Often, when a famous person comes out with a memoir, readers wonder if it will address the elephant in the room, whatever that might be for the celebrity in question. Normally this would be about something at least a little bit salacious. In the case of Lena Dunham, it is, instead: how did she pay for her 2010 indie film Tiny Furniture?

The precise funding of one low-budget movie from decades ago might not seem a compelling enough question to inspire widespread curiosity. It makes sense, however, in context: Exactly privileged Lena Dunham was dominated cultural discourse for much of the 2010s. How privileged, but also how aware of her privilege. Who was this young woman, who appeared seemingly out of nowhere, skipping whichever dues-paying steps to get her very own TV show?

Her 2012-2017 television show Girls was marketed as a grittier Sex and the City and therefore called out for being what it was: a show with a different sensibility, but about similar women, just 10-15 years younger. The core cast of Girls was otherwise made up of actresses with well-known parents, but Dunham herself is the child of artists, working artists making a living that way, which is unusual, but ones who are not household names. This correction swiftly morphed into an overcorrection, wherein this was the richest and whitest and most nepotistic television show ever made. Dunham herself became this magnet not only for legitimate complaints about a lack of racial or socioeconomic diversity in entertainment, but also for resentment from those demographically interchangeable with or even more privileged than she was, but who mysteriously had not been given their own HBO shows.

Dunham’s oeuvre is impressive and she’s a talented writer. But the why-not-me she sparked is itself the key to her cultural significance. Without that background, it might seem bizarre that Dunham chose to begin Famesick, her new memoir, and use as its pre-publication New Yorker excerpt, not any number of the sex-and-famous-people stories of which Famesick has plenty, but rather a detailed accounting of how Tiny Furniture came to happen. But she does, complete with minutiae about the amount she got from her mother ($20,000 USD, and fundraised at that), the space she had access to (her childhood home). She writes about unglamorous office and restaurant jobs she held before making it big, which happened when she was in her early 20s, at roughly the same age her peers were, if they were lucky, achieving financial independence. Before she was a famous person, she was an undergrad.  

Dunham explains that her parents came from the art world, not Hollywood, but well-networked enough that one phone call from her mother could get her an agent, another, a kitted-out place to stay in Los Angeles. As she presents it, these were the only two phone calls of the kind. She presents the second writing dryly, in parentheses, “I guess I really am a nepo baby.” That this is a sarcastic reference to accusations against her and not an admission becomes all the more obvious further into the book, when she discusses how uncomfortable her fame has made her parents.

Most people don’t grow up in artistic circles in major cities. But plenty do, and exceedingly few of them go on to be on the cover of Vogue, attending the Met Gala, mentored by Nora Ephron, and thanking Taylor Swift in their book acknowledgements. Her parents didn’t give this to her. They didn’t have it to give!

There is on the one hand Lena Dunham the character, the construct, the hated entity, and on the other, an actual........

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