“A lot of the stuff that happened last year couldn’t have happened if I was happy in my life, right? It was almost like I was throwing a match, burning it down”
Dunham in New York on November 2. Photo: Gillian Laub One morning, about three weeks after we’d first met, Lena Dunham sent me ten text messages in a row. She was in the hospital, recovering from a procedure to remove her right ovary, “which was encased in scar tissue & fibrosis, attached to my bowel and pressing on nerves that made it kinda hard to walk/pee/vamp,” as she’d later explain on Instagram.
She sent texts to supplement conversations we’d already had in person, texts that answered questions she thought I’d probably ask in the next interview. She expressed disappointment with negative reviews of Camping, the HBO show she co-wrote with her Girls partner, Jenni Konner, and, days later, refused to be bummed by bad Camping reviews. She Skyped into the new writers’ room for a show she’s developing for HBO about a grifter heiress, and sent me a screenshot of the first session.
“I’d have to say, I do feel pretty good here,” she says, offering me three chilled-beverage options from the fridge one September afternoon. Right now, there are purple snakeskin poufs, leopard-print rugs, and bright-green walls. There’s a tiny pink room, called the “Lady Room,” filled with memorabilia: a framed teen glamour shot of a pubescent Dunham in a Nicole Miller blazer, lip-printed pottery she made at Color Me Mine and wanted to sell on Etsy, Eloise posters.
“You can say a lot of shit about me, but I am a very committed pet owner,” Dunham says. “Ask anybody who works with me on a pet level.” When Dunham quickly got very famous and powerful — on-the-cover-of-Vogue famous, star-maker-in-her-own-right powerful — that dynamic replicated itself on a larger scale. Cannot stand that main girl. In a way, she dared it all to happen, the insane expectations and attention.
Dunham lists the reasons for the hate — with her explanations for why she is the way she is — as if she were reciting a poem imprinted on her brain in grade school: She grew up privileged in New York, which led to what people perceive as a sense of entitlement. Her parents are Soho art-scene royalty, and she was raised around “very specific, liberal provocateurs,” who taught her she could say things that “might now warrant a trigger warning,” which informs her sense of humor.
Mostly, right now, she’s trying to figure out who post-Girls Dunham is and how, maybe, she can distance herself from the meta-version of Lena Dunham that has overshadowed the work in recent years. But as she texts me increasingly intimate details that she knows I’ll put in this article, as if she were trying to be the director of her own candid, sympathy-generating magazine story, I begin to wonder if Lena Dunham, the performance artist daring us to hate her, is the work.
That November, despite pushback from her doctors — most OB/GYNs do not recommend this as treatment for endometriosis — she had an elective total hysterectomy at 31. She didn’t have time to freeze her eggs. “I was in too much pain to wait,” she explains. “It’s really amazing, in points of extreme distress, how things you thought were nonnegotiable start to become negotiable,” Dunham says. “I thought I would do anything to have a kid naturally. Turned out that wasn’t true.
“Some people reached out and were quietly like, ‘It’s great that you defend him,’ ” Dunham says, but mostly people in her life came to her in disbelief. Apatow warned her, “I don’t think this is what you meant to do. That’s not how, in this day and age especially — this isn’t how we talk about women.”
Dunham starts squeezing blackheads on Irma the hairless cat’s chin. “I texted Amy Schumer the other day, and she was like, ‘How are you doing,’ and I was like, ‘You know, fourth operation in a year and losing my fertility and my boyfriend and all this stuff with Aurora,’ and I was like, ‘It’s like, we all go through it,’ and she wrote, ‘Not really.’ ”
Dunham enters the room in black-and-white pajamas, glowing pink post-shower. She’s really good at pajamas, since she spends so much time in them these days. These are ASOS, she says; since the hysterectomy, Dunham has gained 24 pounds, she tells me, and she is invested in finding and promoting size-inclusive brands.
“Mama, can I have this chicken leg?” Dunham says, rising to serve herself more food. She stands picking at the salad surrounding the chicken. The study is filled with the Dunham siblings’ framed art from childhood. Dunham’s younger sibling, Grace, now Cyrus, is a 26-year-old trans writer who lives in Los Angeles and starred in Tiny Furniture. “They have a book coming out next year,” Dunham says and jokes, kind of, that everyone is about to find out who the real talent of the family is. In her 2014 memoir, Dunham describes having come out to her mother for her sibling, who wasn’t quite ready to share.
She also didn’t like what drugs were doing to her relationships. “I was on pain meds for a couple of days after I got out of the hospital,” she tells me, “and my dad was like, ‘You have a very specific personality on medication. It’s a mix of aggression and regression.’ He was like, ‘You’re not nice.’ I was like, ‘Sorry.’ ”
“Our relationship probably lasted longer than it should have,” Dunham says. “He’s a very loyal person, so he was not going to bail when the going got tough. He literally held my hand while I got an enema on New Year’s Eve while his family celebrated. But when you’re sick, so much energy goes into making sure the other person is well that you’re not even noticing maybe our schedules aren’t compatible. Maybe we want different things out of our lives.
For several months, Dunham has been very casually seeing an artist she met through mutual friends. She remembers, right after the hysterectomy, crying to Jemima Kirke, “Who’s gonna want to date me? I have PTSD and no uterus.” Kirke’s answer: “A soldier who hates condoms.” After many months of not being this way, sex is now pain free, and without having that fear or hope of getting pregnant, Dunham describes sex as more chill, “like an intimate high-five.
“Now she doesn’t have to absorb whatever bullshit I tweet that day,” Dunham says. “Whatever I do doesn’t have to now be hers, which, I’m sure I’d imagine if I were her, would be a relief.”
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