
[02:36] All we know is that she had not spoken to Adam Driver in about three seasons. Yet the book has a much narrower focus than I was expecting going into it. And really, the book is about the toxic effect her fame had on her health, and then how her declining health affected her work.

Speaker 1:
[02:56] Yeah. And I think the title speaks to the fact that her fame and her illness are so fused together that they're almost indistinguishable.

Speaker 2:
[03:06] But to your point that this is not a light read, I found myself having to re-examine my own parasocial relationship with Lena Dunham. And I was re-watching her 73 questions in her and Jack's West Hollywood bungalow and like other interview appearances because I'm like, I think this bitch was happy once or twice during this time period, which you wouldn't get from reading this book.

Speaker 1:
[03:31] No.

Speaker 2:
[03:32] I think a lot of this book, which I certainly resonated with a part of myself from when I was younger, is the self-hatred that Lena has for herself. And she talks about people on the Internet were cruel to me, but no one was crueler to me than myself.

Speaker 1:
[03:49] For sure. And you see how that leads to all of these very self-destructive impulses that she has.

Speaker 2:
[03:57] Yet she is seemingly always able to turn a script in on time.

Speaker 1:
[04:02] Well, it was a half-hour show.

Speaker 2:
[04:04] Which is part of her sickness, right? Is you and I had this, one of our earliest VIP episodes was actually about the 10th anniversary of Girls Coming On Air. And I had made the point that if she were not the lead of the show, she probably would have gotten a lot less flack. And now that I'm reading this memoir, I think her health would have been in way better shape if she was not the lead, as well as a writer, executive producer, and sometimes director of this show.

Speaker 1:
[04:33] Oh, it's so true. The second you're public facing, you get fucked. Which is why I've had so many reservations about filming our podcast. But it's true. When you're a behind the scenes person, no one gives two shits about you. Because she was front and center, it made her a target for criticism in a way that she wouldn't have been otherwise. And as she discusses in the book, and I think it's a really fair assessment, so many people projected shit onto her, especially jealousy.

Speaker 2:
[05:03] Oh, God, yeah. I mean, I was trying to think of an example of her contemporaries. And the Duplass brothers are kind of before her, but certainly inspired her early independent film work. But like, you don't see think pieces about Mark and Jay Duplass, no. And I've also seen the read on the Internet about this book of like, if she was conventionally attractive, she wouldn't have gotten the shit that she got. And I feel like this is a little bit of a Mandela effect, because if you go back to girl season one, she just looks like a normal girl.

Speaker 1:
[05:38] Yeah, that's what's so sad about the scrutiny that she faced, is that she does just look like a regular bitch, and that is what was cool about it.

Speaker 2:
[05:46] Did you think about the drama while reading this book? Because her father essentially says, like, there are no bad thoughts, only bad actions.

Speaker 1:
[05:56] Of course I thought about the drama. Okay, so shall we start with Lena's origin story?

Speaker 2:
[06:03] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[06:03] She grows up in Tribeca in the 80s and 90s, the daughter of Laurie Simmons and Carol Dunham. She goes to Oberlin for college.

Speaker 2:
[06:14] Which was a thing with New Yorkers, especially children that have grown up in New York. Like, the Safdies also went to school in Boston, having grown up in New York City. I believe she does, like, a semester at UG. Lang, as it's like, this is all I've ever known is New York City, which I think is funny for us to think about, growing up in California and idolizing New York City. But to her, going to Ohio was exotic.

Speaker 1:
[06:38] No, it's so true. Like, for me, like, every person I knew that was in art school, that was born in New York, went to Micah or RISD.

Speaker 2:
[06:47] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[06:48] So she moves back to New York after college. She starts making shorts. She makes a series called Delusional Downtown Divas, which is how I was introduced to her, because I knew some people in her friend group. I knew Gabriel Held, who has been a guest on this podcast, who's on this show, and Joanna Avales. And that show was very cute. It was very like ABFAB inspired, but it was about these Art World NEPO babies, which that whole cast was basically.

Speaker 2:
[07:21] It was very self-aware, which would follow her work. Yeah. A lot of this book is very, if you know, you know, like the first one of these things is the millennial legend that is 368 Broadway, which is this office building where the Safdies, the NYSAP brothers, the Schulman brothers, Greta Gerwig, Henry Juiced and Lena Dunham all have offices in.

Speaker 1:
[07:45] What a time. I didn't think that Greta Gerwig would be making so many appearances in this book.

Speaker 2:
[07:51] There's so much circular trivia that, of course, Lena wouldn't be interested in, but I'm interested in this moment where she talks about Greta Gerwig going to Los Angeles to shoot Noah Baumbach's Greenberg. I'm like, oh, the movie that breaks up Noah Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Lee's marriage because he has an affair with Greta Gerwig, which would later inspire the film Marriage Story, which stars Adam Driver.

Speaker 1:
[08:18] Yeah, it's impossible not to think about those things. Not that I think that Lena should have mentioned that, but it is crazy.

Speaker 2:
[08:26] I feel like I almost needed companion footnotes, like an IMDB trivia section for this book, which I guess is what my role on this episode is. I also love a piece of goss that I don't know, I care about that I previously did not know about is the director of Pearl, Ty West, and Lena Dunham had a situationship.

Speaker 1:
[08:49] Love it. I guess back in the day, you just meet random guys at South by Southwest, they turn out to be these prolific directors.

Speaker 2:
[08:57] What I did enjoy about this book is she does give a little more context to her meteoric rise, which is she started making shorts at Oberlin that she submitted to film festivals. This is the early days of South by Southwest as it is coming up and becoming as prominent as a place like Sundance. And this is where she meets the Safdies. This is how she builds a community. But most importantly, this is how she builds relationships with festival programmers, which gets Tiny Furniture in the South by Southwest after the deadline.

Speaker 1:
[09:33] Well, Tiny Furniture was a great movie, so not exactly a hard sell. Did we see that together?

Speaker 2:
[09:40] Yes, we did.

Speaker 1:
[09:41] OK, I wasn't sure. I thought I saw it with you at the IFC setter.

Speaker 2:
[09:45] I think this was the brief moment when you moved back to New York before you moved into your Bushwick place and we were living together briefly.

Speaker 1:
[09:54] Right. That movie was great. And again, I had already had a parasocial relationship with Lena Dunham by that point just because of watching Delusional Downtown Divas, which you can still watch. Don't watch it on YouTube. You have to go to Index Magazine's Vimeo.

Speaker 2:
[10:10] Oh, they're still paying for that Vimeo membership.

Speaker 1:
[10:12] They're still paying for the Vimeo and that's where they all live.

Speaker 2:
[10:15] Well, going back to the like, if you know, you know, everyone is on a first-name basis in this book, but she talks about making Delusional Downtown Divas with her friend Sarah. And I only recently learned that this Sarah is now the wife of Josh Safdie. And she is the one that gave Josh Safdie the book that inspired Marty Supreme.

Speaker 1:
[10:38] Wow, that is a real if you know, you know. But yes, her social circle was comprised of legends or future legends, let's just say.

Speaker 2:
[10:47] But she makes tiny furniture at the age of 23, with really no other ambition than just to make something that reflects the life that she is living at that time. And it is a sensation. And I think this is where people get infuriated with her. And she, of course, gets all of these meetings, what are called water bottle meetings, or as her mother's friend calls it, couch and water bottle meetings, which usually nothing comes out of these meetings. And suddenly she's sitting at HBO and pitches the anti-sex in the city, which would become Girls.

Speaker 1:
[11:28] Yeah, I loved reading that when she pitched it, she was pitching a show in relation to sex in the city.

Speaker 2:
[11:34] But I think a lot of the anger about her is, and I forgot how young she was. I didn't realize she sold Girls at 23.

Speaker 1:
[11:44] No, it's crazy. And of course, I was like her peer at the time. So I thought she was a full-fledged adult when this was happening. But really, it almost borders on like teen stardom.

Speaker 2:
[11:57] Well, you know, there is that line about the moment you get famous or the age that you get famous at, you're sort of frozen.

Speaker 1:
[12:05] I think she's frozen at younger than that.

Speaker 2:
[12:07] Well, this is what I was going to say is, while I was reading this book, I was also having to confront my own relationship with my parents, which I've always considered I've had a very close relationship to my parents. After I graduated from college, I did live at home like Lena did, but it extends far into her thirties into a way where I'm like, oh my God, girl, figure out how to get your own apartment.

Speaker 1:
[12:30] I also love that she's addicted to buying shitty apartments, but we'll talk about that later.

Speaker 2:
[12:35] Also, I did think that there was going to be a little more, I don't know, nuance to how girls came to air because, you know, the story is legendary, right? It goes from tiny furniture. She gets this meeting at HBO. She pitches, as she calls it, a tone poem that doesn't have any characters, no plot. A pilot gets green lit. I thought there was going to be like, oh, it looked that easy from the outside, but you don't know what it really took. And it's like, no, it was that easy.

Speaker 1:
[13:04] What's also funny is I've always resisted the labeling of Lena Dunham as a NEPO baby just because her parents are artists, and that's very different than having parents that work in the entertainment industry. But this book kind of debunked my thoughts about that because she says that her mother's ex-boyfriend's brother is one of the founders of UTA, which is one of the biggest talent agencies. So basically after she did Tiny Furniture, her mom just called her ex's brother and was like, can you rep my child basically, which is nepotism.

Speaker 2:
[13:45] Yeah, it's funny because that comes early on in the book, and then later in the book, her mother is complaining about how dare they think you're the daughter of someone, we're just these downtown artists. When I read that line, I was like, yeah, that's true. And then I had to remember, like, no, no, no, you helped your daughter get this show because your ex-boyfriend's brother starred in UTA. So like, yes, I'm sorry. This is nepotism, and I'm sorry, Lori Simmons, but you created your own nightmare.

Speaker 1:
[14:16] Well, it was also the fact that Tiny Furniture was filmed almost entirely in this beautiful Tribeca apartment, which was her parents' apartment, which was lent for filming, which is just something that the average person would not have access to, of course, but no shade, Lena Dunham was telling a thinly veiled autobiographical story. I don't have a problem with the fact that she writes what she knows. That's what she should do.

Speaker 2:
[14:43] And the other legendary thing about Tiny Furniture was how tiny the budget was. I think it was like $50,000, which Lori Simmons called her friends to raise those funds, but the film looks more expensive than it is because of the production value that her parents' loft lends to that film.

Speaker 1:
[15:03] Yeah, and the cinematographer was good. It looked good. And it was clearly made by someone with a refined eye.

Speaker 2:
[15:09] Yeah, I think that gets taken away from Lena a lot is that she actually is a good artist and a good writer and has a very distinct point of view. You might not like that point of view.

Speaker 1:
[15:22] Yeah, and I think that people think like, oh, anyone could do this. It's like, I'd like to see you fucking try.

Speaker 2:
[15:28] So Girls Gets Made, she has the same energy as Larry David. If you've ever watched Larry David tell the story of Seinfeld getting made, he never believed that it would go past even, I believe notoriously, like they only ordered four episodes. And Larry David was like so annoyed that he had to write four episodes, then 10 episodes, then like several seasons of a show. So Lena writes the pilot, she is paired with Jenny Connor, who will become a central figure in her life. If the book is about her relationship to fame and sickness, secondarily, it is about her relationships with Jack Antonoff and Jenny Connor. Because she is 23 and never written a television show before, she is paired with a showrunner, someone that can take her through the steps. And she immediately bonds, some might say trauma bonds with Jenny Connor, but we'll get into that in a little bit.

Speaker 1:
[16:21] So Girls comes out and it is an immediate critical and commercial success.

Speaker 2:
[16:28] So much so. One thing that this book reveals is that just the confidence that HBO had in her and the show, like I did not know that the second season was greenlit before the first season ever came out.

Speaker 1:
[16:40] It was a great show.

Speaker 2:
[16:42] And also to my surprise, as I've made this point several times about perhaps Lena shouldn't have been the lead of the show, that would have probably saved her health and her sanity. She too, as we learn in the book, was surprised that everyone just like confidently was like, no, you're going to be the lead of the show.

Speaker 1:
[17:01] It's cool that she was the lead of the show, because usually that wouldn't happen. They would cast some conventionally attractive, who would be, let me think.

Speaker 2:
[17:10] Well, she discusses how Dakota Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Amy Schumer, I think I'm forgetting one other person, they all auditioned for one of the four girls.

Speaker 1:
[17:21] Dakota Johnson had to be a Marnie audition.

Speaker 2:
[17:25] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[17:26] I don't believe she would be Hannah. Amy Schumer was probably a Hannah audition, and that's crazy to think about.

Speaker 2:
[17:32] Yeah, Dakota Johnson presents as a Marnie, but if you've ever watched an interview with Dakota Johnson, she's definitely more of a Jessa.

