AMNA NAWAZ: More than a decade ago, Lena Dunham rose to fame as the comedic force behind the HBO hit series "Girls."

In her new memoir, "Famesick," out today, Dunham candidly, hilariously and sometimes painfully explores how she balanced her sudden celebrity with chronic illness, addiction, and trauma.

I spoke with Dunham for the latest episode of our PBS News podcast "Settle In."

Here's a clip of our conversation.

LENA DUNHAM, Actor and Screenwriter: I think that there were moments, like -- and this is - - I feel extremely grateful for my job and I'm certainly not throwing a pity party for myself about what happened.

But, at the same time, I was looking around at my friends' lives who were still maybe having the chance to figure things out in a more private way, to have more spontaneous experiences, to travel, to sort of live a more quintessentially 20-something life.

And I was recreating a 20-something life on screen, but I was basically never not at work.

AMNA NAWAZ: You're also not getting to live your 20s and make the mistakes of your 20s that all of us make in the privacy of your own life, right?

It's a very public experience and a highly scrutinized experience.

And all of this, we should remind people, it's all unfolding at a time when blogging is taking off and social media is taking off and everyone on the Internet has a hot take and an opinion that they really want to share in that moment.

And you bore the brunt of a lot of that, right?

A lot of it was focused at you in a really intensely, a lot of at times unkind personal way.

I wonder how you dealt with that at the time, how you navigated that on top of managing the responsibility of a successful show and running a team and trying to be creative in the moment.

LENA DUNHAM: Well, I think, firstly, I'm going to hook onto two things you said.

One is I think talking about the fact that this was the rise of blogging.

I mean, I have said, I remember joining Twitter the year that "Girls" started.

I remember posting my first Instagram photo.

This was sort of the Wild Wild West.

And now we're sort of -- we have become used to -- I don't know.

The Grammys happen and then everybody gets on with like 57 opinions about Sabrina Carpenter's shorts.

And we are used to that cycle, but it was new.

And people were trying to figure out what it was and what it meant.

And we happened to be in New York at a moment when New York media was really the center of that.

And we were sort of adjacent to the people who were writing, but just far enough away that they could be pretty hypercritical, but just close enough that it could sort of feel a little like eating your own.

And it was -- looking back, it's a kind of a fascinating cultural moment.

It's a fascinating study in so much about creativity, human behavior, how we adapt to new technologies.

I wouldn't say, in the moment, it felt like an incredible cultural study.

In the moment, it felt like I was just fighting to survive, truly.

And in terms of how I dealt with it, I loved what you said about holding on to your creativity.

That was always the most important thing to me, which is, what do I have to do to be able to continue to do this thing that got me here, which is write and direct and make this work?

And I think, in terms of how I dealt with it, is that I didn't deal with it.

And that was part of what was so, I think -- I think unmanaged trauma, unhandled stress, we know is a deep sort of -- it's like pouring an accelerant on illness.

And so these things that I had always dealt with, I'd always sort of been like a sickly kid or someone who had my -- who had my rough moments.

But suddenly that was neck and neck with the rest of my life as the most - - kind of the loudest theme.

AMNA NAWAZ: I wonder what all of that means for your relationship with social media today.

How would you describe that?

LENA DUNHAM: How would I describe my relationship with social media?

I'm really lucky because I have some people.

I have a production company.

And the young folks who work for me are very online.

So they let me know if there's things that I have to know about or things that are special or amusing or really good memes, scandalous TikToks that one must see.

At the same time, I really treat it more like a part of my job.

I have a social media manager.

I have a creative director.

And those are people that I sort of engage with in terms of like, what is an interesting and new way for us to use social media?

But I'm not actually on the apps dealing every day with people's perceptions, which I recognized was a pretty unhealthy cycle for me,and I'd argue a pretty unhealthy cycle for anyone.

And I look at what it means to be a young celebrity today, which is you don't just have to be an actor or a singer or -- you also have to be a content creator.

And that means engaging with all of these voices.

And I do think we will find, sort of the same way that we're learning how spending so much time on a screen is affecting the human brain, we're going to learn what this is doing.

But it's going to take a little bit of time.

And I think about it the way we think about the fact that, like, we didn't know in the 1940s that smoking was bad for you.

And so, for a while, you just get to smoke cigarettes with impunity until one day we discover the truth.

And I think we will learn the same thing about social media.

And it's certainly not going away, but learning how to mediate it in our lives, so that we can actually engage with what's in front of us.

Whenever I talk about this, I feel like I sound like I'm -- I sound like my father talking to me when I was 23, but I'm going to be 40 in a month, and we all get here.

(LAUGHTER) AMNA NAWAZ: It happens fast, doesn't it, Lena?

It happens fast.

LENA DUNHAM: It's wild.

I suddenly hear myself saying things where I just go, oh, my gosh.

Like, I sound like when my mom and her friends would say, like, but what is it you like so much about the Backstreet Boys?

(LAUGHTER) LENA DUNHAM: Like, I'm so mortified.

AMNA NAWAZ: And you can watch that full conversation and all episodes of "Settle In" on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.