Lena Dunham: 'Short-Tempered' Adam Driver 'Hurled a Chair'

In her second memoir before the age of 40, Lena Dunham revisits the intense dynamic she says she had with Adam Driver while making HBO's Girls. In Famesick, released Tuesday, Dunham describes a working relationship that she characterizes as both creatively electric and, at times, frightening and confusing, per Variety. Dunham writes that during the filming of their first sex scene in Season 1, Driver—who played her character's on-again, off-again boyfriend—ignored her staging and "hurled me this way and that," leaving her "stunned" and unsure whether she'd lost control as the show's star, writer, and director. She also claims Driver once punched a hole in his trailer wall over a haircut.

As the pressures of running the series mounted, she says her anxiety led to dissociation on set—and to one rehearsal in which she suddenly couldn't remember her lines. In that moment, she alleges, Driver cursed and shouted at her and "hurled a chair at the wall next to me." She says she didn't report the incident but delivered the lines correctly afterward. "He could be short-tempered and verbally aggressive, condescending and physically imposing," she writes. Yet she also describes him as protective and caring, including during a stretch when he came to her apartment nightly while she was struggling with anxiety. She writes that she ignored his calls one night for fear of crossing a line, then felt "heartbroken" when she learned he was engaged.

The memoir also reveals Dunham cheated on her "first great love," music producer Jack Antonoff, whom she dated from 2012 to 2017, with a middle school boyfriend following a hysterectomy. She writes she felt a "euphoria that in recent months only intravenous medication had provided," per Page Six. Dunham claims Antonoff at that time had been growing close to a young musician who isn't named, but is reported to be Lorde, per the Daily Beast. She describes finding the woman "weeping into Jack's lap as he told her that 'your teens are for experimenting' in a tone so comforting, it almost brought tears to my eyes ... It had been so long since he'd spoken to me with that kind of expansive generosity."