In this frank reflection on illness, fame, sex, and everything in between, the mind behind the hit series Girls asks whether fulfilling her creative ambitions has been worth the pain.
This is an earnest, exposing book ... Its quick hits of wit...are like sniffs from an oxygen mask ... It has a whiff of the old Hollywood tell-all, indie edition, with trash bags for curtains in an Eagle Rock group house ... It’s hard not to see this book as an acidulous regurgitation of all that Hollywood forced Dunham to eat.
An ideal celebrity memoir with the added bonus of being written by someone who can actually write. Both the memoir and Dunham remain lightly enamored with celebrity, name-dropping just enough ... An attestation to the value of slowing down, going home, and shutting the fuck up so you have something to say again ... Doesn’t have heroes or villains, just several people trying their best and still failing.
Dunham has actually learned from her garrulous and unfiltered excesses—she’s got stories to tell in Famesick that blow the roof off, but she’s wielding them with precision this time around ... The revelations in Famesick feel much more loaded, as though Dunham is settling scores, but also justifying herself ... What I longed for more of, in Famesick, was what the writer Leslie Jamison has called 'the infinitude of any given life as a site of reckoning and truth.' The paradox of Famesick seems to be that the more famous you become, the less you have to defend turning yourself into a subject. And so largely missing from the book is a quality I’ve always loved about Dunham’s work...her impulse to make broader meaning out of her experiences ... I’m not quite sure what the meaning of Famesick is, beyond getting certain things on the historical record. It is, in parts, riveting. Dunham is still among our funniest living writers ... It feels unfair to call a memoir self-indulgent, but this one can be, at least for an artist with such talent.
