During the final season of Lena Dunham’s acclaimed comedy drama series, Girls, the character she plays, Hannah Horvath, says her ambition as a writer is to make people laugh about painful things. In real life, this is exactly what Dunham has achieved with her second memoir, Famesick which opens with a prime example.

“It’s very hard to remember a time – aside from brief flashes of adrenaline on a set or a date or at a fashion party where people are inadvertently dressed like kids in a school play about Greek gods – when being in my body didn’t feel like towing a wrecked car across town at midnight,” she writes.

A searingly funny, bare-hearted exploration of the cost of success, Dunham’s book charts her meteoric rise as a young screenwriter, director and actor with brutal honesty.

Review: Famesick by Lena Dunham (4th Estate)

Smart, sassy and highly entertaining, Famesick is ultimately a painfully astute analysis of the ways a dream job can morph into a perilous nightmare. Particularly for someone who is neurodivergent, barely out of college, emotionally dependent on their parents and suffering from a rare, undiagnosed chronic disease.

Throughout the first decade of her glittering career, Dunham balanced precariously between adulation and critical attacks. Her intelligent, sharply observed humour defined her public and professional image, but her personal boundaries were all too permeable. The demands of her job bled into her life with devastating consequences for her body.

Careering from one disastrous man to another, leaning hard on colleagues and friends, Dunham looked to others for the psychological stability she hadn’t yet developed. Her heart dangerously exposed on her sleeve, she poured the events of her life into screenplays, medicated her stress and crashed her way through stardom, unprotected by the industry that relied on her.

The price of Dunham’s success was exorbitant, involving much more than long hours and hard work. Yet while parts of her story are harrowingly visceral, she refuses self-pity and keeps away from the confessional traps of trauma porn.

There is nothing gratuitous or exploitative in these pages and Dunham refrains from blaming others for her chaos. Instead, she frames her drug addiction, unhealthy relationship patterns and debilitating chronic health issues as the cost of her own ambition, with a central question in mind. Was it worth it?

A cursed, well-connected fairy tale

Dunham’s narrative begins like a modern-day fairy tale with the story of her name, chosen by her mother “because it sounded like the name of someone who could be a movie star or a lawyer with an equal measure of........

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