Speaker 1:
[17:41] Yeah, for sure. But Jessa was always Jessa. Jessa was written for...

Speaker 2:
[17:46] Jemima Kirk.

Speaker 1:
[17:47] Thank you, and I don't think they ever contemplated casting someone else for that.

Speaker 2:
[17:52] No, but it seems like Jemima Kirk contemplated not being in the show multiple times, but that was due to her pregnancy, which you can't even clock. Evidently in the pilot episode, she's like nine months pregnant.

Speaker 1:
[18:04] So wild.

Speaker 2:
[18:05] And then she tries to quit somewhere in season two, but that's only because she's pregnant with her second child.

Speaker 1:
[18:11] So the show is a big hit. There's a big party at the Boom Boom Room, which Lena describes as one of the greatest nights of her life. But with the success of the show, immediately comes a great deal of hate and criticism specifically from New York media types.

Speaker 2:
[18:29] Yeah, I think the show was positioned thinking back on it. It just was a no-win situation because it comes at the beginning of internet journalism. Let's call it that. But the demographic of critics that are reviewing the show at traditional outlets are like boomers. Then on the other side of that, you have BuzzFeed, bloggers. I think everyone was criticizing the show. I don't know what it is about her and she discusses this in the New York Times interview she did where Lena Dunham talks about the fact that one of her friends was like, Lena, you've been annoying people since preschool. Like there is something preternatural about her that brings out this reaction in people, as she discusses in the book, in the intervening years. She doesn't help things with statements she says, but there is something about her that just is a lightning rod. And I think it is the beginning of, as I said, internet journalism where you have BuzzFeed and bloggers. And I feel like people our age fell into two categories who didn't like the show. People who were like, this is not my experience. This is a very privileged, white, coastal elite view of what being a what we would call now a millennial is like. Or it was people who were jealous of like, why can't I get a TV deal at HBO at 23?

Speaker 1:
[19:56] Of course, because it triggered everyone that was trying to make it as a writer to some extent. And also, when you consider the time period, it wasn't like now. Like, there weren't 10,000 television shows back then. And to get an HBO show, that's like the most prestigious show of all, because it was kind of like one of the few networks where you actually could make something that was subversive or artistic.

Speaker 2:
[20:21] And we've discussed this previously, but I think because Lena Dunham was such a blank slate and what we knew of her was that she made autobiographical work. It was hard to see until much later that this was satire. I mean, Hannah Horvath was her, but it wasn't her.

Speaker 1:
[20:40] But also, like Delusional Downtown Divas, she was doing a more annoying delusional version of who she actually was, it seems.

Speaker 2:
[20:51] But I think what was probably confusing to people, and I have to say, like, I did not enjoy watching the first season of Girls. I was like, this is too close.

Speaker 1:
[20:59] That's how I felt. I felt really uncomfortable initially about Girls because, yeah, I was going to raves in Brooklyn and trying to build a career in New York and getting shut down and having these embarrassing, sad, romantic entanglements. Like, I remember my parents watched the show and were like, so this is you and this is about your life, and I wanted to kill them and myself in that moment.

Speaker 2:
[21:29] Same with my parents, yes.

Speaker 1:
[21:31] Now, of course, I'm so grateful that this show exists and that it was filmed in the same exact time period because even watching it now, it's like, I'll watch this show and I'll see some bar that I've completely forgot about, that I used to go to, that I would never remember otherwise.

Speaker 2:
[21:48] Well, I remember living in New York when we did Going to College. Honestly, one of the reasons that I moved out of New York was that I just got really tired of people that lived in New York in the 70s, who maintained their lofts from the artist, Loflaw, telling me that I had missed the good times in New York and all of that had passed. So it's very trippy now to watch TikTok videos of people longing to live in 2011 era Williamsburg and work for BuzzFeed.

Speaker 1:
[22:21] I know. I'm grateful that I got there in 2003 because at least you could still smoke in bars and it was a bit more old New York still. But yes, there was a hard pivot, I would say, in the 2010s.

Speaker 2:
[22:37] It's funny. You saying that makes me think of, can we get into the Annie Leibowitz Vanity Fair and then Vogue shoots that Lena does sort of shortly after Girls comes out.

Speaker 1:
[22:49] Sure. Annie first shoots her for Vanity Fair on the Brooklyn Bridge. They wanted her to be naked.

Speaker 2:
[22:55] Which I subsequently found the editorial and, you know, Annie Leibowitz does love a gray tone, but you can even tell in the photo that it is a very rainy day on the Brooklyn Bridge. So it is wild that they wanted Lena to be naked. But she discusses how as they're doing the shoot, someone jumps off of the Brooklyn Bridge and they just go forward with the shoot. And Lena presents this story as an illustration of how callous the entertainment or the creative industry is. And it's like, you're a born New Yorker. That's just New Yorker behavior.

Speaker 1:
[23:31] True, but it does represent this conflict that she will go on to have, which is the conflict between her trying to do her job and her managing her mental health issues, and then also just managing like her family stuff and being there for them.

Speaker 2:
[23:49] I didn't know until this book that the whole story line of Hannah bursting her own eardrum clearly came from her own life, where as soon as the premiere of season one of Girls Happen, she's flown to LA to oversee a writer's room for season two, where her OCD gets out of control and she bursts her own eardrum.

Speaker 1:
[24:13] Which I can't even watch that episode of Girls, there's something about it that even you talking about it now, I'm starting to like, my skin is crawling just thinking about it.

Speaker 2:
[24:22] Which by the way, for those who haven't read the book and are listening to our episode, she does not make this connection. When I say there's very little of Girls, there is no anecdote about, you know, writing a panic in Central Park and like a fit of creative inspiration.

Speaker 1:
[24:39] No.

Speaker 2:
[24:39] Again, it's you got to know to know.

Speaker 1:
[24:41] And there were many times in this book where she provided information about her life that I was like, oh, I already saw that on Girls. Like the eardrum thing, some of the more like depraved sex acts that she has participated in over the years.

Speaker 2:
[24:57] So there is this notorious, or I guess notorious to us, Vogue issue where she is the cover girl. She is posing with Adam Driver. Jezebel used to do this thing called Photoshop of Horrors. And this is like the beginning of Annie Leibowitz's insane Photoshopping.

Speaker 1:
[25:15] It wasn't the beginning, but it wasn't as crazy as it is now.

Speaker 2:
[25:19] But it was a Jezebel feature to show insane Photoshopped in fashion magazines. And this like perfectly aligned with Jezebel's interests, which was their hatred of Lena Dunham and bad Photoshopping. And I found an article from the time, because she talks about how Jezebel issued a bounty for the unretouched photos. And ultimately, they weren't retouched that much.

Speaker 1:
[25:46] No.

Speaker 2:
[25:46] If I'm remembering the editorial correctly, I felt like the most egregious photo is that one where Lena is atop Adam Driver's shoulders in again what Julio Torres calls the Italy district.

Speaker 1:
[26:00] Right.

Speaker 2:
[26:00] But Jezebel offered $10,000 for whoever could produce the unretouched images. And someone came forward within two hours of the initial request.

Speaker 1:
[26:11] So mean. Jezebel had great writing, but they also had terrible writing. And truly some of the most terrible takes I have ever read were on jezebel.com back in the day. And I think this is a perfect example of that. Lena said that it felt cruel, that it felt like she was a girl getting picked on at the middle school dance for stuffing her bra or something. And I think that's fair. She's being cyberbullied by these bitches who are exposing her all in the name of quote unquote feminism.

Speaker 2:
[26:44] Which makes you understand there is this moment where she is unbelievably successful. She has more money than she knows what to do with. She has a critically acclaimed show, although she is getting all of this online hate. Her parents are trying to put it in a context for her, which still remains true to this day, which is like put your fucking phone down. If you put your phone down, everything would be fine.

Speaker 1:
[27:08] Yeah, but that is easier said than done. And she also talks about the fact that a lot of these people that were writing these articles about her were essentially acquaintances.

Speaker 2:
[27:18] Right, right.

Speaker 1:
[27:19] People that she had met at least once, people that she may have shared an ex with, that would be horrible.

Speaker 2:
[27:27] And I did gain a certain empathy for her when she was describing this moment where she's with her dad at a, I think, an art gallery or like a PS1 book fair or something, and she sees a couple eating a taco fighting. And she is realizing that while she is living this creative peak, she could have never even imagined for herself. There is a lot of essential experiences that those of us that did not get a hit show in our 20s got to experience that she just missed. And her father sort of reminds her like, you cannot live every experience parallel to each other or simultaneously. Like this is your life and this is the track that you're on.

Speaker 1:
[28:11] Yeah. But in the Vogue discussion, she talks very favorably about Anna Wintour, which I found to be interesting.

Speaker 2:
[28:20] Right. She says, this is the time to note that Anna is, let the record show, lovely and very funny and has given me less grief than all the chubby women in Hollywood combined.

Speaker 1:
[28:30] I'm just imagining like Melissa McCarthy and Monique just bullying this bitch. Who are the chubby women? Who are you talking about? Also, it just sucks that they can't just let Lena Dunham be chubby. Especially now, I feel like there's this idea like, well, her body was one way 20 years ago, so therefore it should just stay that way for life. And it's just crazy how invested people are in how she looks and what her weight is. I can't imagine what that would feel like.

Speaker 2:
[29:00] Yes, because to put it in a context, this is the beginning of Twitter. She kind of invents clickbait, right? Because the reason so many people are writing about her is that their livelihoods in making $20 a post, and this was my life, this is how I started as a writer, not talking shit about Lena Dunham, but writing a post for Black Book Magazine for $20 a post, the way you were paid was based on how many clicks you would get. So if you knew that you would get a well-read article writing about Lena Dunham.

Speaker 1:
[29:38] Because so many people were looking to hate Lena Dunham. She made them uncomfortable because she was successful, and as she admits, kind of precocious and annoying, and had a level of privilege that a lot of people didn't, and it was just this vicious cycle.

Speaker 2:
[29:55] I think that she supplements this pain by renting and then buying increasingly shitty apartments.

Speaker 1:
[30:01] Yeah, I guess after season one of Girls, she rented her first apartment, which was a dump, apparently, that was used as a filming location in Frances Ha, which I don't remember because I haven't seen that movie in so many years.

Speaker 2:
[30:14] A movie that also has Adam Driver in it.

Speaker 1:
[30:16] Oh, I forgot about that. I actually prefer Mistress America, but I haven't seen that in a minute either.

Speaker 2:
[30:22] Yes, I felt the dancing in Frances Ha a little twee, and I did not enjoy Adam Driver in a pork pie hat, fedora.

Speaker 1:
[30:29] I don't remember the hat, but to be fair, Greta Gerwig was a choreographer, and I don't think it was bad choreo necessarily.

Speaker 2:
[30:38] You know my feeling about people spontaneously singing in public. It extends to people spontaneously dancing in public as well.

Speaker 1:
[30:45] I got to disagree. One of the great trailers, but we will move on.

Speaker 2:
[30:49] So one of the many revealing things in this memoir, which is interesting to say to someone who has been so documented, right? It's like, what don't we know about this person? But I had no idea that having just come off watching the comeback, she has her own Valerie Cherish Mickey moment at the Golden Globes.

Speaker 1:
[31:11] Yeah, because she finds out that her cousin dies right before the Golden Globes, who struggled with addiction and died from his addiction.

Speaker 2:
[31:21] And this is one of the first moments you see her attempt to put up a boundary, where she goes to the producers, executives, whomever, it gets up the HBO Gravevine, where she's like, sorry, guys, I can't attend the Golden Globes and make this funeral, so I'm just not going to go to the Golden Globes tonight. And like within an hour, they're like, you can use the HBO private jet so that you can attend the Golden Globes and make this funeral in time.

Speaker 1:
[31:46] And she then went to the funeral in her outfit from the Golden Globes, which again, very Valerie Cherish.

Speaker 2:
[31:53] So I forgot all about her first book of essays, Not That Kind of Girl, which comes out just two years after girls first is on air. And she talks about how, you know, Jenny Connor, her work wife, her creative partner, is upset that she's not only written this book of essays, but it's become such a huge story of how big her advance was. So I would she does not say what the advance is. So I went and googled it because of course it was a story. Everything about Lena Dunham was a story. The advance was three point seven million dollars.

Speaker 1:
[32:30] Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2:
[32:32] So I understand Jenny Connor's concern that the attention might be taken away from girls. But these were essays that she had written on her off time.

Speaker 1:
[32:42] But also jealousy. Let's be real.

Speaker 2:
[32:44] Oh, for sure.

