Controversial creator and star of Girls, Lena Dunham, 39, admitted to cheating on her Grammy-winning boyfriend, Jack Antonoff, in her salacious new memoir, Famesick.
“I had never stopped flirting—I mean, I wasn’t dead yet—but I had observed careful boundaries, never taking it far enough that I could be declared out of bounds," Dunham, 39, begins in her memoir.
Throughout their relationship, the actress suffered from chronic illnesses related to an endometriosis diagnosis, which she attributes to straining the relationship.
After returning home from a bone density test, Dunham recalls seeing Antonoff too closely holding an unnamed pop star collaborator in his lap.
The young musician was “sprawled across our sectional couch, weeping into Jack’s lap as he told her that ‘your teens are for experimenting’ in a tone so comforting, it almost brought tears to my eyes,” she wrote. “It had been so long since he’d spoken to me with that kind of expansive generosity.”
Though Dunham skirted questions about the pop star’s identity in her book and in interviews, her identity has long been speculated to be the New Zealand-born Lorde. Antonoff co-wrote and co-produced her Grammy-nominated 2017 album, Melodrama, which was released the same year the couple split. Antonoff and Lorde denied any rumors of a relationship.
“‘You’re just mad because she doesn’t want to be your friend,’” Dunham wrote of Antonoff’s response. “And he was right.”
After her 2017 hysterectomy “changed the game” in her relationship with Antonoff, Dunham reached out to her middle school ex-boyfriend, Nick, asking him to meet her nearby.
“I got an answer back in less than a minute: ‘I’m already running,’” she wrote.
The Golden Globe winner described the multi-day affair in detail, including asking him to do “all of the work” and “washing each other’s hair at the same time,” even revealing that she believed the affair to be beneficial to her and Antonoff’s relationship.
“I had fixed myself, proved I could be the freaky sexy lively young woman he fell in love with. I had exorcised the demon. In a way, I had f---ed Nick for both our sakes, to make our house a home again,” she wrote. “It would all be better now.”
The next morning, Dunham could no longer suppress her unhappiness and broached the topic of breaking up with Antonoff.
“‘No matter what happens,’ I said, ‘you will always be my first great love.’ ‘And you’ll be mine,’ he wept,” she continued.
The next Monday, the now-ex-couple attended a pre-scheduled therapy appointment to “discuss what came next.”
Later that night, Antonoff asked her how she felt over text.
“It was confusing to explain. On the one hand, my heart was so heavy, I thought it might sink down and replace my uterus,” she started. “On the other hand, Nick was in my makeshift bedroom, likely with his head between my legs while I sent the message: ‘pretty strange.’”
Dunham’s memoir, Famesick, was released on April 14.
