Lena Dunham took a break from rehab to attend the Met Gala.
Lena Dunham took a break from rehab to attend the Met Gala in New York
The Girls star entered a treatment facility in 2018 to address her addiction to painkillers and she’s now revealed staff at the facility gave her “scheduled leave” to walk the red carpet at the glitzy fashion parade in New York City but “the whole event felt like a fever dream”.
In an extract from her new memoir Famesick – published by the Guardian newspaper – Lena, 39, wrote: “I had a few scheduled leaves. On one, I went to the Met Gala.
“They had let me go, though not without some hesitation – there were long talks about whether it would be ‘safe’, whether I could handle the chaos of it.”
Lena admits she felt “scared” before facing the cameras and she also didn’t like her hair and make-up or the designer gown she was wearing which was “so stiff I could only shuffle”.
She added: “On the red carpet, I looked wan and haunted. The whole event felt like a fever dream – cameras flashing, people shouting names that weren’t mine, champagne I couldn’t drink circulating like a joke I wasn’t in on.
“I told Jenni [friend and Girls co-writer Jenni Konner] I was probably the only person there who had come just for the night – from rehab. ‘You’re probably not,’ she said.”
Lena went on to explain she left the party at midnight and was driven back to rehab in Massachusetts where she had to strip off her designer dress so the staff could make sure she wasn’t smuggling any “contraband” into the facility.
She wrote: “At midnight, I climbed into a black SUV and drove back to Massachusetts – Cinderella in her pumpkin. They made me drop my dress at the door to my room so they could search it for contraband.”
Lena previously revealed she began writing her memoir a month after leaving rehab.
In a post on Instagram, she wrote: “When I first began this book, I’d been out of rehab for 30 days. I was in the cloud of delirium that comes with new sobriety – the world was suddenly so LOUD, and I thought that meant I knew what I was hearing.
“If you’d told me then that the writing process would take me through the next seven years, I probably would have ripped up my contract and chucked my laptop in the tub.
“Throughout my twenties, writing was all pure immediacy. I’d have an experience, put some version of it through the filter of fantasy, and it would be playing on television six months later.
“Writing was how I processed as it was happening. I hadn’t lived enough life to deal with it in retrospect. I didn’t understand the value of time – to heal us, to make sense of where we’ve been, to actually change the patterns we keep replaying in our work and our art.
“The gift this book has given me over the last seven years was that it was always there. No matter what changed – my location, my body, my mind – there was a constant: this place I could go to try and make sense of the story. “
She went on to add: “When we finally set a publication date for Famesick, I felt something like grief. One of my steadiest companions was leaving. But it’s time.”
Lena also promised to share “the truth and nothing but the truth” in the book, telling PEOPLE: “It took a long time to have the perspective to tell this story with honesty, humility and the appropriate dose of humour.
“I have been supported at every step of the way by my longtime editor, who encouraged me to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”