Speaker 1:
[32:45] And how could you not be? Especially if you're working with this person where you are doing so much of the heavy lifting day to day. Jenny Connor was doing all of the production stuff that Lena Dunham didn't want to do. And Jenny Connor was also managing Lena Dunham's personality and her mental health struggles and stuff and getting it all to work.

Speaker 2:
[33:10] Yeah, in a prescribed time that remained on budget didn't piss off HBO so that they could keep getting another season and another season.

Speaker 1:
[33:19] But really, at the end of the day, the star is Lena, it's Lena's mind, it's Lena's world. Jenny's just orbiting it.

Speaker 2:
[33:28] Very true. And just a note about that crazy advance that Lena Dunham got. We have to remember this is the time of like Tina Fey's Bossy Pants, another woman who is writing a semi-autobiographical series about her life of which she is the star of. Tina Fey got a $5 million advance for Bossy Pants. And I completely erased that time in my mind, but I do remember for like several years going back and forth to see my family when I was in college. Like that was a Hudson News mainstay.

Speaker 1:
[34:02] Yeah, for sure. But again, it's precisely these details, which is why the people that are being paid $20 to write an article for Jezebel are hating on this bitch. Because imagine having $3 million and she doesn't deserve it and blah, blah, blah. I would argue that no one deserves that amount of money for a book advance.

Speaker 2:
[34:21] But anyway, and Lena certainly doesn't help herself with what she puts in the book, which, by the way, at this point, I don't remember anything but what is known from this book, which is the story where she allegedly molests her sister, or at least that is how it is presented on right wing news outlets that then gets picked up everywhere.

Speaker 1:
[34:43] Her sister that is now a trans man.

Speaker 2:
[34:45] Yes, which I went back to find the passages, which I will not read word for word here. But the way that the Internet remembers things is so understandably Internet broken brain, because my memory of this is like, right, she stuck rocks up her sister's vagina, and everyone thinks she molested her sister. That's not the story. The story that she writes is how she is asking her mother about her sister, now her brother, but in the book, Lena refers to him as her sister, especially in this time. But she's asking her mother about her siblings biology. Does she have a vagina like I do? And her mother being the first wave, second wave feminist that she is, is like, okay, second wave.

Speaker 1:
[35:35] I don't think Laurie Simmons was fighting for the right to vote.

Speaker 2:
[35:38] Sorry. Second wave feminist. She explains to her daughter the fact that all women are born with all of the eggs that they will ever have in their life. And so Lena is thinking about this and she opens her sister's vagina. And what she finds is a bunch of rocks that her sibling had stuffed up their vagina.

Speaker 1:
[36:00] Okay. I love all the pronouns switching you were doing just then. But I like that you're trying anyway. Everyone called her a child molester because of this, as if that is the same thing, as if there is any sexual component to this at all.

Speaker 2:
[36:14] To this day.

Speaker 1:
[36:16] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[36:16] This is the Mandela effect that the Internet has on people. I was reading about this book and people's reactions. Still, there are people who are like, didn't she molest her sibling?

Speaker 1:
[36:28] Yeah, of course. That's a comment under any post about Lena Dunham. It's really fucked up and upsetting. She writes very eloquently about how her fame fucked up her brother's life basically, and how he couldn't really trust people because of her fame. I completely can imagine that because I remember seeing him at like lesbian parties back in the day, and of course everyone was like, oh, that's Lena Dunham's sister, you know?

Speaker 2:
[37:00] Right. And Lena's sibling, Lena's brother is at a very vulnerable age. Like they were in college at the height of girls. Can you imagine how annoying that would be? Like I think Lena talks about their brother going through the dorm halls and every TV has girls on.

Speaker 1:
[37:20] Yeah, and her brother also hadn't like come out as trans yet. That would just be a complicated period for anyone. But when you have your sister's fame on top of that and all the attention that comes with that, especially for this story.

Speaker 2:
[37:34] There is an anecdote in this book that I consider gossip that no one's really picking up on, which is Lena's brother was the tour manager for this book tour. And ghosts Lena because he's slept with a contestant or a judge on the Great British Bake Off. And no one is doing the investigative work to figure out who this is.

Speaker 1:
[37:59] I'm not familiar enough with the Great British Bake Off to know which ones were dykes, but I would love if someone did that work for us.

Speaker 2:
[38:07] So at first Lena and her family do not take these stories seriously until it starts affecting her family, right? Because her father has a gallery show and receives death threats.

Speaker 1:
[38:20] Because her dad's art is erotic, a lot of it. I wouldn't say pornographic, but an exploration of the female body.

Speaker 2:
[38:30] I mean, her entire family and the way that she behaves is just catnip for the right of like these are the deviant liberals that we imagine.

Speaker 1:
[38:40] Right. And of course these freaks like don't understand art unless it's like, you know, landscapes and live, laugh, love type shit.

Speaker 2:
[38:48] Thomas Kinkade paintings.

Speaker 1:
[38:50] And Getty's photographs of babies.

Speaker 2:
[38:53] No, that's demonic.

Speaker 1:
[38:55] In retrospect, it kind of was babies as flowers.

Speaker 2:
[38:58] What are we really trying to say here?

Speaker 1:
[39:01] I don't think that babies should be laboring so that they look like pumpkins. Babies don't need jobs.

Speaker 2:
[39:06] So there is this tension with Lena and the public and her work, which is that book is a best seller. It's not a bad book. It sold well. It justified the advance, even though you think no one should get a $3 million advance.

Speaker 1:
[39:21] Actually, I take that back because after taxes, that's what? Not even $2 million. And how much is this book making for the publisher?

Speaker 2:
[39:29] Hopefully, it made its money back.

Speaker 1:
[39:31] I'm sure it did.

Speaker 2:
[39:32] Enough for her to buy yet another kooky, dilapidated apartment, I'm sure. But Girls Is Successful, I remember that somewhere it was reported when Girls was going on, that the surprise demographic that was watching it the most were older white men. And I couldn't tell if that was just pervs or divorced dads that were trying to understand their daughters better.

Speaker 1:
[39:55] A good show is a good show. And also, I think that no one talks about this element of Girls, but it was an intergenerational show. Obviously, Lena's parents are hugely important figures in her life, and the same was true of her parents in that show. And parents in general and adults, like, really dominated the world that these girls lived in. It wasn't like it was this sort of euphoria situation where it's only teenagers everywhere all the time.

Speaker 2:
[40:23] And then I think it was Judd Apatow who correctly suggested what became the Rey role, the Alex Karpofsky character.

Speaker 1:
[40:32] The Lauren Garroni role?

Speaker 2:
[40:33] Yeah. Because you needed someone to just be a buffer to all of these characters' insanity. He was sort of the Greek chorus.

Speaker 1:
[40:42] Totally. Guys, did you ever wonder what it would be like if Hannah and Rey had had a podcast? Because now you get to experience it.

Speaker 2:
[40:50] So she hosts SNL, which I have no memory of.

Speaker 1:
[40:54] Zero memory.

Speaker 2:
[40:55] All we get from this book is that all of the writers suggest that she should just be naked or it should just be some joke about her always wanting to be naked as sketch ideas.

Speaker 1:
[41:05] Look, clearly the ideas that the writers had were not that great because we don't remember any of this.

Speaker 2:
[41:11] But what I do remember is there was a time whenever Girls was on early in its run, Tina Fey hosted and they did a parody of Girls, which is next level where the whole joke is that Tina Fey is some Eastern European woman named like Olga who moves in with them.

Speaker 1:
[41:30] Love it. She also says that SNL retouched her photos way more than Vogue ever did and she was offended by that.

Speaker 2:
[41:39] It makes you wonder.

Speaker 1:
[41:40] I'm sure they did.

Speaker 2:
[41:42] Famesick is a really up is down kind of book where Anna Wintour is actually a hero and Lauren Michaels is the villain.

Speaker 1:
[41:49] Totally. And it really is a be careful what you wish for situation because she also talks about like during the Vogue shoot, she had some like horrible skin condition.

Speaker 2:
[42:00] Oh, right, right, right. I meant to bring this up because, yeah, her fear with these unretouched photos was everyone was going to see these like fucked up green skin lesions, which somehow, as she says, do not show up on camera.

Speaker 1:
[42:14] I mean, can you imagine what Annie Leibovitz lighting guy is like or lighting girl or person?

Speaker 2:
[42:21] Lighting they them? Yeah, incredible.

Speaker 1:
[42:23] That lighting they them is at the top of their industry.

Speaker 2:
[42:26] Sorry to go back to this. Jezebel obviously doesn't exist anymore, but when researching information about this bounty that they had, there is some like archived Yahoo article of the Jezebel Photoshop because what they did is they did it in a GIF where it was like the retouched photo, the unretouched photo. And the craziest retouching was that they just like raised the hemline on Lena Dunham's dress.

Speaker 1:
[42:53] Fair enough, like me, she has like shit posture. So it's like, if you do that, like the neckline of your strapless dress will fall down.

Speaker 2:
[43:01] So instead of anecdotes about coming up with iconic moments or scenes from girls, which in doing press, I've learned she, like Sarah Jessica Parker has never watched the show. Beyond the edits that she had to supervise, she's never gone and rewatched.

Speaker 1:
[43:17] That to me is insane because I think that it might be healing for her to watch it. Or maybe it just brings up trauma. I mean, you know, it's a similar thing to Justin Bieber's Coachella performance. Like I was tearing up just watching him with his younger self.

Speaker 2:
[43:34] Right. I mean, she's talked about like being on TikTok and clips of the show come up and she nearly like dissociates because she's like, what is this? Who is this? Like that's my voice, but who's this person? So maybe it's best that she doesn't.

Speaker 1:
[43:49] Clearly she has her reasons, but I hope she realizes how good it is. Not that any level of success is really worth what she went through.

Speaker 2:
[43:59] Which now we get into kind of the central thrust of her memoir, which is the more famous she gets, the harder she has to work because she knows how brief this could be. So she wants to take on every opportunity. Again, to put it in a context, she's 25 responsible for a crew of hundreds of people and all of their families and all of that.

Speaker 1:
[44:25] Also SNL and the Vogue cover, that was during the same week. Can you imagine the stress and the adrenaline and just what that would take from you?

Speaker 2:
[44:36] Going back to Bossy Pants, a book that I don't really remember reading, I remember this one part where Tina Fey is talking about, she's shooting 30 Rock, she's also doing Sarah Palin, and it's her daughter's fourth or fifth birthday, all in the same weekend. It's the episode where Oprah is on 30 Rock, and so they have to, it's like something crazy where they had to shoot her on the weekend. It's like she's going from having just been Sarah Palin after shooting an 80-hour week to then going to set on a Sunday to shoot with Oprah, and then she's got to leave and go to her daughter's birthday party, and she's telling Oprah this, and Oprah looks at her and she's like, you're doing too much, and Tina Fey says something to the effect of like, if Oprah's telling you you're doing too much, you're doing too much.

Speaker 1:
[45:22] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[45:23] But for Lena, her body, like a Cronenberg body horror film basically begins to break down on her.

Speaker 1:
[45:30] Yeah. She's always had OCD from childhood and anxiety. We can presume that she also has depression from this book, I think.

Speaker 2:
[45:40] I felt seen because she is the only other person who has my bizarre phobia of not being able to fall asleep and therefore, it's like a vicious cycle where we can fall asleep and we can keep ourselves up from the anxiety of not being able to fall asleep.

Speaker 1:
[45:56] Isn't that just the definition of insomnia?

Speaker 2:
[45:58] I don't know. Is it?

Speaker 1:
[45:59] I think so.

Speaker 2:
[46:01] Do you feel panicked when it's happening?

Speaker 1:
[46:03] Of course. Then the anxiety keeps you up.

Speaker 2:
[46:06] I'm learning a lot from this podcast about myself.

Speaker 1:
[46:09] You really should know that that is not a rare thing and that so many people struggle with that and it is the absolute fucking worst.

Speaker 2:
[46:17] But her mom gives the same advice my mom gave, which was like, just close your eyes. It's the same as sleeping.

Speaker 1:
[46:24] What I do is I give up and I start watching Sex and the City, SVU, Girls, something comforting.

Speaker 2:
[46:32] Well, you're also scrolling Instagram and I know this because I receive DMs that have time stamps like 1.15 in the morning.

Speaker 1:
[46:39] Well, yeah, I usually go to bed around 1. I don't have an infant that necessitates that I wake up at. When do you have to wake up?

Speaker 2:
[46:47] He was up at 5.18 this morning.

Speaker 1:
[46:50] Yeah. So we're on different schedules.

Speaker 2:
[46:52] But then we gave him a bottle and he slept till 7. But you're up, meaning myself. I'm up. Anyway, back to Lena. In discussing how to discuss this book, we didn't want to do it chronologically for those who've read the book, but we did want to give context to those who haven't read the book. But I think the best way to talk about it is these very important relationships in Lena's life.

