For the past month, I have been walking around Manhattan with Liza Minnelli’s voice in my ear. It is maybe the best way to experience a New York in spring, especially this spring, which started with a hot flash, made every tree and flowering bush instantly horny, and drenched everything with a shower of pollen so thick, it made me feel faint every morning. 

Minnelli’s new memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, is just as big and bawdy and bodacious. To hear Minnelli trill “relaaapsssiing” just as you are about to slip on a sodden pile of dogwood-tree seed in a trash-logged gutter near Columbus Circle is truly a New York experience. This book, like the old SNL skit, has everything. Within the first few pages, Minnelli mentions, “I didn’t overthink the sexual orientation of someone I married. It just wasn’t a big deal.” She explains that her childhood best friends were Mia Farrow, Candice Bergen, and Cheryl Crane, Lana Turner’s daughter. One of Minnelli’s formative memories is hearing the screams from Lana Turner’s house the night her friend Cheryl killed Turner’s boyfriend because he had been abusing her. She remembers the other two, future superstars in their own rights, as a girl who was shunned by everyone except Judy Garland and Vincent Minnelli because she had polio (Mia Farrow) and a girl locked in a jealous feud with her father’s ventriloquist dummy, the hated source of her parents’ wealth (Candice Bergen). Following this is an anecdote about a four-year-old Liza Minnelli singing the Cole Porter standard about an elderly sex worker, “Love for Sale,” to Cole Porter himself at the insistence of her father, Vincent Minnelli, in a costume he had designed.

All of this would be worth hundreds of pages of analysis itself, and it’s before we even get to Liza’s relationship with her mother, Judy Garland, who expects a preteen Liza to care for her while seeing her as a talented rival. Minnelli’s recounting of her and her mother’s famous concert together at the London Palladium in 1964 is full of psychological intrigue, something a director like Todd Haynes could make a meal of. 

Minnelli’s star persona has always been a mix of canny and naive, with a throughline of deep earnestness. Minnelli has lived a life that is inarguably glamorous, inarguably cool. (She mentions offhand that she was having an affair with Mikhail Baryshnikov while dating Martin Scorsese while still married to her husband Jack Hanely Jr., son of the Tin Man in her mother’s greatest movie, The Wizard of Oz.) But she is a star from another time, a reminder that if you fear appearing cringe, you will never reach artistic greatness. 

I suppose I should start this review with a full disclosure—that I worked for Lena Dunham and her production partner during the final, high-flying years of Girls, Jenni Konner, for the feminist newsletter the pair started, Lenny Letter. In her new memoir, Famesick, Dunham recounts Lenny Letter as a symptom of her strange and often cursed fame: an attempt to brand girlboss feminism, which she says was never actually her intention. “Once Trump was elected, I continued to fight as if it were a job I’d been assigned, as if I were some kind of general in a feminist military.… I often spoke in full paragraphs that employed the cadence of activism but, were someone to really attempt to investigate, amounted to a weak mewl of ‘justice for me.’”

The trials and tribulations of the many controversies—as well as the actual good work published there—are a mere blip in this engrossing memoir of Dunham’s relationship with fame. But I can say that the few times we met in person, she was unfailingly kind and encouraging. She was polite about my own misunderstandings about what actually happened in pitch meetings, and after each PR disaster that unfolded during the newsletter’s run, she would reach out in private to say she was available to talk over any misgivings I might have. I had just escaped a toxic work environment, was in another for my day job, and at that point had had two decades of work environments with poor boundaries, so I approached it all with a rigid sense of politeness that I don’t think did anyone any favors. Through it all, I understood that Dunham was a great writer; you don’t write sentences like those quoted above without being one. What that meant in terms of showing up as a person of the world is still an open question, one that many before her have not been able to resolve.

You can speculate a lot about Lena Dunham and her creative and personal motivations. A whole subindustry of publishing on the internet existed 10 years ago to do just that. But Dunham is first and foremost a writer; it is where her talents truly shine and the thing she has always made sure to be clear about as a public figure. So I think it is important to talk about what is actually on the page in this book.

