Early in Lena Dunham’s memoir “Famesick,” she describes living back in her artist-parents’ Tribeca loft after college and becoming involved with an informal collective of young New York filmmakers. During that period, she developed her ultra-low-budget feature film, “Tiny Furniture,” casting relatives, friends, and acquaintances and filming in the family loft. The movie was accepted at the 2010 South by Southwest film festival and became an instant success, winning the Grand Jury Prize. What followed, in short order, was Dunham signing on to make the HBO series “Girls,” which ran for six seasons and became one of the cultural touchstones of the twenty-tens. “Famesick”—a feast of keen observations and psychological insights delivered vividly, with candor and wit—details the many issues that arose in the wake of the show’s success, including the rapid onset of Dunham’s celebrity, the series of illnesses that she endured, and the connection between those seemingly disparate experiences. Her narrative is frankly and stringently personal, but it also provides a wide-angle view of show business itself, and of a fundamental artistic conflict within it: the cost of moving from the freedom of independent filmmaking to the corporate demands of TV.

The first twist in the story is that Dunham had no intention of making “Girls” or any other television series. After the triumph of “Tiny Furniture” at SXSW, “emails began pouring in—from sales agents, from talent agents, from managers, from producers”—and she had no idea how to respond or what to do. Her mother, Laurie Simmons, had a connection and found her an agent—a prominent one, Peter Benedek, at the agency that he co-founded, United Talent Agency. He brought Dunham out to Los Angeles, where, after a couple of weeks of insubstantial meetings at a variety of companies, they went to HBO, where she met executives whom she found sympathetic and eager to work with her. When Dunham, who was then twenty-three, went to Los Angeles, she had a general idea of what she was hoping for—and what she wasn’t. “At that point, I had no sense that television was something I wanted to make,” she writes, “but I’d heard it was a job that could sustain an indie film habit—a job in a writer’s room seemed, as far as jobs went, like one I could handle.” But things quickly changed at the HBO meeting, where she was asked, “What would you want to make?”

Taken by surprise, Dunham spontaneously described what would become “Girls.” She wrote the idea up that very night and submitted it the next day; within hours, HBO offered her a deal to write the pilot. The executives, however, didn’t just send her home to write; they also hooked her into the corporate system within which she’d be writing. “HBO told me that I would be set up with something called a ‘supervisor,’ ” she writes, and they arranged phone meetings with their selected batch of “candidates.” She connected with the first one she spoke with, the screenwriter Jenni Konner, and offered Konner the job at once. The role of the supervisor, Dunham writes, was “a kind of mentor, someone who helped you if you had never written TV, to understand the invisible but mighty set of rules that governed the form.” A few weeks later, Dunham went to Los Angeles to work with Konner, who explained the show-making formula: “She introduced me to ideas like A and B stories, inciting incidents, and comic set pieces.” Described this way, the lessons sound like marching orders.

Even before submitting the script for the pilot, Dunham was asked to write four episodes along with it. In September, the studio decided to make the pilot, and the shoot was scheduled for November. This, Dunham writes, “gave us two months to cast, hire crew, scout locations, build sets, and a million other things that hadn’t yet occurred to me since I’d never made anything outside my own house.” She was ready to let the process take over her life (“There was nowhere else I needed to be”) and eager to make the series: “If I loved making movies, then making TV, I figured, must be like a movie that never ends. And what could be better than that?” The be-careful-what-you-wish-for part came quickly. The production was set up at Silvercup Studios, in Queens. Dunham had an office there and, at times, she felt lost: “Often, when I closed the door, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I would sit there alone, wondering how a person with a sign like that on their door used their time.” She had entered a machine that was running on its own, assembled by people who assembled such machines for a living, and she had to find a way to fit her ideas and herself into it.

The cast of “Girls” included such thrilling actors as Allison Williams, Adam Driver, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet, and Andrew Rannells. (The cast may be the show’s most enduring contribution to cinema.) Dunham assumed that the lead role would be played by an experienced actor and was surprised to learn that “everyone”—from Judd Apatow, who’d come on as an executive producer, to Konner to “the brass at HBO”—expected her to star, as she’d done in “Tiny Furniture.” Dunham’s first shock, after filming the pilot, was a complaint from Konner about her appearance: she was thinner than she was in “Tiny Furniture” and, Dunham writes, Konner told her “it’s not funny if you’re too thin.” What Dunham heard was a supervisor expressing her authority, with the threat that goes with it. So, Dunham writes, “For the rest of that summer, I ate like my job depended on it. . . . I must have gained fifteen pounds in a month.” She understood that, for the hierarchy above her, she was both an employee and disposable, even as she was on the upswing of seemingly overnight success.