Speaker 1:
[47:16] Yes. There are main characters in this book. Let's start with Jenny Connor, her work wife.

Speaker 2:
[47:23] I think this relationship best describes the fact that Lena Dunham doesn't have boundaries. It's easy to understand. She forms, I said it earlier, this kind of trauma bond with Jenny Connor instantly and wants what is a professional relationship to be the same as the type of personal relationship she has with her lifelong friend, Jemima Kirk.

Speaker 1:
[47:49] And it is like that in many ways. They are texting hundreds of times a day and it's not necessarily all about work. They were close friends, but at the same time, Jenny Connor is like reporting to HBO.

Speaker 2:
[48:05] For sure. I couldn't help but compare this dynamic with our dynamic, which is different and similar. It is similar in the sense that we have a personal relationship and we have a business together and those things are intertwined. But again, I think it is a big difference that their personal relationship starts at the beginning of a professional relationship.

Speaker 1:
[48:28] Totally. Also, the fact that Jenny Connor isn't a mentor role in a way because she understands the business, she understands how to make a television show, and Lena is depending on her for that knowledge. But Jenny is also depending on Lena because Lena is the creative powerhouse behind this show.

Speaker 2:
[48:50] I think Jenny understood where to push. I think the biggest example of this is she really leveraged their personal relationship, and I think understood how much her approval meant to Lena, because Lena in different parts of the book discusses how a text message lacking a punctuation could send Lena into tears if she received a punctuation without an exclamation point from Jenny.

Speaker 1:
[49:19] Right. She felt that Jenny was very hot and cold with her generally, which kind of mimics how she characterized her mother in this book also.

Speaker 2:
[49:28] Yes, lots of mommy issues.

Speaker 1:
[49:29] As someone that could be hypercritical sometimes and other times be like her biggest champion and supporter.

Speaker 2:
[49:37] But going back to what I was saying, I feel like Jenny understood the dynamic she had with Lena, how much Lena sought out her approval, and really used that to her advantage when they were renegotiating their contract and demanded that she get the same amount of money as Lena.

Speaker 1:
[49:56] Right.

Speaker 2:
[49:56] Which is unprecedented. Lena has a whole additional role that Jenny doesn't have, which is being an actress and, as Lena explains, and writing the show also. Right. I'm trying to think of Jenny Conner had writing credits on Girls. That I'm not so sure about. But more than that, Lena is the one that is the face of the show and is getting all of this internet hate and onslaught in a way that Jenny isn't.

Speaker 1:
[50:26] No, Jenny is obviously doing her job, which I'm sure was stressful. Like being a showrunner is a job that I would never ever want to have in a million years. But yes, she is just sort of reaping the benefits of the show being successful without the toxic negativity that is hurled at Lena every single day of her life. No one's calling Jenny Connor a child molester.

Speaker 2:
[50:53] This is very true. I also think because Jenny Connor has been in the industry far longer than Lena Dunham, right? This is Lena Dunham's first go around with the industry. So in Lena's experience, like you make a movie, you get a TV show. That's just the way it's always going to be. And Jenny Connor, who started with Judd Apatow, I think it was on Freaks and Geeks, if not Undeclared. But one of the shows that got canceled after a season, like she understands the reality of the industry and just how rare the success of girls is. So it's like in my mind, if Lena was panicked about Jenny's affection, Jenny is equally panicked to keep this gravy train going.

Speaker 1:
[51:36] Right. And that becomes especially hard when Lena's mental health starts to deteriorate and her physical health, which she has to be the middleman between Lena and the network and satisfy both of these people simultaneously.

Speaker 2:
[51:52] Well, yeah. I mean, do we want to discuss this now that kind of the apex of Lena's health issues that seem to transpire during the last season of Girls, where Lena is at a place where even she, someone who does not want to disappoint anyone, is holding up filming.

Speaker 1:
[52:11] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[52:11] And desperately needs time off, which is a problem because they can only shoot around Lena for so long. And it is Jenny through production who insists on an exam by a HBO sanctioned doctor who manipulates while palpitating Lena so much that it bursts a cyst in her body.

Speaker 1:
[52:34] Yes. And she felt very traumatized by this exam, which seemed incredibly invasive and borderline violent.

Speaker 2:
[52:45] I felt traumatized reading it because-

Speaker 1:
[52:47] I felt a lot of sadness for her.

Speaker 2:
[52:50] Because it's- Lena's own doctor is saying she needs time off, but they won't give her time off until the HBO doctor also says that she needs time off.

Speaker 1:
[53:03] Because HBO, in so many words, is saying you have nunchausen.

Speaker 2:
[53:08] Or, look, this book, which is exhaustive, and I mean that in a complimentary way, highlights maybe a dozen examples of her medical episodes, whether it's going to the emergency room, doctor's appointment, surgeries. But the contextual clues that you get from Jenny Connor's reactions, Jack Antonoff's reactions, which we'll get to in a second, leads you to believe that if Jenny Connor and HBO are insisting that their doctor needs to clear Lena, this happened dozens upon dozens upon dozens of times.

Speaker 1:
[53:43] Right. Which would happen if someone had a chronic illness, of course. But also the fact that Jenny and Jack, and also it feels like her brother Cyrus, they don't fully believe that these are physical symptoms. They think it's a mental thing or they think that she simply does not want to work. She wants to rot in bed all day. And that is the lifestyle that she would prefer is what I took from it. Based on Lena's own descriptions of these people, which is naturally going to give a lot of people pause when reading this book.

Speaker 2:
[54:19] For sure. And that's why I thought it was surprising that she doesn't talk about her work on Girls More because she is seemingly turning pages in on time. I mean, she talks about shattering her elbow during her final scenes, which seemed to be the whole episode with Adam Driver in The Diner, where she breaks her elbow and continues filming the rest of the season with a fucked up elbow that needs to be in a sling, and she's taking the sling off between every take.

Speaker 1:
[54:51] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[54:52] And this pain is something we haven't talked about up until this point is these chronic illnesses, injuries, pain, the prescription for this beyond four milligrams of Kalanapin, which she has been taking seemingly since she was a teenager in her 20s is a lot of pain medication.

Speaker 1:
[55:11] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[55:12] Something that makes me sad that she doesn't acknowledge is how great of a performer she was as Hannah Horvath in Girls. Like I keep seeing people posting the diner scene when she realizes that her and Adam really have nothing in common and she just starts crying. And how great of a naturalistic performer she became throughout the run of Girls.

Speaker 1:
[55:35] Yeah. And she's doing that with her shattered elbow, which I imagine would make the tears easier. But she also gives a lot of credit, I would say, to Adam Driver and his acting and how powerful that performance was. She says she did her best work on that show because of him and how intense he was, which had upsides and had downsides.

Speaker 2:
[55:56] Right. And for those who haven't read the book, I'm sure you've seen the most salacious headlines that have come out of this book, is this incident where he throws a chair at her and is screaming at her in a trailer while they're trying to rehearse a scene.

Speaker 1:
[56:10] He throws a chair against a wall. I don't think it was at her.

Speaker 2:
[56:14] It was near her.

Speaker 1:
[56:15] It was near her. Not that that is that much better, but just saying.

Speaker 2:
[56:19] Just to say you probably shouldn't throw a chair in the direction of anyone, let alone your scene partner, also your boss technically.

Speaker 1:
[56:27] No one should ever throw a chair, and this is why men are so annoying, although I get that women do that too sometimes. As we learned from the recent bachelorette contestant.

Speaker 2:
[56:38] Oh, Taylor Frankie Paul. Good, Chelsea. You're right. She threw a stool at her partner that inadvertently hit her child. Very dark. But I feel like what is missing from this story is very necessary context where in the middle of the scene, she begins dissociating and I don't even think it was the middle of the scene.

Speaker 1:
[57:02] She was in the middle of an episode that lasted for days, as she describes in this book, where she completely disassociated, fell outside of her body.

Speaker 2:
[57:11] She's rehearsing a scene with Adam Driver and she can't remember the lines that she even wrote. She's just staring at him and he's screaming at her like, why are you staring?

Speaker 1:
[57:21] Like, hello, is anyone in there?

Speaker 2:
[57:23] The answer was no.

Speaker 1:
[57:25] So, yeah, he was correct. Should he have had a violent outburst? Of course not.

Speaker 2:
[57:31] I feel like the incident that not enough people are talking about is how they almost fucked.

Speaker 1:
[57:37] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[57:38] While his longtime girlfriend was out of town doing a play, a month before he proposes to her.

Speaker 1:
[57:45] Yeah. Basically, what happened is, I guess Lena was texting him, like, come over to my apartment. And he was like, over text, like, OK, well, if I come over, I'm not leaving this time, suggesting, like, I'm staying over because we're fucking.

Speaker 2:
[58:00] I just want to hop in for a second. She is staying at her parents' house. Now, please understand. She has bought several apartments at this point, but still chooses to sleep over at her parents' place, which is where Adam Driver is going to.

Speaker 1:
[58:15] So wild.

Speaker 2:
[58:16] And then despite the fact that Lena acknowledges that in most parts of her life, she does not have boundaries or very loose boundaries. There's something inside of her that realizes, I cannot cross this bridge. And so she does a very Hannah Horvath thing and hides when he rings the doorbell or whatever, rings the buzzer.

Speaker 1:
[58:35] And ignores his phone calls and stuff. Something, some angel came down and saved her in that moment, truly.

Speaker 2:
[58:42] And she writes in the book that a month later, he gets engaged to his longtime girlfriend. And you can't help but think maybe this incident inspired him to propose finally.

Speaker 1:
[58:54] I don't know if it inspired him to propose. I just think it speaks to the fact that a lot of guys will just behave like that.

Speaker 2:
[59:02] Well, he says, what does he say to her that, you know, I realized when she was out of town, I'm no good alone, something like that. There's also that moment where they get into it. And you forget that these are young people in their 20s on their first job. But there are moments where you remember this. Like when Adam Driver hisses at her, never forget that I know you. I really fucking know you. And then Lena Dunham goes, what do you know? You don't go to parties, you love animals and you hate being whispered about. And he was right. Although Lena Dunham rightly notes, I mean, no one likes to be whispered about. True.

Speaker 1:
[59:40] But you realize how much of their actual real life dynamic did bleed into the characters on Girls. What I thought was most interesting was the last appearance of Adam in this book, which happened on the last day that they filmed together. And they drove home together because they lived on the same block. They never normally shared a car.

Speaker 2:
[60:01] They live so close together that she writes in the book that she and Jack Antonoff would see him and his wife watching television at night.

Speaker 1:
[60:08] And they drive home together holding hands the entire time. So girls. And then he says, like, I've always loved you, basically. There was obviously some unrequited romantic element to this dynamic. It's not to say that, like, he was suggesting that Lena Dunham was the love of his life or like the one that got away or something like that. But it was an acknowledgement of, I guess, their bond, their history, the dynamic that they had.

Speaker 2:
[60:37] Oh, absolutely. And they have undeniable chemistry. It's weird chemistry. I mean, she discusses, maybe it's not in the book. I mean, she discusses a lot the real life Adam that inspired the character. But she has discussed in interviews that she wanted a quintessentially handsome guy to play the role of Adam. She was not expecting Adam Driver. It was the casting director that brought him in. You can watch their first audition on YouTube. I mean, he bites her shoulder in the audition, only having met her for the first time like a minute before.

Speaker 1:
[61:17] But that's so the character, especially when you read her descriptions of the guy that Adam was based on, who makes multiple appearances throughout this book. Not because he keeps popping back up into her life, but because she is very preoccupied with this guy that she had a situation ship with for a time in her, I guess, really early 20s before she met Jack Antonoff.

Speaker 2:
[61:43] Yes. Something I find interesting about Lena as someone who has been really single is she's the type of person, and she describes herself this way in the book of like, I never had friends and like, you know, I've never really had a boyfriend. It's like, you always have a guy that you are seeing and you have lifelong friends.

Speaker 1:
[62:02] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[62:02] But this book highlights that her own self-image of herself was never good, never solid, and getting this kind of fame so young and then hated by the entire internet, which felt like the entire world certainly did not help things. So Lena talks about this in the New York Times interview, right? Where she did not imagine when she wrote Adam, that he would become this romantic hero. Because the real life Adam, the inspiration for him is based on this guy that she was seeing at the time, who has a cleft palate. This is the cleft palate guy, right?

Speaker 1:
[62:38] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[62:39] There's no other description of this guy, other than he's a welder, I think, and has a cleft palate, something like that. That at the time in her early 20s, she was craving this really Mary Gates-skilled depraved sex.

