Lena Dunham started working on her upcoming memoir while beginning a new chapter of her life.
“When I first began this book, I’d been out of rehab for 30 days. I was in the cloud of delirium that comes with new sobriety — the world was suddenly so LOUD, and I thought that meant I knew what I was hearing,” Dunham, 39, captioned an Instagram post on Thursday, September 4, when announcing the book. “If you’d told me then that the writing process would take me through the next seven years, I probably would have ripped up my contract and chucked my laptop in the tub.”
The memoir, titled Famesick, is set to be released in April 2026 and details how Dunham’s life “changed profoundly and permanently” in the 10-year period between 2010 through 2020, which she said included “years of impossible magic and years I thought I wouldn’t survive.”
Dunham also plans to discuss “illness and addiction and heartbreak” along with “the lessons I no longer feel ashamed of having had to learn” in the memoir. (Dunham entered a treatment facility in 2018 and has been sober ever since.)
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“Throughout my twenties, writing was all pure immediacy. I’d have an experience, put some version of it through the filter of fantasy, and it would be playing on television six months later,” Dunham’s caption continued. “Writing was how I processed as it was happening. I hadn’t lived enough life to deal with it in retrospect. I didn’t understand the value of time — to heal us, to make sense of where we’ve been, to actually change the patterns we keep replaying in our work and our art.”
She noted that the book is “also about illness as teacher, body as tattletale, our societal relationship to women on the edge.”
“It’s about me — but whenever I write about me, I hope, deeply, that it’s also about you,” Dunham added. (Her first memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, was published in 2014.)
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The actress explained that Famesick offered her a gift while she was writing it over a seven-year period: “It was always there.”
“No matter what changed — my location, my body, my mind — there was a constant: this place I could go to try and make sense of the story,” she added, admitting to feeling “something like grief” when a release date had finally been set.
Famesick is set to hit shelves on April 14, 2026.