Lena Dunham Recalls Ex Jack Antonoff’s ‘Closeness’ With a ‘Teen Pop Star’ Striking ‘an Odd Note’

Lena Dunham is pulling no punches in her new memoir, Famesick — and the revelations inside are adding fresh fuel to years-old speculation about her ex-boyfriend Jack Antonoff and singer Lorde.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the Girls alum recalls confronting Antonoff about his “closeness” with an unnamed “teen pop star” whose album he was producing, writing that the dynamic had begun “striking an odd note.” While she never names the artist outright in the book, which hit shelves Tuesday, April 14, the description has fans connecting familiar dots.

Antonoff famously produced Lorde’s critically acclaimed sophomore album, Melodrama, which was released in June 2017. (Lorde is now 29.) The two musicians spent significant time together during that collaboration.

Those who’ve followed the saga will remember that Dunham and Lorde were once incredibly close — the “Royals” singer even lived with Dunham for a period of time, according to Grazia.

But that friendship abruptly ended after Dunham and Antonoff split after five years together in 2018, and he was spotted looking cozy with Lorde (real name: Ella Yelich-O’Connor) on multiple occasions.  “I don’t think anything happened between them,” Dunham told The Cut in 2018, but added, “I have never spoken to Ella about it.”

“It was awful, and I couldn’t do anything about it except trust that what he was saying to me was true,” she said at the time.

In Famesick, the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood actress admits boundary issues weren’t one-sided in the relationship. She writes that she “had observed careful boundaries, never taking it far enough that I could be declared out of bounds,” before pointedly adding that Jack may not have been “observing them as closely” as she was.

But after her 2018 hysterectomy, she reconnected with a middle-school ex named Nick, admitting she was “ready to do adultery.” The affair lasted several days before she and Antonoff tearfully ended things.

Antonoff has been in a relationship with actress Margaret Qualley since 2021, and the couple married in 2023. Dunham married musician Luis Felber in 2021.