Speaker 1:
[62:53] I don't know if she was craving it, but she fell into it with this guy, and was having really kinky, doing Isabelle O'Pair shit, basically, with this scary welder. And a lot of this book, and she touches upon it in the New York Times interview, is her recognizing that sex that she was having her up a bit, and maybe wasn't entirely healthy, again, because she had all these self-hatred issues.

Speaker 2:
[63:23] Right.

Speaker 1:
[63:24] And I think it's a worthwhile conversation to have. I mean, I'm glad that there's less stigma around kink and stuff, of course, but also, I think we could acknowledge that there have always been people for whom this type of shit isn't entirely healthy.

Speaker 2:
[63:40] Yeah, but I feel like the mid-aunts, kind of our generation, was like the first generation that had easier access to hardcore porn. Like, I always remember this story about Sasha Grey being on her first porn shoot at 18 and wanting to get punched in the stomach by Rocco Sufretti.

Speaker 1:
[64:00] I don't know who that guy is, but...

Speaker 2:
[64:03] He's a porn legend. Don't ask me how I know that.

Speaker 1:
[64:06] I know about Sasha Grey, obviously. Don't ask me how I know that.

Speaker 2:
[64:09] Wait, did I tell you that I saw her at a cookie store opening in Studio City a couple weeks ago?

Speaker 1:
[64:14] You did, but tell the. I would have been so gagged to see Sasha Grey.

Speaker 2:
[64:19] Paul and I and the baby were in Studio City. We were leaving a frame bridge. And in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the weekday, a cookie store was opening. Forgive me, I cannot recall the name of it. And Paul goes, I think that's Sasha Grey. And I looked over and I'm like, a lot of women look like that. Why would Sasha Grey be at a cookie store opening in the valley in the middle of the day? And when we got home, I looked on social media and Sasha Grey's social media, it was her.

Speaker 1:
[64:47] She was posting like, hey, just at this cookie store. Why?

Speaker 2:
[64:51] Because her friend opened the cookie store. She's now a streamer, by the way.

Speaker 1:
[64:56] What is she streaming? Not porn.

Speaker 2:
[64:58] Video games. She was a DJ. Anyway, this was a time where some of us, not gonna include all of us, but some of us may have wanted to recreate some of the things that we watched in hardcore pornography when we were way too young.

Speaker 1:
[65:14] But the way she describes it was like, I didn't even know this shit existed.

Speaker 2:
[65:18] That's why she's a creative genius. So that experience is juxtaposed with the fact that shortly after Girls comes on air, she's getting styled by Rachel Antonoff. And Rachel Antonoff is like, hey, you should date my brother.

Speaker 1:
[65:32] And Jack is instantly like, I want to date this person, emails her, they have their first date. It's instant chemistry, instant kinship.

Speaker 2:
[65:43] Well, they're both, he's a germaphobe, she's got OCD.

Speaker 1:
[65:48] They are Jewish creative types that grew up in New York and New Jersey, respectively.

Speaker 2:
[65:56] And are also at the beginning of an ascent where they are both cultural figureheads in their respective industries of millennial culture.

Speaker 1:
[66:07] Right.

Speaker 2:
[66:08] I can't think of another example of something like this, of meeting someone when you're at the beginning of your success and they're at the beginning of their success and you're just together.

Speaker 1:
[66:18] But I would say Lena was more successful than him at that time even.

Speaker 2:
[66:23] Yes, We Are Young has just hit the airwaves.

Speaker 1:
[66:26] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[66:27] But like the way she talks about girls, she talks about Jack in a very similar way where the beginning of their relationship, like literally their first date, a whole chapter is basically dedicated to this very almost cinematic scene where a tour bus picks him up from their first or second date and he's just gone. And so we get all of this detail about the beginning quite like the beginning of girls. And then it just fast forwards and their relationship sucks.

Speaker 1:
[66:55] Yeah. Well, it seems like their relationship worked in a certain sense because it was always predicated on a friendship. It seems like they were very affectionate to each other in a lot of ways throughout the course of the relationship. But there became conflicts. Obviously, her medical stuff, her deteriorating mental health impacted the relationship. His career is also exploding. So oftentimes when she is having a breakdown or a medical incident, he's off working with Charlie XCX. He's off working with Pink. He's doing what he's doing. He's being Jack Antonoff.

Speaker 2:
[67:34] He's working with Lorde.

Speaker 1:
[67:36] He's working with Lorde, who Lena doesn't refer to by name in this book. She refers to her as the teenage artist.

Speaker 2:
[67:45] Pop star.

Speaker 1:
[67:45] Teenage pop star. Yeah. And the teenage pop star who then moves into their apartment.

Speaker 2:
[67:52] Which I think the most damning thing about their relationship, this is very like Carrie and Big or Carrie and Eden, is she is always, as we previously explained, lived in these decrepit apartments and her and Jack move into a new build that as she says, the type of building my parents would have made fun of that she hates and has always hated.

Speaker 1:
[68:14] Yeah. I would just refuse. I can't understand how someone that has the upbringing that Lena has being in like the fabulous apartments of rich artists, how you could then move into some cheesy, like new build apartment complex.

Speaker 2:
[68:30] It seems weird that Jack Antonoff would move into that, but I guess that explains his ability to work with any and all pop stars. I think the campiest moment that took me out is, Lena has recovered from one of her surgeries. I think it's an endometriosis surgery. She has a walker. She doesn't give context for why she now needs a walker, but she has a walker and she's trying to go to the fridge and Lorde just calls her Aunt Lena.

Speaker 1:
[69:00] She's basically in a poly under duress situation.

Speaker 2:
[69:05] She's in a platonic pud situation.

Speaker 1:
[69:08] Like he's basically moved in his young girlfriend into their house. And she says things in this book that suggests that Lorde had a crush on him, that there might have been something there. I've heard gossip that they actually did fuck and that Lena just didn't want to put it in the book because obviously a huge shit storm would erupt and people would talk about nothing else in this book if she had disclosed that.

Speaker 2:
[69:39] But the album that Jack Antonoff is working with Lorde on is melodrama?

Speaker 1:
[69:44] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[69:45] Okay, so the album that is about her boyfriend cheating on her.

Speaker 1:
[69:50] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[69:50] Perhaps caused a cheating situation.

Speaker 1:
[69:53] And you know what? We are going to close this episode with one of those songs.

Speaker 2:
[69:57] We don't know which one yet, but it's one of them.

Speaker 1:
[70:00] Yeah, I think she showed a lot of restraint and a lot of compassion.

Speaker 2:
[70:04] Now, might that be because it took her seven years to write this book? We should say, I guess we'll get to it during the actual friendship breakdown between her and Jenny Connor. But the one thing Jenny Connor asked of her is, I know you're going to write about this, please just don't do it immediately. So she waits seven years to publish Famesick. But in that time, she wrote and directed and put out too much, which really, if you remember, does skewer Jack Antonoff pretty brutally.

Speaker 1:
[70:35] Yeah, in a way that she really didn't do in this book.

Speaker 2:
[70:39] I'm just saying, perhaps she got it out of her system.

Speaker 1:
[70:42] Yeah, but also she did basically find 10 different ways of wording the fact that he was a boring lay or that they didn't have chemistry or whatever it was. If I was Jack, that would make me really upset.

Speaker 2:
[70:57] Well, you could read it another way that she just can't be with the normal guy, right? I mean, she goes from the guy that she's having this transgressive Isabelle Luperre sex with to a nice Jewish boy who loves her.

Speaker 1:
[71:14] Yes, and she's already contorted herself into these Madonna horror roles with both of these guys, essentially.

Speaker 2:
[71:21] I also thought the subtext was that her health also limited their sex life.

Speaker 1:
[71:27] For sure, because of her endometriosis specifically, she had her period or was bleeding for the majority of the month. Not that you can't have sex on your period, not saying that, but just one of the many things that and her many gynecological surgeries and things, of course, would affect your sex life. I was really traumatized when she talked about taking baths that blood clots would just bubble up to the surface that were the size of cherry tomatoes.

Speaker 2:
[71:59] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[71:59] Like, you don't want to get fucked if that's happening to you.

Speaker 2:
[72:02] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[72:03] Well, I mean, she kind of does, but we'll get into that.

Speaker 2:
[72:06] It's funny, it wasn't until you and I started discussing Jenny Connor and you pointed out that it is a similar dynamic that she has with her mother, this running hot and cold.

Speaker 1:
[72:18] Yeah, I fear that I might be a Laurie Simmons type of parent where she's kind of like obsessed with her work and randomly hypercritical, but then really great at decorating a 12-year-old's bedroom. Like, the description of her mom decorating her what would become her childhood room was incredible.

Speaker 2:
[72:37] Well, yes, for those who haven't read the book, the special detail is that her mother is a true minimalist, and Lena Dunham could not be more opposite than her mother. And her mother decides to not only give her daughter some privacy in this loft by sectioning out a room for her, she decorates it in a style that is not her own, but her daughter's maximalist style.

Speaker 1:
[73:02] I thought that was a really sweet part of the book.

Speaker 2:
[73:05] The thing that I could never understand about Girls, because Girls is a rare depiction of an only child, of which Lena Dunham is not actually an only child, we are only children.

Speaker 1:
[73:15] She's made herself an only child, because her sibling is like, fuck this, I'm moving to East LA and never looking back.

Speaker 2:
[73:24] One could make the point that Lena's mental and health issues, which have existed since childhood, did not allow space for her brother to take up space.

Speaker 1:
[73:35] Yes, I imagined that that was the case after reading this book. And her brother had to have really firm boundaries with her.

Speaker 2:
[73:45] Which is in stark contrast to Lena's inability to having boundaries. But something I always struggled with with Girls was just how mean her mother was on the show to her.

Speaker 1:
[73:57] Right, played by the wonderful Becky Ann Baker.

Speaker 2:
[74:01] Who also plays, we remember, guys, Miranda's sister. In my motherboard myself.

Speaker 1:
[74:06] All roads lead back.

Speaker 2:
[74:07] But her mother is her harshest critic, but also her greatest defender. And I do feel like this is something, maybe I'm revealing too much about my own mother-daughter relationship. But there's this moment where Jenny Conner comes to Laurie Simmons basically to say like, I think this is all in your daughter's head. And Laurie Simmons like defends Lena to the death.

Speaker 1:
[74:33] Yeah, but the subtext was, I know that there are mental health issues that are contributing to these physical symptoms and these physical issues. But you are not going to come here and tell me that.

Speaker 2:
[74:44] Well, this is where it felt like my mother, where it's like, no, no, no, no. I can talk shit about my daughter. You can't talk shit about my daughter.

Speaker 1:
[74:52] And Lena basically says that.

Speaker 2:
[74:54] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[74:55] Can we talk about the gala and her mother?

Speaker 2:
[74:58] Which one?

Speaker 1:
[74:59] The one where, I don't know, she's getting an award. I forget what it was for. Was it the endometriosis one or something else? It's like some benefit where Lena is being honored. And in the middle of her speech, and this is so cinematic, she sees her mother stand up and walk out because her mom is pissed about the seating arrangements of the gala. And Lena is like, imagine caring about something like that. But also her mom felt slighted for whatever reason. She wasn't at the A table. She was at the Z table with a bunch of freaks, presumably.

Speaker 2:
[75:33] But another, sorry to keep using this word, but it is apt. This other tension that is going on is as Lena is achieving her dream. I mean, she didn't even dream big enough for this to be her dream. It is in contrast to the fact that her parents careers that they spent decades on is now being overshadowed, where they are now known as Lena Dunham's parents. And as she writes in the book, they thought it was cute the first time, and then they hated it every time afterwards.

Speaker 1:
[76:04] Yeah, she writes about this in a way that kind of broke my heart. She says, the biggest issue and the hardest one for us to name was my career, not just the challenges I was facing, but its impact on her sense of her own legacy. Her art had always been her religion. The one thing I knew I could not touch, change, inform or be more essential than. And now I was the story.

Speaker 2:
[76:26] Her mother is painted as a sort of frenemy. And then she speaks about her father as this kind of perfect person. And this dynamic reminded me a lot of the way Gwyneth Paltrow has spoken about her mother and her father. I personally have never understood the whole daddy's girl thing. I'm very close to my mother. I have a good relationship with my father. But I just have never understood the daughters that are like, I am closer with my father.

Speaker 1:
[76:56] Right.

Speaker 2:
[76:57] And Gwyneth Paltrow has spoken about this. But Gwyneth Paltrow, like Lena, has this creative competition with her mother. Gwyneth Paltrow has talked about how Blythe Danner was a little jealous of how easy her daughter's career came together.

Speaker 1:
[77:13] Of course. How could you not be? And she, of course, in a way, gave up her career or at least at the very least made sacrifices to raise her children.

