Lena Dunham Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of And Other Lies Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Lena Dunham is an actress, writer, filmmaker, director, and published author.

You may know her for Tiny Furniture, the 2010 film Dunham wrote and directed. She is also the creator, writer, and star of Girls, the popular HBO series. Born on May 13, 1986, she landed a $3.5 million deal with Random House in 2012 to publish her first essay collection Not That Kind of Girl. She was named one of Time’s most influential people in the world in 2013.

Dunham has received Emmy award nominations and two Golden Globe Awards for Girls. She also became the first woman to win a Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing- Comedy Series. She received an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay for Tiny Furniture and went on to write and direct the films Sharp Stick and Catherine Called Birdy. She created the Netflix series Too Much in 2025.

In 2015, she created the online newsletter Lenny Letter with Jenni Konner in 2015, which was discontinued in 2018. She has made appearances in movies like Supporting Characters and This is 40 as well as Happy Christmas and made guest appearances on Scandal and The Simpsons. She also appeared in American Horror Story: Cult.

She was born in New York City, to her father who was a painter and her mother who was an artist and a photographer. She has a younger sibling, Cyrus. She won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award as a teen and went to The New School for a year, then transferred to Oberlin College. She graduated in 2008 with her creative writing degree. At Oberlin, she produced independent short films that she uploaded to YouTube, and produced Pressure in 2006. She would produce several more films that came out as Tiny Furniture DVD extras.

Dunham created the Index Magazine web series in 2009 called Delusional Downtown Divas and the same year premiered the comedy Creative Nonfiction at the South by Southwest Festival. Tiny Furniture in 2010 would become her breakthrough, which led to getting a blind script deal at HBO, who paired her with Jennifer Konner. She would later be profiled in The New York Times and introduced to Judd Apatow, who ended up becoming involved with the Girls series.

Girls follows along with Hannah Horvath, Dunham’s character, who is a young writer trying to make it in NYC. Some of Hannah’s experiences mirrored ones that Lena had experienced in real life. The show premiered on HBO in 2012 to general critical acclaim. The show continued to get renewed and in 2014 the third season premiere received over a million viewers. That year, Dunham would host Saturday Night Live.

She would also launch A Casual Romance Productions in 2015, aimed at developing film and television projects. Dunham appeared in her mother’s film My Art in 2016 and voiced Mary in My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea in 2016. Girls came to an end in 2017. Her production company produced Camping, a British comedy series remake. She also appeared in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and would split with Konner as a producing partner when their joint HBO contract expired in 2018.

She has written the screenplay for a film based on the memoir A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea in 2018. In 2019, she started a podcast with Alissa Bennett called The C-Word Podcast and launched a production company Good Thing Going that year. Dunham also wrote Verified Strangers, a serial novel that started on the Vogue website, and was a director and an executive producer on Industry’s first episode, and was an executive producer of Generation. As a child, she was diagnosed with OCD and revealed she has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome in 2019. She got married to Luis Felber, a musician, in 2021.

Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” is a 2014 book by Lena Dunham. It is a New York Times Best Seller and was picked as one of the best books of the year by The Globe and Mail, BuzzFeed, and Library Journal. If you love nonfiction, humor, and interesting work, you’ll love this funny and candid collection of personal essays from Lena Dunham.

These essays end up covering a variety of topics, from feeling alone, falling in love, being overweight by ten pounds, having to prove yourself in a room full of men who are older than you, and believing your story deserves to be told, among others.

Whether it’s losing her virginity in ‘Take My Virginity (No Really, Take It), or being attracted to mean guys in ‘Girls & Jerks’, or covering her obsession on death and dying in ‘Is This Even Real?’, Dunham covers a broad spectrum of topics in her own keenly observant voice and does so in a way that is relatable and fascinating at the same time.

Each of these essays is worth a look. Get a first-hand introduction to who Lena Dunham is by getting a copy of Not That Kind of Girl today.

Famesick is a 2026 book by Lena Dunham. The author and director is back again in a reflection on everything from sex to fame to illness and all that is in between that sees Dunham asking the question whether fulfilling her ambitions creatively was worth the pain.

Lena has been in waiting rooms for years, looking for relief as well as some type of diagnosis and treatment. All while writing, directing, starring in, and producing a television show as a young woman in her twenties. Or on her way to different destinations, fighting through the physical state of her body whether it’s going to the Golden Globes, the White House, or meeting Oprah.

The artist details how she cannot tell the difference between trying to do what she loves or being a servant to her own ambition, while holding out for the type of love that can endure her personal as well as public challenges– and wanting to feel like herself again.

The result is a tracking of Dunham’s rise to being famous, selling the Girls pilot and going all the way up to present day. Was fulfilling her dreams worth the price that she paid? Find out by getting your hands on a copy of Famesick.