Inside Lena Dunham’s Substack press tour
Lena Dunham and her social strategist on coming back online, her new memoir Famesick, and embarking on a Substack book tour
For most of the past decade, Lena Dunham has been offline: no Instagram, no scrolling, with a trusted collaborator managing her digital presence. Last year, she and that collaborator—strategist Dolly Meckler—decided to make an exception, and Lena got her Substack login. “It was like when I graduated from rehab,” Lena told us. “Very adult.”
Since then, Lena’s become increasingly active on Good Thing Going, writing about everything from reading lists to her favorite Etsy finds to how she organizes her Notes app. Now she’s promoting her new memoir, Famesick, from bed, both at home and onstage, where she’s been hosting a kind of roving variety show from under the covers—and all over Substack.
In the days leading up to the memoir’s release, Lena made guest appearances on publications across the platform, an online book tour that let her collaborate with some of her favorite writers. Each piece was written to fit its home: a ’90s fashion nostalgia trip for Emilia Petrarca, a Q&A on body image and rehab for Health Gossip, a meditation on moviegoing for 11am Saturday. Writer Casey Lewis of After School took note: “I can’t recall a single book launch that has utilized the Substack platform so handily.”
We talked with Lena and Dolly about “going where it’s warm,” why they promoted Famesick sideways rather than head-on, and what Dolly would do differently next time.
You’ve been in bed with everyone from the NYT to Emily Sundberg in the last few weeks. How’s the press tour going?
Lena: It’s been a ball! Last time I really did this level of public anything was the last season of Girls (and if you read Famesick you’ll see that I wasn’t really in the place to, uh, enjoy it). Since then I’ve been largely behind the scenes as a writer and director, which means you can rely on your cast to hold it down, press-wise. I have definitely pushed myself out of the little comfort zone I’ve found in recent years, but that’s because, as all the many authors of Substack know, when it comes to a book, there’s only you. So I realized I was going to have to find a way to do promotion and a tour that didn’t leave me physically and spiritually fracked.
It felt like you were everywhere in the days leading up to Famesick’s pub date. What was the strategy for your Substack tour?
Lena: Dolly is always such an incredible sounding board, but our strategy was kind of not a strategy, in that it wasn’t super calculated. It was the result of my happily accepting the chance to collaborate with the newsletters I actually read. “Organic” is an overused word, at least in Hollywood, but I do think that when you’re a fan for real and having a genuinely great time, people can feel it. All press is not good press (another lesson of Famesick), and if you’re stiff, anxious, and out of place, then what’s the point? Whereas I love writing. I have a myriad of interests and hobbies and there’s a newsletter that speaks to them all. I’m also chronically ill, and so getting to show up as my best self, the self who loves to write and go down little Wiki wormholes and eBay trapdoors, is a rare treat. Writing has always made me feel like part of the world even when I can’t be, and I feel very lucky to have made new pals and learned a lot.
Dolly: Lena and I first started talking in December 2024 about what it might look like for her to publish a Good Thing Going newsletter. We had been working together since 2020, and it always pained me to cut down her beautifully written Instagram captions to fit a character limit. She needed more real estate for her words. When we initially discussed a newsletter, there was some hesitation around committing to a locked cadence, but I tried to encourage her to throw out the “rules” of how to show up online. Lena is a writer. Substack made sense for her.
When it came time to promote Famesick, we had a large kickoff with the full team: publisher, agents, PR, management. While the PR teams focused on traditional media, I was thinking about Substack as an equally important layer of the ecosystem. Lena is the only person I know who is so offline yet deeply aware of what’s happening online. She’s an avid Substack reader, subscribes to dozens of publications, and is very engaged with her own community through DMs, Notes, and comments. So while there wasn’t a rigid plan, collaborating with publications she already read felt like a natural, grassroots way to introduce Famesick without it feeling too promotional. Some opportunities came through her DMs, some through my inbox, and others were friends and writers who felt like an organic fit.
What were you hoping to achieve here versus other arms of the tour?
Lena: I wish we had a more mustache-twirling evil genius plan, but I was just “going where it’s warm,” as my father always advises. It feels like Substack folks are way more “my people” than on any other app, or on the stage of a talk show or in the pages of a magazine.
Also, as a late-in-life data nerd, it’s been really interesting to see how committed certain audiences are. I love that a newsletter with more followers but a less engaged audience doesn’t have the same value as someone with a tiny but rabid fan base. As the girl whose show regularly clocked under a million viewers (a number that, in showbiz, might as well be 10), I connect to that vibe: small but noisy, mini but mighty. It’s so cool to me that so many people are making a living as writers who wouldn’t have found a way to do that even five years ago.
In January, you introduced Dolly and revealed that you haven’t posted on Instagram directly in years. You do have your own Substack password, right? Are you fully in the driver’s seat on Good Thing Going and Notes?
Lena: I sure am! That was a big moment, because I literally hadn’t typed into a social media app in well over half a decade. But I was getting FOMO.
It’s a testament to how much fun I was having, and how safe the community feels, that this even seemed like an okay idea. I joined Substack purely for pleasure. I love reading, and I’m always looking for new avenues to take in unvarnished and inventive voices. I wanted a place to share book lists and niche vintage shopping fetishes and all the delicious bits of being alive that don’t have a home anywhere else creatively. Quickly, I started having fun, and fun isn’t a word I’ve equated with social media in many, many years.
You used a bunch of formats in just a few days: a column takeover, a live Chat AMA, Notes. Did you go in pitching format and topic, or did each one grow out of the publication you were working with?
