“Girls” creator Lena Dunham lays her feelings about motherhood bare in her new memoir “Famesick.” She appeared on TODAY With Jenna & Sheinelle on April 15 to add more color to her very personal experience.
“A lot of dreams came to an end,” Dunham said.
She was referring to the period of time when both her longterm relationship with Jack Antonoff and her ability to carry a child concluded. Due to extreme pain caused by endometriosis, Dunham had a hysterectomy and had one of her ovaries removed.
“You write about at 31 years old, in the sort of prime of your career, walking into an ER and begging for a hysterectomy because your endometriosis is so crippling,” said Jenna Bush Hager. “How did you grieve that?”
“What was so beautiful was that I had (my mother) with me and I had her full support,” Dunham shared. “And that made it so much clearer to me because this person who knows me and loves me went, ‘You can’t go on like this.’”
“You’ve talked about the idea of the life that you’ve imagined not coming to fruition,” said Sheinelle Jones. “How do you process all of that?”
“In the moment, my pain was so overriding that I put those other thoughts aside and it was only in the aftermath of the surgery that I started to feel the weight of what had happened,” Dunham said.
“Some people don’t dream about being mothers, but I had. And a big part of my identity was that I was going to do that someday and in this way,” she shared.
Dunham hasn’t closed the door on raising children, however. Now 39, she is married to British musician Luis Felber.
“The amazing thing is since then I have met so many people who have built their families in so many different ways, and I’ve really come to a place where I feel really excited,” she shared. “Whatever way it happens, I will be so grateful.”
