Lena Dunham Opens Up About Feeling Invisible During Her Relationship with Jack Antonoff and His Young Fame
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Lena Dunham reflects on her past relationship with long-term boyfriend Jack Antonoff in her new memoir, Famesick. She addresses a particularly low moment that arose partly from Antonoff’s collaboration with a “teen pop star.”
In the book, published on April 14, Dunham, known for creating Girls, recounts her five-year relationship with the Bleachers frontman, which ended in early 2018. She describes how Antonoff, along with a certain singer whose album he was producing, became deeply engaged in the recording studio located in the apartment they shared. “I was too oblivious to be jealous of [her],” she reflects on the young pop star, who reportedly called Dunham “Aunt Lena” and whose “needs seemed as massive and complex as my own.”
Passages shared by Entertainment Weekly reveal that Dunham once discovered Antonoff’s collaborator “sprawled across our sectional couch, weeping into Jack’s lap” while he comforted her by saying, “your teens are for experimenting.” Dunham notes that the tenderness in Antonoff’s voice was so moving, it nearly brought her to tears. “It had been so long since he’d spoken to me with that kind of expansive generosity,” she writes.
As their relationship dynamics shifted, Dunham suggested to Antonoff that “perhaps their closeness was striking an odd note, that [the unnamed pop star] wanted something from him that he couldn’t give.” She further expressed feeling “like a ghost” when witnessing the two together, an observation that prompted Antonoff to remark, “‘You’re just mad because she doesn’t want to be your friend.’” Dunham admits, “And he was right,” acknowledging that she had maintained careful boundaries in their relationship. “If I’d wanted to look, perhaps I may have seen that Jack was not observing them as closely as I was.”
Billboard has reached out to Antonoff’s representatives for comment.
Since their breakup, both Dunham and Antonoff have moved on, marrying other partners. Dunham wed Luis Felber in 2021, while Antonoff tied the knot with Margaret Qualley in 2023. In Famesick, Dunham also touches on her emotional split from Antonoff, revealing that she cheated on him with a former middle school flame shortly before their breakup.
Antonoff’s career has seen remarkable growth, earning his first of three consecutive Grammys for producer of the year, nonclassical, in 2022. He has contributed to multiple Billboard 200 chart-topping albums for artists such as Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, and Sabrina Carpenter. His band, Bleachers, is currently set to release a new album titled Everyone for Ten Minutes in May.
