Lena Dunham admits to cheating on Jack Antonoff in new memoir

Lena Dunham isn’t one to pull punches, and she has never been particularly shy about her personal foibles. So it’s no surprise that in her new memoir Famesick, the actress, writer, and director lays out an intimate play-by-play of her infidelity to Bleachers frontman Jack Antonoff, whom she dated from 2012 to 2018.

Dunham recalls that it was Antonoff’s “closeness” with an unnamed “teen pop star” that had first struck “an odd note” as their relationship began to deteriorate. Antonoff co-wrote and co-produced a then-19-year-old Lorde’s 2017 album Melodrama, but the two artists have continually denied any and all romantic rumors. Dunham claims Antonoff was often “locked in a room” with a musician “whose needs seemed as massive and complex as my own.” Around the same time, Dunham underwent a hysterectomy after dealing with endometriosis for years. She alleges the pop star in question called her “Aunt Lena” and wanted something from Antonoff “that he couldn’t give.” 

Eventually, Dunham broke down. She reached out to a middle school boyfriend, who is referred to in the book only as “Nick,” and asked him to cheer her up. “Cheer her up,” Dunham elaborates, meant “fuck me and… do all of the work.” The affair continued, with Dunham noting that she let the liaison persist in order to feel “alive” as her health and her relationship with Antonoff stood in flux: “I could be the freaky sexy lively woman [Antonoff] fell in love with. I had exorcised the demon.” Eventually, when Antonoff returned from tour, the two broke up, another scene Dunham recounts in comprehensive detail. “We put our foreheads together and wept,” she wrote, calling the experience “euphoric.” Dunham married the musician Luis Felber in 2021; Antonoff wed actress Margaret Qualley two years later. Dunham and Qualley were co-stars in Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

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