Speaker 2:
[77:22] For sure. But Lena talks about her father glowingly. But there are these stories that it's like, I don't know, is your father nice? Because there's that incident where they're going to vote. And he basically is like, God, I wish I didn't have to vote with Lena Dunham, which is like the reverse of the parent-child dynamic where the child is usually like, hey, can you like drop me off a block from school so I'm not seen with you? But now it's her father being like, I don't know, can you like maybe vote like 10 people behind me?

Speaker 1:
[77:53] Yeah. And this subtext is like, I don't want to make this a whole thing.

Speaker 2:
[77:57] I think he says, I don't want the paparazzi to follow us. And she notes the girls had only been on air for six months.

Speaker 1:
[78:04] She also says in this book that she regrets supporting Hillary Clinton and wishes that she supported Bernie Sanders instead.

Speaker 2:
[78:12] Well, she says, instead of stumping for Hillary, I wish I had just put a sign for Bernie Sanders in my window.

Speaker 1:
[78:19] And called it a day.

Speaker 2:
[78:22] Just going back to her father, at the beginning of the book, her father discusses after reading the manuscript to Famesick, it's hard for me to understand why anyone would want to publish a book such as this. And the such as this is, he said some people are going to connect to it and feel it's for them. That would be us. And some people are going to say, why won't she shut the fuck up already? And Lena gives her father credit. I thought that was a pretty accurate assessment of the options, which is so telling of how she sees herself, of like, it's either this is for me or I fucking hate this bitch.

Speaker 1:
[78:58] Right.

Speaker 2:
[78:59] She doesn't open the door that some people might actually just be indifferent about her.

Speaker 1:
[79:03] It's hard to be indifferent about her.

Speaker 2:
[79:05] All right, should we get into the best part of any celebrity memoir, which is the other celebrities who get mentioned?

Speaker 1:
[79:12] Sure. Nora Ephron is a main player in this book. Maybe not a main player, but the most prominent of the supporting characters.

Speaker 2:
[79:21] Well, yes, she did unfortunately die of an aggressive form of cancer that she told no one about, but it seems like they would be great friends to this day had Nora Ephron lived. She's got crucial advice from how to fix up her first crummy apartment to how to deal with Uber producer Scott Rudin when you don't write his script and he yells at you.

Speaker 1:
[79:43] And Nora is obviously a huge inspiration on Lena Dunham's writing, but I loved the tidbits we got about Nora. Also, Bruce Springsteen has an important pivotal role in this book.

Speaker 2:
[79:57] Yes, they see each other post-Jack Antonoff breakup where Lena Dunham explains, like in these kind of moments, you can do one of two things. Do what she calls normal stuff or psychotic stuff. And she chose to act psychotically.

Speaker 1:
[80:15] She overshared about her breakup to Bruce Springsteen and her feelings and her pain.

Speaker 2:
[80:22] Because Jack Antonoff and Bruce Springsteen had become friends, put on a music festival together. And I guess Bruce Springsteen had not gotten word that they had broken up. And he's like, I like your guy, Jack. And she's like, well, he promised to love me forever and he didn't. By the way, this is happening at a table where Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel are, I guess, an Irishman cast dinner.

Speaker 1:
[80:47] Anyway, Bruce Springsteen basically gives her like Yoda-like life advice about how to navigate her pain. And he also says something like that I think speaks directly to this book, which he's like, hey, you don't have to like reveal everything to people.

Speaker 2:
[81:06] Right. It doesn't mean you lie. It just means you can have secrets. You only owe it to them to show them how your mind works.

Speaker 1:
[81:13] I feel like that is her, in so many words, addressing the fact that there is stuff that she has left out like this Lorde stuff, for example.

Speaker 2:
[81:22] Right. I think the funniest tidbit in this book is her conversation with Barbara Walters backstage during her first appearance on The View where Barbara doesn't know the difference between having sex from behind, meaning doggy, versus anal sex.

Speaker 1:
[81:40] Yeah. She's basically like, oh, so you're having anal sex on this show.

Speaker 2:
[81:45] This show is so scandalous. Anal!

Speaker 1:
[81:48] And Lena's like, um, that's not anal.

Speaker 2:
[81:51] She's like, do you mean sex from behind? She goes, yes, anal.

Speaker 1:
[81:54] So Barbara Walters has never had sex outside of the missionary position or perhaps cowgirl.

Speaker 2:
[82:00] Another thing that I need help decoding, and at the time of recording, there's not enough Reddit forums about this. Who is the American Hugh Grant that she meets on The View that sends her a middle of the night U-up text? This is Lena, not Barbara Walters.

Speaker 1:
[82:17] We should have just figured out who was on The View that day, or who was on The View the next day, because sometimes they film two episodes a day.

Speaker 2:
[82:24] So the one Reddit forum I could find about this is saying John Cusack, which makes sense. Similar age to Hugh Grant has been in a lot of romantic comedies. She does speak to the fact that he has dyed brown black hair, which John Cusack does.

Speaker 1:
[82:40] He is also neurotic, but in a charming way like Hugh Grant.

Speaker 2:
[82:45] If I had 2012, 2013 era Lena Dunham power, like I would try to fuck John Cusack. I've watched Say Anything a million times.

Speaker 1:
[82:54] Well, speak for yourself.

Speaker 2:
[82:56] I did see on Twitter that someone, and I could not verify this, but someone went back and looked at who else was on that episode of The View, and they said it was Kevin Kline, which, no, no.

Speaker 1:
[83:09] Although he is also an American Hugh Grant.

Speaker 2:
[83:13] Because of French Kiss?

Speaker 1:
[83:15] I think he was cast in similar roles, like Hugh Grant could have played his role in In and Out.

Speaker 2:
[83:21] Sure. He's a little bit older and has been known for his salt and pepper and white hair for a while. So it's hard for me to think that it is actually Kevin Kline. Also, that man's been married to Phoebe Case for 40 years. Don't take that away from me, okay? That's my favorite celebrity marriage.

Speaker 1:
[83:40] Yeah, but you never know what kind of marriage people have, especially in Hollywood.

Speaker 2:
[83:44] Speaking of which, there is also some director of her favorite comedy films who hits on her, that has made her unable to watch his films anymore.

Speaker 1:
[83:56] I know. Did Gary Marshall try to fuck?

Speaker 2:
[83:58] Well, I was like, Albert Brooks? Who could this be?

Speaker 1:
[84:01] It had to be someone like that.

Speaker 2:
[84:03] It's not Judd.

Speaker 1:
[84:05] No. I get the sense that it was slightly older generation than Judd.

Speaker 2:
[84:10] Yes. That's why I'm like, I mean, you said Gary Marshall, but that's where my mind went to Albert Brooks.

Speaker 1:
[84:15] If anyone has theories, let us know.

Speaker 2:
[84:18] Oh, this is going to be, I hope it will be a fun comment section.

Speaker 1:
[84:22] There's also a really insane detail about Nicholas Cage because Lena moves into this apartment complex in LA where a lot of celebrities have lived over the years, one of whom was Nicholas Cage who allegedly destroyed an aquarium and threw a baby shark out of a window in a fit of rage directed at his then-girlfriend Nicolette Sheridan. Don't like that.

Speaker 2:
[84:45] I like that this insane anecdote is included in the book, but yes. We should say that she learns this from the property manager of the building that she's renting from, which is the El Royale, which is near Largemont.

Speaker 1:
[84:59] Well, he would know. Also the Sunset Tower looms quite large in this book. It is practically the fifth character.

Speaker 2:
[85:06] Yes, I had no idea that while we were having lunch at the Sunset Tower, Lena Dunham may have been upstairs recovering from one of her innumerable surgeries.

Speaker 1:
[85:17] Or starting a fire, as she acknowledges she did.

Speaker 2:
[85:21] Correct. She did start a fire, not to be confused with the time she set herself on fire, which we are getting to.

Speaker 1:
[85:27] She also did have a house, I guess, after the El Royale on Ogden Street, very close to Butter Nails, where we get our nails done. Lena Dunham used to also frequent that nail salon.

Speaker 2:
[85:40] Yes, we're doxing her because she sold that house.

Speaker 1:
[85:43] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[85:43] Yeah, that is what I was confused by. This is a woman, I mean, she used that $3.7 million advance quite well and does speak about, I believe she renewed her contract for girls during season four, that it was like for an insane amount of money. But she has homes, like she has a home in Los Angeles, but seemingly is always staying at the Sunset Tower and has a place with Jack Antonoff, but is constantly living at her parents, just to go back to her parents' situation.

Speaker 1:
[86:13] Also, her parents have a second home in Connecticut. Lena Dunham built a separate house on their property that there was like an architectural digest feature about a few years ago.

Speaker 2:
[86:27] Even if I had all the money in the world, and you know how close I am with my family, I would not build a compound where they are also living.

Speaker 1:
[86:36] Yeah, it's really apparent to me that she is almost like a permanent forever 12-year-old.

Speaker 2:
[86:41] Yeah, I mean, we discussed this at the beginning of the episode, and I think it is true, right? She gets famous at 23, but even before that, she seems to mentally be an adolescent.

Speaker 1:
[86:53] Yeah, or that's her safe place or that's her clearly her ultimate comfort, which I get it. She has these amazing parents. She grows up in this incredible loft.

Speaker 2:
[87:02] She does discuss this towards the end of the book, where she's talking about being at the Sunset Tower and losing her key for the millionth time, and she just says, learned helplessness is what our girls producer, Eileen, had called it. The condition of celebrities who have to call someone else in a panic just to find out the password of their own computer, the code to their own door, to ask for a latte or a change of bedsheets or a doctor, a doctor right now, please, I can't go through hair and makeup until I see a doctor. A lot of these incidents of learned helplessness with Lena reminded me of my time being an assistant for a celebrity, a celebrity who two years after I worked for her, texted me to ask what her password was for her YouTube account.

Speaker 1:
[87:46] Most celebrities have this disease, I would say, apart from the working actor type of celebrity, which may have found some fame, but they still are a bit more grounded, I suppose, because they have to get themselves to the theater every day, and they're not exclusively surrounded by other celebrities.

Speaker 2:
[88:06] That is one of the many dichotomies with Lena Dunham, because you would think that she would be made of stronger stuff having grown up in New York City.

Speaker 1:
[88:15] But she was such a baby when she got famous. You can't blame someone for never maturing if just basic life tasks are done for them from such a young age.

Speaker 2:
[88:27] And we discussed that essay she wrote a year or two ago where she was discussing that, like, yes, even as a child, she was not meant for New York. I think it was when Too Much came out because she was discussing how much she loves London compared to New York, because every block of New York, essentially, because she grew up there just has bad connotations.

Speaker 1:
[88:46] Yeah, and New York is a overwhelming environment, especially for someone with anxiety.

Speaker 2:
[88:52] Well, I think this is a perfect transition to get into her health and maladies in general.

Speaker 1:
[88:58] So as we said, she has OCD, presumably anxiety and depression. She has endometriosis, and she also has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is like a connective tissue issue.

Speaker 2:
[89:16] Look, beyond what this disease is called, more importantly is how she is diagnosed with it, which we have forgotten to mention that during the run of girls and maybe it was right after girls, she starts Lenny Letter. Remember Lenny Letter?

Speaker 1:
[89:30] It was sub stack before sub stack.

Speaker 2:
[89:33] And Lena Dunham talks about, and we haven't gotten into yet, the offshoot of fame is how many people try to get into your orbit to make their dreams come true, right? She has a line about, you know, I can't tell you how many scripts and short films I've been asked to come to and all of them.

Speaker 1:
[89:51] How many coffee dates.

Speaker 2:
[89:53] Which she doesn't outright say she's a people pleaser, but she's clearly a people pleaser. And she wants to make everyone's dreams come true. And she realizes she just doesn't have enough time.

Speaker 1:
[90:04] Especially because she's trying to appease the guilt that she has around her success, that she has because everyone has been saying how undeserving she is and that other people should have these opportunities and what have you.

Speaker 2:
[90:18] But I forget if it's Judd or someone she previously dated comes to her and is like, hey, someone I went on a date with wants me to get a letter to you and she's like, great. What is this ass going to be? And it's someone going like, hey, I really admire your work. I've watched you. I've heard a lot of anecdotes. You've told being hyper jointed and I think you have this disease.

Speaker 1:
[90:40] And they were right.

Speaker 2:
[90:41] So she gets a lot of surgeries mostly because of her endometriosis, a lot of lesions, a lot of cysts. She feints at one of the many Met Gala she was at. She does not specify which Met Gala, but she does say that when she awakes, she sees Maggie Gyllenhaal above her being like, it's okay, it can be really overwhelming. Maggie Gyllenhaal thinking that Lena Dunham has fainted because of just the pressure of being at the Met Gala. Look, we got into this before. There is a subtext of this book that beyond her parents, those closest to her cannot handle slash have varying levels of belief that she is actually sick. And I'm not going to lie, there are various points in this book that I did Google Munchausen.

