Lena Dunham recalls fainting at a Met Gala in her new memoir.
Read an excerpt from Famesick, the book everyone is talking about.
If I’m asked to remember the year after Girls ended, I can recall scenes, major characters, maybe some snippets of dialogue—but the plot evades me. It’s only now, almost a decade later, that I understand the thematic thrust— the things that had been painful but suppressed, uncomfortable but tightly managed, were suddenly overpowering me.
I know I fainted at the Met Gala after another surgery and had to find my way out of the museum through its bowels. A security guard met me at the emergency room to collect my jewelry. . . . Leaving the hospital a few days after the ball, my father carrying my gown in a massive trash bag, I saw my own face on the lobby television with a chyron below it, reading: “Lena Dunham Rushed to the Hospital From 2017 Met Gala.” My father looked at it, looked at me, and didn’t say anything except, “Well, that happened.”
I know I wasn’t really eating, except white rolls with thick slabs of butter from the bodega downstairs and bottles of green tea, which don’t count as food because they’re a beverage. I know I weighed what I weighed in seventh grade. I know that after the Met Gala collapse, I stopped leaving the house, just in time for the summer.
Posted May 13, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC · locked