Dolly: This happened pretty organically. The column takeovers were part of the collaborations we had planned, but the other formats unfolded in real time. The AMAs came from the idea that Lena would already be answering audience questions on her book tour, so we thought, why not source those questions directly from the brilliant minds on Substack? The responses were so strong that it led her to create her own advice column, Dunhamisms. Notes ended up being a major learning. She would text me every time she saw a spike in followers. We quickly realized that consistent posting on Notes was a key driver of engagement and discovery.
On Good Thing Going, you promoted Famesick sideways: posts about coats, self-help, and if our moms actually have the capacity to change. How much of that was mapped out ahead of time as part of the official strategy?
Lena: Dolly and Penguin Random House know I’m pretty allergic to the “hey y’all, preorder my book!” sales style. I never judge anyone for giving it a go, but it’s the same way that I could never take a very serious nude. Some people have it in them and some don’t! I have to find a way to make it feel fun and engaging to me, which is also the only way to make it possibly pleasurable for anyone else. I love marginalia, writing about writing, talking not just about process but what makes up a writer’s life. Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings was the first blog that ever felt like it was my little home on the internet, because it captured how much frippery and fun there is to being an artist, and also the many ways to inspire and be inspired. I hoped to capture a little bit of that and perhaps preserve some of what goes into putting a memoir together, in a little bit of a Proustian cookie way.
How do you think the Substack press impacted preorder sales?
Lena: Someone I trust told me that, in book sales at least, every single Substack follower is the equivalent of many more Instagram or X followers because Substackers are way more likely to follow through and buy a book. While I don’t have the actual numbers, that feels anecdotally true to me. There’s an appreciation of the written word that suffuses this whole place. Most of your readers are also going to be writers themselves, who know just what writing a book takes.
Dolly, how are you measuring whether the Substack leg of the press tour actually moves the needle? Do you look at numbers after posts go up, ask publishers to share data, track preorder velocity or Lena’s subscriber growth?
Dolly: We actually could have done this better. Because everything we were doing was intentionally collaborative rather than overtly promotional, we focused primarily on subscriber growth. If I were doing this again or advising someone else on this, I’d recommend setting up unique tracking links to better measure conversion from Substack. That being said, I think there’s a bigger lesson here: as Good Thing Going grows, so does the surface area for talking to our audience. We built that growth by having fun with it, and that in turn made the book promotion more effective.
Many of our readers are writers themselves—some writing books, some writing for the inbox every week. What does memoir ask of you that writing online doesn’t?
Lena: What I love about Substack is that it’s a writers’ community. Not since my LiveJournal days have I been so surrounded by like-minded folks. And a lot of us came of age when the confessional memoir and blogging were starting to braid together and people started to tailor their own narratives to the algorithm (a lot of “9 Ways Game of Thrones’ Red Wedding Was Like My Last Breakup!” energy). That was very much the world we were swimming in on Girls—Hannah dreamed of making money writing a breakup-themed listicle.
Writing at a particular cadence is amazing for the creative muscle. That’s what writing TV taught me: to be athletic and not precious, since you have to grind out an episode whether you feel it or not. At the same time, it requires that you metabolize life quickly and that you always have something to talk about. A lot of memoir [writing] is slowing down enough to understand where you’ve been, what was significant about it, and to dig into larger themes, since all my favorite memoirs are not, at the end of the day, only about their author. Figuring out how to tell stories again and again, to be able to rely on yourself to produce cogent ideas even when not in the mood, is an amazing skill and can really be the difference between a writing career and a hobby in this day and age. At the same time, I don’t think that memoir, at least in its truest form, can be produced with a stopwatch in hand.
What, if anything, would the Girls girls be writing about on Substack in 2026?
Lena: I am terribly afraid that Hannah would be doing a lot of “everything I wish I’d said to the man who called me cutie at the ATM this morning!” type of stuff, but maybe I’m doing her dirty and my girl is a better writer than that. Shosh’s NYC guide would be a little bit basic but at the same time, she doesn’t do anything in half measures. She would be the West Village Girl to follow.
Writing a memoir requires a kind of excavation, and then a press tour asks you to talk about what you found, over and over, with strangers. Has this revisiting taught you anything about your own life or career that you didn’t have perspective on when you were still writing it?
Lena: There is a distinct irony to doing a press tour to talk about the damage you did to yourself on press tours, but it also offers a chance to revisit old habits and come correct. Being able to show up and be open to these brilliant people but also clear in my own boundaries has actually been a wonderful correction, the rare chance for a re-do and to see lessons in action.
You spend however long writing the book, trying to speak with clarity and intention. Then you’re asked about the same experiences but in a context with no editor, no guardrails, and no control. On my last book tour, I didn’t realize that I don’t always have to offer something new. It’s okay to say, “I worked hard to say that with specificity and integrity, and I hope people will read it in context.” It’s also a cool chance to turn it away from my own story and toward some of the larger themes: chronic illness, how our culture ingests and spits out women’s stories, and, of course, being a person who loves to wear weird coats.
Dolly, what does “this worked” actually look like to you?
Dolly: I’ve always felt very protective of Lena’s online presence. The internet has been so cruel over the years, and every recommendation I’ve made has been about helping her be understood on her own terms. Seeing such a strong wave of positive sentiment has been the clearest signal to me. There’s genuine admiration for her voice, her thinking, and the book itself, and that’s incredibly meaningful, both professionally and personally. It all makes me very happy.