Lena Dunham stopped by the Today show to discuss her new memoir with co-hosts Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones.
Dunham’s Famesick, which chronicles her career as creator of the hit television series Girls, along with her relationships and health struggles, was published Tuesday by Random House. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book as “a moving and candid look at an overexposed and misunderstood life.”
Hager asked Dunham about the title of her memoir, noting that Dunham writes that fame and illness are sometimes connected.
“That was the title that came to me as I began writing, and what I was thinking about was the idea that being famous and being sick are two conditions that we’re taught not to talk about,” Dunham said. “They’re two different kinds of isolation that other people don’t necessarily want to hear you complain about for different reasons.”
Dunham’s book has made headlines for her claims that actor Adam Driver was verbally and physically aggressive on the set of Girls. Hager asked her, “How does that sit with you now?”
“I didn’t want to put anything in the book that I felt wouldn’t be useful potentially to a reader who maybe wasn’t even in show business or connected to it,” Dunham said. “I wrote about a dynamic that a lot of young women could understand from the workplace, and the complicated thing is that I spent eight and a half years writing this book, so I’m super intentional with every word that I put on the page. And then you come on live TV with cool, glamorous girls like you, and are asked to rehash it in a way, and I really want people to read it in context.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
