Lena Dunham is opening up about the good, the bad, and the ugly while working on Girls in her latest memoir, Famesick. Dunham’s tell-all book details the turbulent relationships she developed with some of her co-stars, as well as her co-writers on the television show, which aired from 2012-2017.
One of the most complex dynamics Dunham experienced while working on the series was with her co-writer/showrunner, Jenni Konner.
According to Dunham in her memoir, she was struggling with disordered eating while filming the pilot of Girls, and was told by Konner that she looked too “thin” and “pretty” for the leading role as Hannah Horvath. Konner’s thought-process was that Girls would be labeled just another Sex and the City if Dunham was too conventionally attractive, so in order to make their series stand out, she needed to gain weight.
“I think the issue is you’re too thin,” Dunham recalls Konner saying, as detailed in her book. “And it’s not funny if you’re too thin. It’s just Sex and the City all over again.” She continued, adding that Konner said, “It’s not that hard. Just put food in your mouth.” This came after Dunham emphasized how difficult it was for her to eat due to a mixture of anxiety and newfound pressures of the entertainment industry, which pushed her to look a certain way.
“It took me years, until I was in my late 30s, working with women in their early 20s, to think about how I’d approach someone who was showing signs of disordered eating," the 40-year-old Girls alum writes. “It would never occur to me to do anything but ask if I could help. Express my concerns about their health, their inner life, which resources they had and needed… The discussion of what we were getting on camera would be the least of it.”
