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Has writer and filmmaker Lena Dunham made mistakes over the course of her life and career? Sure\u2014and she gets into plenty of them in new memoir, Famesick<\/em><\/a> (out today from Random House), as she examines the realities of living with two chronic and often misunderstood conditions: illness and fame.<\/p>\n You should absolutely read the memoir for yourself, but as a little amuse-bouche, here are the nine biggest things I took away from Dunham\u2019s new book.<\/p>\n Not only did Dunham and Gerwig run in the same downtown New York circles as the Safdie brothers\u2019 Red Bucket Collective<\/a> in their early filmmaking days, but Dunham also used to run lines with the future Barbie<\/em> director. But the connection doesn\u2019t stop there: Dunham recalls in her book that the last scene of Gerwig and Noah Baumbach\u2019s film Frances Ha<\/em> was shot in a Brooklyn Heights apartment that Dunham ended up living in. \u201c\u2026There\u2019s a brief but lovely moment where she places her things on my little white desk and looks out the window at the very gardens that made me feel I had to live there,\u201d Dunham writes. Thus, it\u2019s confirmed: Frances Halliday and Hannah Horvath would have absolutely loved (or hated?) each other had they been undergrads or interns at the same time!<\/p>\n Questions have long circulated about the circumstances under which Dunham and her Girls<\/em> collaborator Konner dissolved their friendship and multiple creative projects. In Famesick<\/em>, Dunham writes about the experience with a measure of grace that undergirds a clearly not-entirely-processed amount of pain, recalling Konner\u2019s lack of sympathy toward Dunham\u2019s struggles with disordered eating and body image while filming Girls<\/em>, her later inability to empathize with Dunham\u2019s experience of chronic illness, and a tough dynamic around what both women were paid at one point. Female best friendships\u2014they can be complicated!<\/p>\n Much has been written lately about Driver\u2019s erratic behavior on the set of Girls,<\/em> with multiple outlets picking up Dunham\u2019s anecdote about Driver throwing a chair in her direction<\/a> while shooting a scene. Midway through Famesick<\/em>, Dunham recalls hoping for a different kind of ending with Driver than the one she got as Girls<\/em> wrapped, writing: \u201cHe got out of the van. I stayed, motionless, wondering if this moment, this reckoning, meant we had a different kind of future ahead of us. Who knows\u2014maybe I\u2019d write him new parts. We would write new stories. We would laugh at the way things had been, and smile at the way they were now. But I never heard from him again.\u201d Woof.<\/p>\n None other than Nora Ephron, who acts as a sort of Glinda the Good Witch in Dunham\u2019s Hollywood-ascent narrative, gives Dunham permission to move on when Rudin excoriates her via email for putting aside a project she\u2019d been working on for him on spec. Ephron\u2019s incredible line on the subject? \u201cHoney, if Scott was a straight man, we\u2019d all have fucked him and then wondered why we\u2019d done it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\nGreta Gerwig\u2019s Frances Ha and Dunham\u2019s Hannah Horvath spiritually inhabit the same multiverse<\/h2>\n
Dunham\u2019s personal and professional breakup with Jenni Konner was one of the most fraught ones in her life<\/h2>\n
The toxic relationship between Hannah and Adam on Girls<\/em> was mirrored by Dunham\u2019s real-life dynamic with Adam Driver<\/h2>\n
Scott Rudin is exactly as bad as reported<\/a><\/h2>\n