#96: Lena Dunham

"Pain, in its purest form, is a signal. We are all too used to pushing it down."

Today’s guest is the one and only Lena Dunham, the writer, actress, and director perhaps best known for HBO’s Girls (2012-2017). Critics-a-many have called her “the voice of her generation”; more recently, friend of the letter, Courtney, dubbed her the “patron saint of Substack.” Her second memoir, Famesick, is out now.

#96: Lena Dunham
Taurus/Gemini/Cancer
North London + Northwest Connecticut

What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?

Growing up in the height of the diet-obsessed 90s and early 2000s — Snackwells cookie commercials on TV, my mother and her friends all drinking a confounding daily powder called Ultraclear, which tasted like a vanilla-infused crayon, speedwalking for their lives — I didn’t realize it, but I thought that being healthy meant being thin. I started eating Lean Cuisine with my grandmother when I was eight, and I wanted to have twig-like arms swimming in my thermal, delicate ankles sticking out of my Pumas. Soon, jeans got tighter and tank tops got smaller and puberty came and my body started to change, which coincided with a spike in profound, fight-or-flight anxiety and painful periods (which, I was told, were just a fact of female life, like deciding whether or not to get an underage belly button ring from the place that also made fake IDs, or having a man expose himself to you on the subway).

Looking back, I can put together the emergence of my chronic health conditions like a detective going into a fugue state of newspaper clippings and red string. But at the time, it felt like everyone else was moving around in a body that made sense, could do its job, and mine was always glitching.