After creating one of the most iconic audiovisual works of the second decade of the two thousand, actress, screenwriter, and creator Lena Dunham (New York, 39 years old) continues to provide content for the most nostalgic. This Tuesday, April 14, 14 years after the premiere of the series Girls —with which Dunham emotionally exposed the millennial generation—, she has published her memoirs, titled Famesick. The book, on which she has worked for almost a decade, reveals aspects of the author’s life previously unknown. Many of them are related to what happened behind the scenes of Girls, such as her complicated relationship with Adam Driver, the co-star of the series, who she recounts once threw a chair against the wall. But it also tells other more intimate stories, such as her relationship with acclaimed music producer Jack Antonoff (New Jersey, 42 years old), with whom she had an intense relationship for almost six years that ended in late 2017.
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In this chapter of her love life, which has already been discussed and theorized about in the past —and which was revived in 2025 with the premiere of her other major series, Sin medida, due to supposed parallels—, the author has been more transparent than ever, admitting that she was unfaithful to Antonoff with a former high school love named Nick. As reported by the American magazine Entertainment Weekly, Antonoff’s “closeness” to a “teen pop star” had started to “seem a bit strange.” This could be a reference to New Zealand singer Lorde, whom the author does not mention, but who at that time was one of the music stars Antonoff was producing an album for —just as he has done with Taylor Swift or Lana del Rey— and with whom he was linked for years.
The plot twist revealed in Famesick rewrites what was previously known about the famous couple, even about that breakup scene, which seems to have become inevitable after the infidelity that has just been revealed. She herself described the moment they talked about their separation in May 2018, in an essay written for Vogue. At that time, Dunham recounted: “It was December, that kind of confusing weather where the bright sun makes the cold air feel even colder. We were sitting in the kitchen we had shared for almost four years, looking at each other in silence, acknowledging what neither of us wanted to say. That obsessive connection had turned into blind devotion, and the bandages were starting to fall off, revealing that we had evolved separately. That anger was neither sexy nor sustainable. That our hearts remained broken from trying so hard to fix it, but there was no longer any doubt about whether we could do it or not.”
In the following years, Dunham also publicly shared that the separation from Antonoff coincided with the emotional and physical rough patch she went through in early 2018. At 31, the actress had just undergone a hysterectomy, a removal of the uterus performed due to the endometriosis she suffered from, which caused her intense pain (she also spoke about it in Vogue). Shortly after, she was admitted to a rehabilitation center for her addiction to the anxiolytics she was taking after the surgery: “There was a moment when I didn’t want to live,” she said about this period in March 2020, when she spoke to Cosmopolitan magazine: “I realized I wasn’t just taking medication for physical pain, I was also taking medication for emotional pain,” she continued.
About this time, which coincided with her confessed infidelity, the actress, who saw herself “as a kind of half-wife,” revealed in the book: “I had never stopped flirting —I mean, I wasn’t dead yet—, but I had respected very strict boundaries, never going so far as to do anything inappropriate. If I had wanted to notice, maybe I would have seen that Jack didn’t respect them as literally as I did.” She also explains that at the end of 2017, after the hysterectomy and after “the rules of the game changed,” she wrote to Nick “without any hesitation,” telling him she had just undergone a major operation and needed someone to cheer her up: “Shall we meet on the bridge? Can you bring me a stuffed animal?” she told him. “I’m running,” was Nick’s response. “I let my lips slowly wander over his face until they reached his, and I remembered how Marissa’s mother, my high school friend, once told us that during an affair in the seventies, in which she cheated on her first husband with Marissa’s father, she insisted on wearing a red velvet hooded cape wherever she went,” she continues. She, for her part, wore “a sweater the size of a caravan, but was also ready to commit adultery.”
After an affair that lasted three days and coincided with a professional tour of Antonoff —“The third night, my parents left town and Nick stayed with me at his house, where he gave me oral sex while I watched the flames crackling in the electric fireplace,” she describes—, Dunham had to face her actions. After trying to justify herself thinking that her affair with Nick had been “for the good of both of us, so that our house would be a home again,” she ended up starting a difficult conversation in which both ended up crying, with their foreheads touching: “Whatever happens, I told him, you will always be my first great love.” “And you will be mine,” he replied through tears.”
In a recent interview with The New York Times on the occasion of the release of her memoirs, the creator of Girls explained: “It’s a privilege that all the breakup songs you love were written by your ex. I feel lucky. It was very hard for me to mature. That was the first one. I thought you fell in love with someone and then you were together forever. That ending was very intense for me. I looked around and thought: ‘Is everyone so affected by their breakup?’” Since September 2021, Dunham has been married to British musician (son of a Peruvian mother and English father) Luis Felber. In August 2023, Jack Antonoff did the same with actress Margaret Qualley, with whom he was publicly seen for the first time in 2021.