 
What is on the page is someone who is both skilled at description and skilled at building a narrative. Unlike this season’s other talked-about memoirs—Belle Burden’s Strangers and Lindy West’s Adult Braces—Famesick isn’t plagued by clunky framing metaphors (Burden loves her ospreys) or the intentionally talky cadence of the Internet. Famesick is a pleasure to consume, its sentences seductive, its rhythms soothing. It leads to a fast read, but the sentences never feel empty. It is the pleasure of reading someone who also actually reads books, not someone who only reads posts or captions, which, in our newly crowned post-literate cultural landscape, feels like a blessing.

There are passages here that are piercing in their insight. Here is Dunham describing the well-known allure of an emotionally distant boyfriend: “I still thought that true love was performed with the one-sided devotion of a kicked dog. It was like one of those contests where you had to keep your hand on a truck until you were the last one standing and you won not just the car but the respect of the people—never mind that you had pissed yourself in the process.” There’s a long section midway through the book, as the fame and discourse around Girls becomes overwhelming, where Dunham stops to consider the effect on her parents, who are artists in their own right.

“We had always been able to talk about everything … but it became clear to me quickly that you couldn’t ask your parents how your fame made them feel—not directly,” she writes. “It involved too much shame because it forced them to admit how much of their own self-image rode on their own highly specific public identities.… To admit that my success disarmed them was to admit to the most vulgar and wanting parts of themselves … ‘the work’—their art—wasn’t them. They had made it, but its life really began once it left their hands. In my case, I was the product.”

The generosity in these sentences, the wistfulness, and the emotional pain evident in them are what make parts of Famesick work. But I found myself wishing, as I read, that that same incisiveness could run throughout the book. Oddly, from a writer who has been consistently ridiculed for TMI, I wanted to know more—not the gory details, of which there are plenty: Dunham mentions forcing herself to throw up prop Tasti D-Lite during the first Girls photo shoot; later, she writes in detail about (semi) adulterous sex a few days after a hysterectomy. These are all skillfully rendered scenes that would not be out of place in a roundup called Sad Girl Lit or whatever algorithmic friendly description a publisher might come up with. But for every short scene or shocking detail tossed offhand, there are places when I wanted to ask Dunham to stop, to slow down, to say more about the actual feeling. Because the feelings are sometimes lost.

Early on in the book, she mentions how hard she worked on the Girls pitch, how she poured herself into it, typing on her sibling’s borrowed laptop after a successful meeting at HBO. She mentions that when the show came out, she didn’t tell this story of the journey, instead claiming to have “written [the pitch] on a cocktail napkin.” Then we move on. But why did she obfuscate? Why did she feel the need to hide the effort? It actually would fit with one of the motifs of the work: Dunham’s enduring youth when all this was happening. An especially young artist would be prone to glamorize the myth of artistic nonchalance.

As the details of Dunham’s physical illnesses become more and more harrowing, with descriptions of lying on bathroom floors or curled in bed, more than a few times the litany of very real pain will stop suddenly with the sentence “I went to the Met Gala.” I actually find this fascinating: a woman who has been told it is a miracle she can walk, deciding to show up, repeatedly, in year after year of very bad pain, at the Met Gala. But the motivation for that—was it because she missed the fame? Was it a game played against herself or the world? Was it FOMO? Was it a devotion to beauty? Or a mix of all of the above?—is never explicitly explored, even when Jack Antonoff points out she does not have to go. It’s a piece of advice that is mentioned and then not returned to.

