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Excellent
Famesick: A Memoir
Famesick: A Memoir, Lena Dunham's account of the decade behind Girls, is less a celebrity tell-all than a rigorous piece of narrative nonfiction about what chronic illness and ambition can cost a body. She traces her rise to fame in three sharp acts, and the writing is sharpest exactly where the stakes are highest.
From the review
Lena Dunham's argument in Famesick is a blunt one: for the better part of a decade, she couldn't tell the difference between fighting for work she loved and being owned by it, and neither could the people standing closest to her. She lays the case out in three acts, mirroring the structural instinct that turned a single pitch into Girls when she was twenty-four, only now the acts track a body instead of a season. The middle act is where the memoir does its most exacting work. Dunham writes the years between the Girls pilot and its finale as a spiral: sewn into a corset she can barely sit down in for the Met Gala, summoned to the White House and the Golden Globes, vomiting in a bathroom before she's due to shake Oprah's hand. She doesn't dramatize any of it for sympathy so much as inventory it, scene by scene, until the accumulation makes its own case: a body in crisis doesn't pause for a career, and a career built on visibility doesn't pause for a body. The prescriptions that follow, and the dependence that grows out of them, get the same clear-eyed treatment, named and dated rather than romanticized.
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