Lena Dunham Felt ‘Like a Ghost’ While Dating Jack Antonoff Due to His Relationship With a ‘Teen Pop Star’

Lena Dunham looks back on her past relationship with long-term boyfriend Jack Antonoff in new memoir Famesick, including a low point that she says stemmed in part from his work with a “teen pop star.”

In the book published Tuesday (April 14), the Girls creator — who dated the Bleachers frontman for about five years, up until their breakup in early 2018 — describes how Antonoff and a certain singer whose album he was producing became “ensconced” in the recording studio in the apartment Dunham shared with her then-boyfriend. “I was too oblivious to be jealous of [her],” the screenwriter recalls of the young pop star, who apparently referred to Dunham as “Aunt Lena” and whose “needs seemed as massive and complex as my own.”

According to passages shared by Entertainment Weekly, Dunham goes on to write that she once found Antonoff’s collaborator “sprawled across our sectional couch, 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.”

After a while, Dunham says she suggested to the guitarist that “perhaps their closeness was striking an odd note, that [the unnamed pop star] wanted something from him that he couldn’t give.”

She says she also expressed feeling “like a ghost” whenever she saw the two of them together, to which she claims Antonoff replied, “‘You’re just mad because she doesn’t want to be your friend.’”

“And he was right,” Dunham added while also acknowledging, “I had observed careful boundaries [in our 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 reps for comment.

Dunham and the former Fun band member have since gone on to marry other people, with the former wedding Luis Felber in 2021 and the latter tying the knot with Margaret Qualley in 2023. Elsewhere in Famesick, the director shares details of her emotional breakup from Antonoff and admits to cheating on him with a former middle school flame days before their split.

Antonoff’s work as a producer has only expanded exponentially in the years since the time period described in Dunham’s memoir. In 2022, he won his first of three consecutive Grammys for producer of the year, nonclassical, and has worked on Billboard 200-topping albums by Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter.

His band Bleachers is currently gearing up to drop new album Everyone for Ten Minutes in May.