Perhaps the most glaring place where Dunham avoids going deeper is in her accounting of the case of Aurora Perrineau, an actress who, during the height of MeToo, accused a Girls writer of sexually assaulting her when she was 17. Dunham and Konner released a statement refuting the claims, losing goodwill from many of their champions. Dunham says she released the statement while fresh out of a hysterectomy. She attributes the statement to Konner pushing her to release something. Whether or not Konner would agree with this chain of events is beside the point. Dunham explains that in the immediate aftermath, she wanted to stop living, overcome with shame from the swift backlash. She is careful to note the friends who stood by her—Zadie and Hari and America and Riz—by only first name, of course. But outside of the immediate feelings of shame, the incident is not unpacked further. As Dunham writes in Famesick and has mentioned in other interviews, her experience of OCD has been an obsession with whether or not she is a good person. Early on in her description of her relationship with Antonoff, she describes the roles the two were eager to play of who could be a better person in a very complicated and strained relationship. As I read, aware that parts of Perrineau’s story were not Dunham’s to tell and of her own awareness of this, I wished that this tension—of seemingly having your worst fears about yourself echoed back to you as loudly as possible—had been more explicitly discussed in relation to the incident. Instead, we move on to the aftermath of decadent self-loathing.

So many readers will be looking to this book for some kind of mea culpa. Dunham was unfairly held accountable when Girls first came out for many things outside of her control. As one friend put it when I told him I was reading this memoir, “People think it’s wrong for someone to have that kind of access”—referring to Dunham’s meteoric rise to fame and cultural influence. “It’s more like it isn’t wrong for someone to have that; it’s just that all artists should have access to that.” To hold Dunham, a 23-year-old, solely responsible for the glaring whiteness of television or the rigged nature of entertainment coverage was never fair. But. But. Dunham, in this accounting, seems to absolve herself of so much responsibility through assuming the pose of the very young girl. Many times in the book, she writes, “I was so young,” and this is perhaps arguable and true for 23 and maybe 24, but when she writes it about an incident at 27, I wished she had asked herself a few more questions.

In this devotion to girlhood, Dunham echoes the other memoir of a millennial feminist, West’s Adult Braces. Both authors talk frankly about how mental-health struggles prevent them from being able to manage parts of daily life. But with that end to logistical responsibility also comes a reverence for the learned helplessness of a pseudo childhood. Mistakes are made because you were trying to be a very good girl, and if you were careless, it was the carelessness of youth, not true self-obsession. But can you still be a baby at 40? There’s actually great art to be made from that question: Grey Gardens, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (Dunham references her throughout the book), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and Girls itself. So it is frustrating that as the book progresses, Dunham seems to want to explore that tension less and less. Instead, it seems, she increasingly believes in her own prolonged girlhood in earnest.

As I was reading Famesick and its beautiful sentences, I couldn’t help but think of women authors of a few generations before—women like Fran Lebowitz and Toni Morrison, who have both spoken of their own desire to reach adulthood, to grow up, to have their own responsibilities. This was a point of pride, not because it promised unlimited freedom from consequences. Consequences were a given, but the fact that you go to choose them was the thing, where the art and a life well lived lay. I kept hoping to read the things that Dunham could stand 10 toes down on, the things she could actively claim to create. You do not make a decade-defining piece of art simply by chance. In Famesick, there are many truly awful descriptions of the physical torment Dunham suffered through while developing and filming the show. But even through all of that, her choices were hers. I wondered about a memoir where that focus remained throughout. I have no doubt she has the genius to write it.

In each edition of this newsletter, we ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week’s writer is Allie Rowbottom. She is the author of Aesthetica (Soho Press) and the critically acclaimed memoir Jell-O Girls (Little, Brown and Company). Her latest novel, Lovers XXX, will be out in June.

Allie Rowbottom: “Over the past five years or so, I’ve been lucky enough to spend some time with photographer Jamie Nelson at her iconic Pink Palace in the San Fernando Valley. The house is a home, a time capsule, a set, and an art piece all at once. Every room is themed and impeccably decorated in a sexy ’70s and ’80s aesthetic by Jamie herself. The experience of visiting is sort of like walking into a dream of the past. When it came time to write Lovers XXX and, more specifically, to imagine a home base for some of the characters, it was the Pink Palace I found myself picturing. I changed certain aspects on the page, of course. But the soul of the house and Jamie’s vision for it greatly influenced the soul of Lovers XXX.”