Lena Dunham discussed her relationship with ex Jack Antonoff at length in her newly released memoir, Famesick.
“The best medicine was Jack. Here was this boy — no, at 28, he was a man,” Dunham, 39, wrote. “He had strong arms, and good instincts, and models on video shoots who slipped him their numbers on napkins.”
Dunham added, “I didn’t realize it then, but as our relationship deepened, I relied on him for more than companionship and affection. His care for me, his choosing me, was an assurance that l was beautiful, lovable, being signed off on by someone who had every choice in the world and had made this one.”
Jack’s sister Rachel Antonoff connected the now-exes, who began dating immediately after he sent the actress an email asking to get dinner. They were together for nearly six years, splitting in December 2017 after Dunham got surgery to remove her uterus.
In her book, Dunham revealed that she cheated on Jack one week before their split. She initiated their breakup on a Saturday morning.
“When I woke up, he was in the kitchen. He said he was hungry, and we ordered breakfast, unpacking egg sandwiches and bacon strips from the diner where we had a charge account,” she wrote. “But I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t pretend. ‘I think we both know … we haven’t been making each other ha-a-appy,’ I stuttered before sobs overtook me.”
Dunham continued, “We put our foreheads together and wept. In some fit of delusion, I asked if we could still go on dates. … We told each other everything lovely that either of us might ever have wanted to hear.”
Keep scrolling for the biggest revelations about Jack from Dunham’s Famesick:
Lena Dunham’s Weeks-Long Tryst With Ex-Boyfriend
Following her November 2017 hysterectomy surgery, Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff had their “worst-ever fight.” They ended up taking a “pause” in their relationship while he went on tour.
It was at this time, Dunham reconnected with a childhood friend and ex named Nick. She explained that they stayed in “intermittent email contact” over the years.
“Up until now, I had seen myself as some kind of half wife, and so I had observed wifely code (you can masturbate thinking about someone oxidizing metal, but you can’t touch!),” she wrote. “But the events of the past few weeks had changed the game, and it was every woman for herself, just trying to survive.”
Dunham went on a date and took a cab back to Nick’s apartment. She told him: “I’ve been through something awful. I don’t want to talk about it, but I need you to f*** me and I need you to do all of the work.”
They continued sleeping together for the two weeks Jack was on tour. Dunham and Nick got “engaged” after her split from Jack, but they broke up after Dunham’s April 2018 rehab stint.
Lena Dunham Subtly Addresses Jack Antonoff Cheating Rumors
Lena Dunham wrote that she would often get emails from Nick during her relationship with Jack Antonoff, but she “avoided real responses.” Dunham also admitted that she “never stopped flirting” even though she had a boyfriend.
“I had observed careful boundaries, never taking it far enough that I could be declared out of bounds,” she wrote. “If I’d wanted to look, perhaps I may have seen that Jack was not observing them as closely as I was. I wasn’t paying attention, but the internet sure was, and they made some pretty amazing PowerPoints on the issue, so convincing they had me rethinking events that I myself had been present for.”
Elsewhere in the book, Dunham shared her distaste for Jack spending extended time in the studio with someone referred to as a “teen pop star.” She even mentioned catching the singer “weeping into Jack’s lap” when she came home one day. (Theories have long swirled about Jack and Lorde, one of his frequent collaborators.)
Lena Dunham Recalls Teen Listening to Jack Antonoff Song During Rehab Stay
In April 2018, Lena Dunham checked herself into rehab for a Klonopin addiction. While there, Dunham befriended a 19-year-old who she found listening to music one day.
“She held her phone up. It was a song Jack had written when he didn’t come back from the studio with Pink to see me at the hospital, one about hating someone but staying with them anyway,” Dunham wrote, referring to Pink’s 2017 song “Beautiful Trauma.”
Dunham refrained from telling the teen that her ex had written the song. “It felt cruel to tell her its producer was actually scared that MDMA would drain his spinal fluid,” she wrote.
Lena Dunham Spewed ‘Psycho Stuff’ About Jack Antonoff to Bruce Springsteen
Following Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff’s breakup, the actress found herself sitting next to Bruce Springsteen during a night out. Springsteen noted that Jack had become “very special” to him over the years, leading Dunham to say “psycho stuff” about her ex.
“From my mouth came a font of verbal diarrhea that sounded something like this: ‘I’m glad he’s special to you because he promised to love me forever and that’s not how it turned out and I may not have been perfect, but I would have tried and tried and now he shames me just for existing and I’m going to write a memoir one day and I don’t know how not to just call it I HATE YOU Jack, you BROKE ME Jack,’” Dunham wrote, recalling Springsteen looking at her with “the gentlest eyes” before he replied.
According to Dunham, Springsteen said, “Well, Lena, this is the hard stuff. These are the questions artists must ask ourselves. And none of us had that answer, about how best to express our hurt through art. But when I was writing my memoir, I told myself this, again and again. First off, if it’s boring, stop writing it. … And second, you don’t owe it to people to be honest about every little thing. That doesn’t mean you lie — it just means you can have secrets. You only owe it to them to show ’em how your mind works.”
Lena Dunham Cried Seeing Photos of Jack Antonoff Kissing Margaret Qualley
In her book’s epilogue, Lena Dunham reflected on Jack Antonoff’s marriage to the “beautiful” Margaret Qualley, whom she had previously befriended.
“He’d won the friend that I wanted, so when I wept like a child on the first afternoon I saw a paparazzi picture of them kissing on the Brooklyn Bridge, I knew that nobody would understand why I was so upset, that they’d assume it was because I was jealous of her, and that made me weep even harder,” she wrote.
Jack and Qualley were first linked in 2021 and tied the knot in 2023.