Speaker 1:
[91:29] Well, I think this book really does a good job of showing that her sort of fame, her illness and her sexuality are all intertwined in this like very complicated way.

Speaker 2:
[91:42] And I think unless you have a chronic illness, you can't understand what living day to day with a chronic illness, let alone multiple chronic illnesses is like. I think she, to me, it really reframed my thought of what living with a chronic illness is like when she's speaking to her mother. She's talking about how her mother, like most people think that there's a path to healing, right? Pursuing normalcy was incorrect. Being chronically ill meant that you were never getting better. There is no well when your status quo was sick.

Speaker 1:
[92:16] Right. And she got sick tattooed on the back of her neck, which upset her mother. Like that was a bad omen. She was like, no, this is just my situation.

Speaker 2:
[92:25] And I think there is this expectation to those around her and even myself as the reader that, you know, once she gets a hysterectomy, that all of her problems will be solved. And the answer is it doesn't.

Speaker 1:
[92:41] No.

Speaker 2:
[92:42] Now, that might have to do with Lena, who immediately decides to start having sex before the six weeks after her hysterectomy. We should say that her and Jack Antonoff had broken up at this point, which seems like it was the type of breakup that, instead of pulling off the band-aid quickly, you just, you know.

Speaker 1:
[93:03] Oh, it's one hair at a time.

Speaker 2:
[93:04] Yeah. It made me remember, they were the type of celebrity couple where their answer, when they were asked of like, are you guys going to get married? They were always like, when gay people can marry, we'll get married. And then when gay people could get married, I remember she was on Ellen and Ellen asked her like, so are you and Jack going to get married now? And she was like, we'll see.

Speaker 1:
[93:26] I know I need more follow through with that kind of shit. Like you have to actually move to Canada.

Speaker 2:
[93:31] You know, as much hate as Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell get, they actually did get married. They used to use that line and when their gay friends could get married, they did as well.

Speaker 1:
[93:41] But there also is this through line in the book. In addition to the descriptions of her illness, there's this through line of masochism. From the violent sex that she had in her 20s with this guy to getting fucked in the ICU, which apparently happened after one of her medical incidents. And then of course, what you just alluded to, getting fucked repeatedly after her hysterectomy, which then obviously...

Speaker 2:
[94:12] Well, as she writes, her vagina gave out.

Speaker 1:
[94:15] Her vagina gave out. And also just being the kind of person that says shit like, you know, oh, you know, I get tattoos because the physical pain distracts me from the emotional pain and I find that to be freeing.

Speaker 2:
[94:28] Yeah, but that's shit you say in your 20s. Sure.

Speaker 1:
[94:31] But I think that all of these details together paints a more complex picture of who this person is. I'm not saying that she is pretending to be sick, but I'm saying that there are a lot of factors at play.

Speaker 2:
[94:44] I also think an important context is, we are at a point in her life, we're now, this is around 2017, 2018, where girls has ended, she is 30. And I think these behaviors in your 20s, if not glorified or at least understandable, and the fact that she's still acting this way, still this chronically ill, still not able to show up for others wears on people who have been around her for at least a decade at this point.

Speaker 1:
[95:17] Right. And it wasn't as explicitly stated as the way that she talks about Jenny and Jack sort of disbelieving her, but you also get the sense that her brother was not fully on board for all of this.

Speaker 2:
[95:31] I mean, this part of the book is her rock bottom, but even within the rock bottom, we do get this funny moment where the person she is having sex with after her hysterectomy is someone she knew in childhood who came back into her life, a very Hannah Horvath-esque storyline.

Speaker 1:
[95:49] Right. And she's actually having good sex with this guy, which is a big deal because she hasn't been having good sex with Jack, and Jack has obviously been off doing his own thing.

Speaker 2:
[95:59] And this was the other big headline that came from the book's release, that everyone has thought that Jack Antonoff cheated on Lena Dunham with Lorde, which may or may not be true. But Lena Dunham comes out and says, no, I cheated on Jack.

Speaker 1:
[96:13] Right.

Speaker 2:
[96:14] Although the timeline is a little blurry in her defense.

Speaker 1:
[96:17] Well, it's like they were on a break, but they were still living together. But of course, they weren't really living together because she was either in the hospital or at her parents' house.

Speaker 2:
[96:26] Which leads to this darkly comical moment where she is back in the hospital because she has fucked up her stitches from the hysterectomy. I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[96:38] Yeah, from getting railed by this random guy. And look, I get that when you have a chronic illness, sometimes people make choices that seem counterintuitive. It seems insane that she would be sort of risking her health after everything that she's been through. But also, I know that sometimes in a sick backwards way, people make these kind of decisions to just have some sort of autonomy or control, even if it is not necessarily healthy.

Speaker 2:
[97:04] Well, paradoxically, you would think that her mother would be judgmental, but instead, her mother is like, good for you. You get the sense that her parents did not care for Jack Antonoff that much because she has to explain to her mother, to explain to the attending, because somehow Jack Antonoff has gotten word that she is in the hospital again, and this is the time he chooses to come to the hospital. Because after her hysterectomy, he is on tour or recording with Pink or something, and he does not visit her in the hospital. But now he is, and now she needs her mother to tell the attending to not say that she is in the hospital because she has been too much.

Speaker 1:
[97:45] Because the guy that did the fucking is not Jack Antonoff. But again, it's like, why does your mom know this much about your sex life?

Speaker 2:
[97:54] Her mother gets an apartment for her and this guy above them. Like, she gets an apartment for her daughter who is in her 30s at this point.

Speaker 1:
[98:05] And is a multimillionaire.

Speaker 2:
[98:06] In the same building because Laurie Simmons and Carol Dunham don't want their adult daughter to be fucking this rando in their loft.

Speaker 1:
[98:15] Which she was. She's like, yeah, he fucked me on my parents' quilt or something. And I was like, I would take that out of the book.

Speaker 2:
[98:22] So her real rock bottom is this moment that a lot of people know about, which is her and Jenny Connor's statement defending the girls' producer, Murray Miller. And you can either consider that Lena Dunham is dealing with this deathly by not naming the person in this incident, not really she talks around this incident, or she is a coward for not confronting it and speaking about it plainly in the book.

Speaker 1:
[98:52] Oh, I don't think that that's the case at all. I think, if anything, that this event is treated with a lot of sensitivity Right. towards the victim.

Speaker 2:
[99:02] Aurora Paranou, we should say. So the context of this story is it's 2017, the Me Too movement is in full swing. Aurora Paranou, who is an actress and the daughter of Harold Paranou of Lost in Romeo and Juliet fame, files a police report in Los Angeles accusing girls writer Murray Miller of sexual assault. This was an incident that happened back in 2012 when she was 17. We get context in this book, which Lena Dunham has subsequently discussed like, I was high on drugs on the time. I do not remember writing that statement, right?

Speaker 1:
[99:36] We should note that she is addicted to Klonopin.

Speaker 2:
[99:39] She's addicted to Klonopin. We get the context in this book that she is basically coerced to release this statement the day she comes home from her hysterectomy. Point to Lori Simmons, who literally is trying to take the phone out of her daughter's hand, being like, this doesn't need a comment right now. Again, Lena Dunham's memory is foggy because she is on a lot of pain medication. I believe Jenny Connor was there and was like, we need to comment on this right now. Lena Dunham talks about how much she regrets this.

Speaker 1:
[100:13] She's basically said, like, in so many words, like, this girl is lying and I have evidence to prove that she is lying.

Speaker 2:
[100:21] Oh, I went back and found the statement because the statement is way, way worse than I remember it being. Yes, the part you're referring to is, we believe having worked closely with him for more than half a decade, that this is the case with Murray Miller. While our first instinct is to listen to every woman's story, our insider knowledge of Murray's situation makes us confident that sadly, this accusation is one of the 3% of assault cases that are misreported every year.

Speaker 1:
[100:49] So, obviously, this statement is met with horror.

Speaker 2:
[100:53] It does not go well for her.

Speaker 1:
[100:54] No, and this is when she is as cancelled as someone can be, I think, really. And also, there's lots of smaller incidents of her being cancelled for things that led up to this that aren't really addressed. But this was the big thing, and the way she writes about it, I think, speaks to the level of shame and trauma and guilt she feels about what she did.

Speaker 2:
[101:18] Yes, and she was, as I stated, under the influence and as she writes, essentially coerce to write this statement, or at least give her drug-addled consent with Jenny Connor to release this statement.

Speaker 1:
[101:32] It's really, really, really bad. Also, it's noteworthy because this is the first time that Jenny really feels the backlash of the public in the way that Lena has consistently felt from Season 1.

Speaker 2:
[101:45] And Lena doesn't directly say this in the book, but so much that has led up to this moment is Lena wanting to get off of the train and not knowing how. And again, I don't think she was in her right mind when this happened, but it did give her the momentum to step away from the limelight that she herself could not do, which was to step away, take a break, not work. This statement made her radioactive.

Speaker 1:
[102:13] Yeah. And then directly after this point, she gets engaged to the random guy that's been fucking her too soon after her hysterectomy.

Speaker 2:
[102:23] And then goes to rehab, which this is not a funny part of the book. I just couldn't help but feel that in certain passages, did it not remind you of the movie 28 Days?

Speaker 1:
[102:35] Oh, for sure. And while 28 Days, like, obviously has some dark moments, I'd love to talk about this film more in-depth with you at some point in the future. But like, it is like the warmest and fuzziest idea of what rehab could be, where you're in this, like, world of these wacky, fun characters and you're all friends. It's kind of like the way that Orange is the New Black made prison look fun.

Speaker 2:
[102:58] Right. I mean, and there are similarities of, you know, Dominic West proposes to Sandra Bullock in rehab. Lena Dunham's life, this guy proposes to her. Before she goes to rehab, there's the incident with everyone's favorite, Walter, who gets kicked out of the rehab because he violates policy by telling his wife that he's in rehab with Lena Dunham.

Speaker 1:
[103:21] Is she not violating policy by writing about these people in this book?

Speaker 2:
[103:26] I mean, I guess it's not their real names. Can we just discuss the circumstances around her going to rehab? Because she says it's ostensibly for a clonopin addiction, which she has been taking what her pharmacologist has been recommending since she was a teenager, her 20s.

Speaker 1:
[103:45] But like the highest dose of clonopin that can be prescribed by a doctor, which I'm sure is a lot and clonopin is one of the most fucked up addictive drugs that there is, that has ruined countless lives, including Stevie Nixes.

Speaker 2:
[104:01] But there's nary a mention to her now decades long dependence on pain medications for her various surgeries.

Speaker 1:
[104:10] That's true. We also don't really hear anything about her actually detoxing or anything. It's all about the kooky characters in the rehab.

Speaker 2:
[104:21] I do enjoy. Her mother is her adversary, it feels like for the first two-thirds of the book, but she really does come to her daughter's defense towards the end, whether it's against Jenny Connor or this pharmacologist who she yells at, because the pharmacologist is like, oh yeah, I think your daughter may need to detox from all of the clonopin. Laurie Simmons goes, let me get this straight. You prescribed my child a medication and now you're giving us the name of a rehab so she can get off of it?

Speaker 1:
[104:50] Well, that's so fucking common. When I was of girls age in college, I had this psychiatrist that would prescribe me anything. I wasn't even in there for ADHD and I got Adderall all this just to have as a study drug. Clonopin, wafers, you name it.

Speaker 2:
[105:06] Yeah. We should say that her diet of drugs, as she lists, is Adderall, clonopin and then whatever. Pain medication usually Percocets. She is on at the time.

Speaker 1:
[105:19] But it doesn't seem like she really drinks, which is interesting.

Speaker 2:
[105:22] No. And now she's completely sober.

Speaker 1:
[105:25] So yeah, after her stinted rehab, she's kind of in this transitional phase because it's like she's been canceled, Girls is over, it's during the pandemic.

Speaker 2:
[105:36] Well, we should say, to my point, that this book is like, if you know, you know. Some of the dates are muddled. I couldn't keep straight when certain things were happening because she goes to rehab, but she does have another production deal with Jenny Conner. They do that show Camp, if you remember.

Speaker 1:
[105:54] Camping.

Speaker 2:
[105:55] Camping, yes. Where Lena comes from rehab to oversee the show, something like that, but they do one show and then they're basically, they're done.

Speaker 1:
[106:04] Or one season of the show.

Speaker 2:
[106:06] I'm saying Jenny Conner and Lena do one show under this new deal and then it just combusts.

Speaker 1:
[106:11] Right. And they have a break up that happens in a therapist office, really.