The show’s entire first season went quickly into production. Yet, during the shoot, she faced a crisis of creative authority, one that made itself felt in the texture and substance of “Girls”: she and the show’s cinematographer, Jody Lee Lipes, had worked together on “Tiny Furniture,” and their plans for the TV series were similarly ambitious. “We committed to holding on to our cinematic aesthetic no matter what was thrown at us, to making the show look more like Cassavetes than Friends.” But during the shoot, she observed “a tug-of-war between Jody . . . and Jenni and Judd, who were trying to help me bridge the gap between my very specific aesthetic and the medium of television, which, even in its most elevated form, still needs to feel accessible and, on some level, populist.” The result was that, by the end of the shoot of that first season, Lipes was no longer talking to her; their communications took place through intermediaries. Another result, which she doesn’t cite, is that the show lost some of the tone and texture that had defined her feature film—especially in the many episodes that Dunham didn’t direct.

The acclaim for “Girls” was overwhelming, the publicity engine roared, and Dunham became famous. She had written the pilot never expecting that the show would be made; while making the first season, she assumed that there wouldn’t be a second. With the third, she writes, “it seemed like Girls would just be my life from now on.” Indeed, she and her fellow cast members were contractually committed to a seven-year run. Even as Dunham began suffering a series of health crises—many of which she correlates with especially stressful, fatiguing, or demanding times on the series—making and promoting “Girls” took up all of her time, leaving her “overstimulated by the intensity of my new public life yet under-stimulated when it came to doing typical things that might make a twentysomething feel whole.” She offers a brief list of the ordinary things that people in their twenties do and that she didn’t. She was thus, as she puts it, “all out of ideas.” This strikes me as the core of the making of “Girls”: for Dunham, a personal filmmaker of such a candidly self-scrutinizing sort, the demands of the TV machine had the effect of blanking her out, depriving her both of the material for movies and of the time and energy to make them.

It’s painful to contrast Dunham’s experience making “Girls” with the experiences of other notable filmmakers of the same generation, including Greta Gerwig and the Safdie brothers, who were part of the downtown collective from which “Tiny Furniture” emerged. These others also started their careers with ultra-low-budget films, and from there they advanced gradually in the business. Gerwig acted in and wrote larger-scale movies before returning to directing, with the moderately budgeted “Lady Bird,” before taking on “Little Women” and the megaproduction of “Barbie.” Josh and Benny Safdie worked on a moderate budget in “Good Time” and a much bigger one on “Uncut Gems” before Josh made the colossus of “Marty Supreme.”

Dunham is no less original a filmmaker, and I wonder what would have happened if the success of “Tiny Furniture” had led to, so to speak, slightly larger furniture. Instead, the industrial structures of “Girls” left little room for the incremental development of production skills. Much of filmmaking is the process of filmmaking—the creation of an on-set reality, a world for the cast and crew, a social environment from which images emerge, as if naturally, when the camera rolls. But the reality into which Dunham stepped in order to produce “Girls” wasn’t one of her own making; the production had a size and a self-sustaining force that she couldn’t control to the extent that she had on “Tiny Furniture.” In that sense, her leap from the local realm of filmmaking to the grand stage of “Girls” seems less like a generous opportunity for a promising artist than like artistry stifled by the extractionary wiles of so-called prestige TV.

In short, the system of high-budget television production exerted mighty pressures on Dunham and on the show, a little for better but mostly for worse. The impressive scope of “Girls” and its momentous cast depended on that system, and Dunham learned a lot, fast, about the practice of TV and the milieu in which it’s made—and, indeed, about the harsh realities of the big time, which she writes about so incisively in “Famesick.” But those pressures were nonetheless, for the most part, detrimental to Dunham personally, to her artistic development, and to the inspirations that made the series so exciting at first. The two movies that she made after the series’ end lacked the vitality of her first feature. I’m impatient for the new movie that Dunham has en route, “Good Sex,” starring Natalie Portman; judging from the sharp-eyed energy of “Famesick,” her reset is already in progress. ♦