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Whenever I think of “Girls,” the hit HBO series that ran from 2012 to 2017, I think of a scene in which Lena Dunham’s character Hannah furiously rides her bicycle down a country lane in the North Fork of Long Island wearing nothing but a green string bikini, her chubby body bouncing and jiggling as she pedals along.

In fact, she spent most of that 2014 episode in her string bikini, completely un-self-conscious, at a moment when extreme thinness and thigh gaps were all the rage.

I thought then — and still do — that it was one of the bravest things I’d ever seen on TV, even braver than the jackhammer sex she frequently had with her TV boyfriend, played by the inscrutable Adam Driver.

As has always been the case for Dunham — really, for anyone who does not conform to the cultural beauty ideal and has the gall to be exceptionally talented to boot — the internet went to work. She’d often been flayed by haters, but never developed skin thick enough to survive and flourish in the public eye.

After the triumphant first season of “Girls,” Dunham writes in “Famesick,” her perfectly titled new memoir, “I scanned my own name on Twitter, but all that stood out were pronouncements about my bad body, irritating voice, clearly horrific politics, inability to walk in heels, poor sense of style, and the fact that anyone — literally anyone — was more deserving of all this than I was.”

This, she describes, as “the ‘why her?’ of it all.”

As Dunham’s fame grows, everything gets complicated; old friends withdraw, requests for favors pile up, the stress is making her sicker and sicker, she has trouble saying no, and her artist parents struggle with the fact that their child has become a commodity whose infirmities are a huge if understandable problem for HBO, because at least 200 people depend on the show going on. “If you make yourself out to be a bottomless resource,” she writes, “people will frack.”

After she withdraws from a project with the famously abusive producer Scott Rudin because she is overwhelmed with Season 2 of “Girls,” his emails to her are so vicious that she dissociates.

“‘Don’t you get it,’” Dunham’s mother tells her. “‘He sends 70 of these a day. He won’t remember next week!’ But I would, I told her. I would.”

Putting a recent college graduate, even one as gifted as Dunham, in charge of a television series, a notoriously high-intensity undertaking, was a huge bet for HBO. The network paired her with an experienced producer, Jenni Konner, with whom she bonded like a baby duckling.

For a woman who discloses practically everything about herself — the good, the bad, the anal — Dunham is curiously reticent about an event she describes as “the one thing in my career, in my life, about which I felt — feel, still — genuine shame.” On Nov. 17, 2017, she writes, while she was in a post-hysterectomy drug haze, she and Konner did what she will only describe as “the big bad thing.”

(A Google search reveals that Dunham and Konner put out a deeply misguided statement defending Murray Miller, a “Girls” writer-producer who was........

© Los Angeles Times