There’s an apocryphal story concerning the original pitch for _Girls:_ Supposedly, Lena Dunham wrote it on the back of a cocktail napkin. It was all vibes but no plot or fleshed-out characters, and situated the show concept somewhere between _Gossip Girl_ and _Sex and the City_. It was about the sort of girls Dunham—then 23 years old and making a web series in SoHo—knew and was friends with. The cocktail-napkin pitch has become a metonym for her career more broadly—evidence of either her breezy genius or the unacknowledged privilege that underpins it all.
Except, Dunham writes in her new memoir _Famesick,_ that story is bullshit _._ “I’d actually written it on my brother’s laptop, borrowed for the trip.”
Dunham wants you to know that she understands her name ceased to be a precise identifier for her individual person long ago. She accepts that a life and legacy defined by those stories is the price she’s paid for fame. She gets it, she really does. But she wants you to know her side, too. _Famesick_ is a granular, exhausting, 15-year-long account of her side, from her early days as an indie filmmaker in New York, her stay in rehab for a Klonopin addiction, to her new life in London with her husband, musician Luis Felber.