Speaker 2:
[106:18] Which the irony is those two probably should have seen a couple's therapist all throughout the production of Girls because by the time they get to an impartial third party, their dynamic is just too broken. As evidenced by there's, what is it, they speak for about 13 minutes and then there's 47 minutes left of the therapy session. They just sit in silence and leave.

Speaker 1:
[106:42] I thought Jenny just left.

Speaker 2:
[106:44] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[106:45] There's no point in talking it out at that point.

Speaker 2:
[106:47] Yeah, it's too broken.

Speaker 1:
[106:49] But this break up really felt comparable to the Jack breakup.

Speaker 2:
[106:54] As she lists, it's Jack breakup, hysterectomy, cancellation, Jenny Connor breakup, all in the span of 18 months.

Speaker 1:
[107:04] Don't forget rehab.

Speaker 2:
[107:06] Rehab. Oh, and engagement to that guy, which we should explain. We learn, as Lena learns, he is a pathological liar. He claims that he is sober. He is not sober. He's an alcoholic. He says that he was discharged from the military due to a head injury, which is not correct. He was dishonorably discharged from the military because he drank so much, then would try to detox, then would have seizures, which caused a head injury. So anyway, she breaks up with that guy.

Speaker 1:
[107:38] Breaks up with that guy.

Speaker 2:
[107:39] Who's still living in the apartment that Laurie Simmons rented for them, which feels so tiny furniture that like Lena and Laurie Simmons have to kick him out of this place that Lena's renting.

Speaker 1:
[107:51] Well, especially because like one day her dad finds him like naked, lying on the doorstep of their apartment. Yeah, really, really fucking dark shit. But after that point, she's in LA during the pandemic.

Speaker 2:
[108:05] I can't think of a worse place for Lena Dunham to be alone during the pandemic than Los Angeles.

Speaker 1:
[108:13] I mean, New York would have been worse for her, I think.

Speaker 2:
[108:15] No, but she has her parents in New York.

Speaker 1:
[108:17] She would have been in her parents' house, it's true.

Speaker 2:
[108:19] She describes going on pandemic dates, which really gave me some personal PTSD of just outdoor patio bar first dates with people en masse. And she talks about going on this date with this ginger who brings her home only for her to be berated by his roommate, explaining his short film to her and how she stole a storyline for girls from his short film that she had never seen. She also has to explain to him that was never a storyline on girls. And he goes, I guess I never really watched the show that closely.

Speaker 1:
[108:53] Horrible. She decides to go to England because she's going to direct a few episodes of Industry.

Speaker 2:
[109:01] This opportunity comes to her because the head of production, HBO, says, you know, do you know any up and coming directors who might want to direct this pilot? And Lena goes, what about me? Which was very surprising. And so, you know, she discusses this idea that her entire life, she has pinged and longed between New York and LA., which is something that resonated with me. And maybe she needed something just completely different. And so she goes to England.

Speaker 1:
[109:28] Where she promptly lights herself on fire, which we also saw on Too Much.

Speaker 2:
[109:34] Oh, right.

Speaker 1:
[109:35] But it was less serious on Too Much. It wasn't a insane burn that required a skin graft from a cadaver.

Speaker 2:
[109:45] Right. And because she's Lena and has means, her father comes to England to fly her to Los Angeles so that it can be done by a cosmetic surgeon.

Speaker 1:
[109:54] Yeah. She's also like, being in England is fucked because I have all these joint issues because of the... What is it called again?

Speaker 2:
[110:02] You know what? We're just going to put in a Google speak clip of what...

Speaker 1:
[110:06] The EDS.

Speaker 2:
[110:07] The EDS. Ellers Danlos.

Speaker 1:
[110:10] And obviously, England is so damp and rainy that maybe not the best.

Speaker 2:
[110:15] But she remains because she falls in love with someone. Her now husband.

Speaker 1:
[110:19] Who is not really mentioned in this book.

Speaker 2:
[110:22] Well, the book basically ends when she gets married.

Speaker 1:
[110:27] But she doesn't write about getting married. She just says, I got married.

Speaker 2:
[110:31] Yes, she doesn't write about the Fabulous Wedding. She also doesn't write about her writing Sharp Stick or making that film.

Speaker 1:
[110:39] Or too much or anything.

Speaker 2:
[110:41] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[110:42] Or being in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Speaker 2:
[110:44] With Margaret Qualley. I mean, she does reference Jack Antonoff being with Margaret Qualley and meeting her on the set of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But you are correct. To my point about this blurriness of timelines, it's hard to overlay how she actually did all of this stuff considering all of the medical maladies she had.

Speaker 1:
[111:05] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[111:05] That's why I said I ended up investigating my own relationship with Lena Dunham, because it's like, weren't you in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?

Speaker 1:
[111:13] Well, I also found it fascinating the way she wrote about finding out about Jack Antonoff and Margaret Qualley. She saw some paparazzi photo of them and started crying because she knew that everyone in the world would think that she was jealous of Margaret Qualley and she was crying because in actuality, she wanted to be friends with Margaret Qualley. And of course, Jack swooped in and got her, which is the exact same way she felt about Lorde. And Jack even said that to her. He was like, you are just annoyed with her and projecting all of this shit on us because you're annoyed that like I'm friends with her and she doesn't want to be friends with you.

Speaker 2:
[111:54] Something we haven't touched on that is tied to Lena Dunham's medical issues is her coming to terms with the fact that she won't be able to biologically have a child.

Speaker 1:
[112:06] Yeah. And she goes through all of this shit. She does egg retrieval post-hysterectomy.

Speaker 2:
[112:14] She does an egg retrieval. It sounds like she's trying to harvest embryos because she seemingly gets sperm from an unnamed gay friend of hers. That she, in the process, before she even knows if her eggs are viable or if the embryo creation is successful, she has already written a contract with this unnamed gay gentleman whose sperm she's using to have this child only to learn the egg retrieval was not successful, the embryos were not viable. I bring this up because a lot of her post breakup with Jack and seeing him with other girlfriends, the first one which becomes a version of Emily Ratajkowski in Too Much, I think the first time she sees their photos, she's imagining her pregnant or is it Margaret Qualley pregnant?

Speaker 1:
[113:04] I don't remember.

Speaker 2:
[113:05] And she had hope that she would be the one to give Jack Antonoff a baby and she describes this moment in therapy where there is a session or multiple sessions of aversion therapy and people usually want to relive a trauma. She instead brings in this issue of People magazine about celebrity pregnancies.

Speaker 1:
[113:27] As her trigger in her trauma, which makes total sense. How could it not, especially if you've had a hysterectomy at what age?

Speaker 2:
[113:34] I think she was 28, 29?

Speaker 1:
[113:36] I mean, just beyond.

Speaker 2:
[113:38] But the book is incredibly dark and it's only in the last few chapters, the last few pages, does she begin to share the good times with Jack Antonoff. As I said, it's a lot of their origin and first date, and then it fast forwards to when things are bad. And it sort of fucks with my memory of like, I remember you guys smiling at award shows. Not that like you guys smiling at award shows is the totality of your relationship, but like, I think you guys were happy once in a while, and only in kind of the last part of the book does she share these very specific moments.

Speaker 1:
[114:13] Yeah, well, I get the sense that she does really love him as a person, but they grew apart and things change, and that's normal, and they weren't right for each other, but they were both sort of clinging on to it. As she describes in a way, like, you would think that we had like multiple children or something, that we were trying to stay together for the kids, like when, in fact, we both were completely financially independent young people that should have broken up a lot sooner than we did, but didn't just do to this sort of sense of duty to keep the relationship going.

Speaker 2:
[114:49] Even though it had been dead for a long time. I think another hint of the fatigue that Jack Antonoff and probably Jenny Connor felt to Lena in her medical issues is, I think, during the fire incident, she accidentally calls Jack because she can remember his number but not her parents' number. And he's on tour, and he just texts back like, I can't be with you right now, but my mom's available. Which gives you the impression that his mom stepped in a lot to keep her company during hospital visits.

Speaker 1:
[115:27] Oh, for sure.

Speaker 2:
[115:28] And that's not something you would say if it wasn't a frequent occurrence. Anything else to talk about? Do you want to talk about the lack of Taylor Swift in this book?

Speaker 1:
[115:35] Yeah, there's no Taylor Swift in the book, but there is a long dedication to Taylor Swift in the acknowledgment section. She says, Tay-Tay, you sing the songs I wrote the book to, the stories that pulled these stories out of me, the music that makes the whole world feel seen. And yet somehow miraculously, you also pick up every desperate call at every desperate hour. I love you so much and forever for the reasons everyone does and for reasons all my own. Give me one Taylor Swift tidbit. It's interesting that you're friends with one of the biggest pop stars in the world, who's also a close collaborator of your ex.

Speaker 2:
[116:14] I think there is a lot said in what is unsaid in this woman who professionally confesses everything about her life. Yeah, because clearly Jack Antonoff was working on Taylor Swift records while they're together for sure.

Speaker 1:
[116:27] And she formed her friendship with Taylor then. Look again, this book is not about the fun aspects of being famous.

Speaker 2:
[116:35] It's not, which you really get that sense given the people that she dedicates the book to for Jean Seberg, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield, Amy Winehouse, Liam Payne, Janis Joplin, Chris Farley, Elizabeth Wurzel, who I believe is still alive.

Speaker 1:
[116:52] No, she's not.

Speaker 2:
[116:53] What?

Speaker 1:
[116:54] She died during the pandemic.

Speaker 2:
[116:56] Oh my God. Okay, well, then that makes a lot more sense.

Speaker 1:
[116:59] Yeah, RIP, Queen. I love that Chris Farley was thrown in there.

Speaker 2:
[117:03] Brittany Murphy, Lisa Left Eye Lopez. I won't read everyone, but it ranges those that, as she says, anyone else who is too fame sick to be cured. These are mostly people that died of drug overdoses.

Speaker 1:
[117:18] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[117:18] Or people who had fallen out of Hollywood favor and killed themselves like Dana Plato.

Speaker 1:
[117:23] Yeah, or people like Gia who died of AIDS, but as a result of drugs.

Speaker 2:
[117:28] You know what? That really should have set the tone for what book we were about to read. I don't know why I expected more fun anecdotes from the set of Girls.

Speaker 1:
[117:35] It did set the tone. Although I will say she is a very funny writer, as we know. There are funny bits and pieces in this book, but it is not a light book.

Speaker 2:
[117:45] Even though we tore through it.

Speaker 1:
[117:47] Well, it is easy to tear through it because you are like, oh, I am getting tired. I should stop reading this book. And then I shot the cover of Vogue and you are like, well, I am back. I can't stop now.

Speaker 2:
[117:58] Well, the reason this book took so long to come out, as I referenced earlier, is because in this therapy session with Jenny Connor, Jenny Connor begs her not to immediately write about the downfall of their friendship.

Speaker 1:
[118:11] And I think that is wise because honestly, now that I have read this book, I am like, maybe too much was a little too soon.

Speaker 2:
[118:18] I've seen a lot of online talk about people that wanted an explanation about too much, and which has led me to believe, did people not like that show?

Speaker 1:
[118:30] A lot of people didn't like that show, but I don't think it was panned. I mean, it didn't get renewed, so.

Speaker 2:
[118:36] You bring up a good point. I think, was it the New York Times interview or a different interview she did? She was talking about her husband's reaction to too much that in The Guardian, it got one star and he threw up. And suddenly, like, she became the person that everyone else around her was where she was like, pick it up. It's fine. You know, no pain, no gain. Like, she became a coach to him of like, it's going to be OK.

Speaker 1:
[119:01] Well, I think she just didn't want to write about this relationship, which is fair, and I'm sure she will in the next book.

Speaker 2:
[119:08] Oh, yeah. I mean, now that she doesn't have this Jenny Conner time limit, like, who knows? In 18 months, we could get the next memoir about her life, about making sharp stick. And if we'll ever get the answer of, was that character really autistic? And you just clawed it back because people told you, don't do that, without materially changing that protagonist. So the fact that she is not said to be autistic makes it even weirder.

Speaker 1:
[119:32] Well, I think that as with most like early portrayals of homosexuality, most cinematic depictions of autism, it's not stated that these characters are autistic. That just fits in with a longstanding Hollywood tradition. Anyway, I'm sure we will hear about this in a book ten plus years from now.

Speaker 2:
[119:53] Well, we will be back, I'm sure, to talk about Lena Dunham's next film, which is kind of her version of that Anne Hathaway Harry Styles film with Natalie Portman, who is a therapist, maybe a sex therapist. I can't wait for that. All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed this. This may be our longest VIP episode. I enjoyed it. I had a great time. And we are always here to breathlessly cover whatever Lena Dunham does clearly. For better or for worse. This is our toxic trait. All right, guys, we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.