What to read this week: Lena Dunham on fame and Tom Junod on fathers

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham

The new memoir from the creator of Girls and former “voice of a generation” Lena Dunham, published this week, has already been trailed with a proliferation of tabloid-style headlines online: “Lena Dunham admits to cheating on Jack Antonoff”; “Adam Driver screamed at me and threw a chair, claims Lena Dunham.” But its intimate details don’t feel cheap or lurid but rather an expression of Dunham’s radical candour. Her openness often hurts her, but it’s also – as Anna Leszkiewicz writes – what makes her best work so powerful. And it's what makes Famesick, about the twin destructive forces of celebrity and physical illness that blighted Dunham’s 20s and 30s, a moving, compelling and necessary book. 
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WHAT TO READ NEXT

In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir by Tom Junod

From one searching memoir to another. Here the great American journalist Tom Junod seeks to uncover the secret life of his father. Lou Junod is, as Xavier Greenwood writes, “a war veteran and handbag salesman who learned that the best way to succeed was to ‘sell himself’ in business and in life. He is a married man who beds women with abandon, including his friend’s wife and, it is rumoured, the Hollywood starlet Zsa Zsa Gabor. He is besotted with his appearance, a sun-seeker who lathers himself in baby oil, dons black bikini shorts to the beach, and hails the turtleneck as the most flattering thing you can wear.” In unpicking the lies of Lou’s life, Tom is forced to confront his own.
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Communion by Jon Doyle

Jon Doyle is one of The Observer’s debut novelists of the year. His book Communion, reviewed this week by Jude Rogers, begins as a Welsh coastal town prepares for two simultaneous events: an immersive play of the Easter Passion starring a homegrown celebrity – and if that reminds you of one Michael Sheen, you are not wrong – and a major industrial strike in protest at the managed decline of the local steel plant. With a protagonist who is struggling with his decision to abandon his training as a Catholic priest, this remarkable novel asks big questions about work, faith, identity and community. It marks, writes Jude, “the arrival of an explosive new talent”. 
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ENDNOTES

Born in North Yorkshire, Dominic Gregory moved to Dungeness, in Kent, 20 years ago and became an RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) volunteer. Lisa O’Kelly spoke to him about his first book, Lifeboat at the End of the World, dealing with the realities of serving as part of a lifeboat crew. Here’s Dominic talking about an incident where his lifeboat is launched into treacherous waters in the dead of night to rescue a dinghy lethally overloaded with people trying to make it from France to England.

“It was the job we’d been dreading. Our first mass casualty event in the Channel. Only 39 survived out of as many as 50 who left France. It was horrendous. Amid all of that, I wanted to tell the story from the perspective of the volunteers on the lifeboat, how it was affecting us. That story hadn’t been told. There have been acres of comment about this crisis from people who’ve never pulled a body from the sea, but nothing from the point of view of those actually dealing with it. On a lifeboat there is a crew of just six or seven, and there’s only a handful of lifeboats on the south coast. It’s a huge responsibility.

“At the end of the rescue my legs buckled under me. I didn’t go back to sea for about a month afterwards, whereas Stu and his son [members of the lifeboat crew] were back the same day, searching for bodies. I think they were on service that day for 21 hours. We dealt with it by talking about it. We still refer to it as ‘that December job’. It never goes away.” 

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Illustration by Charlotte Durance