If I had a nickel for every time this year a controversy-stoking Twitter power-user who attended college in Ohio in the late 2000s published a follow-up memoir to their decade-old, bestselling account of early life, I’d have two nickels. Which, as the meme puts it, isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

J. D. Vance’s Communion, an account of his conversion to Catholicism—among other things—arrives in 2026 on the heels of Lena Dunham’s Famesick, an account of her struggles with illness and addiction, among other things. Both books are sequels to splashy memoirs the authors wrote in their late twenties. As their authors now crest the age of forty, they look back on their high-profile, high-conflict early adulthoods and share lessons learned. If this seems like an unlikely pairing to you, imagine how it would seem to them. And yet, to understand what Vance is doing (and avoiding) with Communion, it’s worth comparing him to the other infamous Millennial striver who keeps telling us her story and who, unlike Vance, got only some of what she always wanted.

Vance and Dunham could not have more different backgrounds if they tried; each one’s childhood looks like a stereotype the other would invent to make a point through hyperbole. But it’s precisely their unapologetic stance toward those traits they knew others would mock that made their careers. Grabbing the derogatory epithet first (“Hillbilly,” “Girl”) allowed both to position themselves as confident spokespeople, exemplars of a tribe, unconcerned with political correctness and ready to show what others might consider the worst parts of themselves (a mother with a pill problem, a normal-sized nude body). That bravery, combined with extraordinary talent, hard work, and ambition, catapulted them into the public eye. They were both perfect fits for the 2010s, an era when links still drove web traffic and we could still be captivated by a messy bitch who loved drama.

Now, having achieved the heights of fame and fortune and the lows of the emptiness that runaway success seems to provide, they have turned to, respectively, religion and sobriety. Dunham’s book, if not an apology, is an explanation for some of her more confounding behavior during those Girls years, and she frames her current actions as “living amends” for earlier misdeeds. Vance, for his part, credits his re-entry into religious faith and conversion to Catholicism with providing him inner calm and a kinder, gentler way of looking at economic policy. Both books are written by writers in “older, wiser” mode looking ruefully at their younger mistakes (sex with alcoholics, liking Ayn Rand). But only one of them is a fun read.

If Famesick isn’t quite a “tell-all,” it’s at least a “tell-most,” with juicy and horrifying details about Dunham’s health and the unglamorous side of Hollywood on most every page. Communion reads as a “tell some”—at best. Its subtitle is “Finding My Way Back to Faith,” and Vance’s journey from believer to atheist and back again is its subject. Although it touches on personal moments of feeling God’s grace or absence, it never stays personal for long, avoiding the mess of shameful thoughts and embarrassing deeds that Dunham revels in.

Vance’s conversion seems to have been deeply intellectual, prompted as much by reading Christian authors and studying religion’s social utility as by moments of crushing awe. I must admit this approach is appealing to me. As a member of the “religious but not spiritual” community, I welcome every bookish weirdo into the faith, trusting that the Holy Spirit knows what it’s doing. Yet the book’s stilted prose and barely concealed political agenda make what could be an interesting, if nerdy, story into a boring one whose omissions say as much as its contents.

Communion has many literal footnotes (articles from The Atlantic, data from Pew), which struck me as odd in a memoir, but it also contains frequent factual asides. They remind the reader, like an old-time radio announcer setting the scene in a period film, that in 2003, “The Iraq War had just started and George W. Bush was president, with sky-high approval ratings.” Who, I wondered while reading, is this context for? Who needs sociological background on themselves?

“Why people like me lose their faith is a hard question to answer confidently,” Vance writes. “This is especially true given the nature of religious belief, where family pressure, emotional attachment, and rationality intersect in psychologically complicated ways.” That seems reasonable, but I imagine most people reading this book don’t want to know about people in general; they want the specifics about one particular guy. Vance will admit flaws and profess feelings, but the connection to what’s wrong with America or its elites is never too far away, the personal moment allowed to shine only briefly before getting wrapped in larger, blander packaging.

Vance’s description of his family’s Covid experience encapsulates this bloodlessness. He follows a specific scene—buying a thousand rounds of ammunition, rice, flour, beef, and ketchup from Walmart in preparation for “the China virus”—with a generic critique that the policy response was flawed because “many of our leaders seemed unable to make basic trade-offs.” In addition to wondering what happened to all the bullets and the food, I’m curious which leaders he’s referring to and whether or not they include Trump, who was, after all, president at the time.

Vance’s analysis isn’t wrong: schools were closed for too long in some states and people definitely acted like jerks when they didn’t have to. But I have no clue how, as parents of an infant, he and his wife, Usha, navigated those months themselves. What did they do practically? Masks or no? How did it feel emotionally? And, given the book’s main topic, I’d like to know: Did he try, as my family did, to attend online church? If so, what did he pray for? I can understand not writing a soul-searching memoir that includes the upheavals of 2020; I have a harder time understanding deciding to write one and then mostly mentioning ketchup.

In chapter six, he quotes a scene from Hillbilly Elegy about trying to purchase a night in a motel room for his mother, and the writing on that page is so much better—more evocative, more lyrical, more vulnerable—that it seems almost to be from a different author. A book by that man about his spiritual struggles would have been compelling; the one we get is often inert, with data in place of confessions. Vance is an avowed fan of Reconciliation (me too). As he says in Communion, “The fact that there was a sacramental ritual around guilt…attracted me to Catholicism.” Unfortunately, his priests appear now to be getting his best material.

A compelling memoir depicts interesting life events in gripping prose. I’d put Hillbilly Elegy and Famesick both in that category. Dunham’s first memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, is entertaining, but the stories of Dunham’s life pre-fame aren’t particularly newsworthy. (Its most alarming event, allegations of pedophilia, happened after the book was published and appears, of course, in Famesick.) Communion, on the other hand, is an action-packed story told by someone who seems to have heard it all thirdhand, recounted to an audience recently arrived from Mars.

Part of this stems from the fact that Dunham is secure enough in her current career (Netflix just paid $55 million for her next movie) to burn a few bridges and name a few names. But Vance is still in the middle of his journey as a politician, perhaps only a few years from its apex, and you can’t talk smack about your coworkers when you still have to walk into the office every day. Dunham’s fraught interactions with Adam Driver and toxic frenemy dynamic with co-showrunner Jenni Konner are fair game to write about now that the show is wrapped and the relationships are over. But Vance’s commitment to leaving all useful bridges intact means that despite having had an objectively fascinating past ten years, he chooses to speak in the broad categories of a pundit and candidate (“many of our leaders,” “everyday Americans”), not the up-close perspective of someone in the room.

Vance also has little to say (positive or negative) about the men who have accompanied, and bankrolled, his meteoric rise. He defends his pivot from Trump critic to Trump defender by insisting that he only objected to “stylistic elements” of Trump in 2016, and he can now see beyond the style to the success of his political substance. Vance presumably interacts with the president daily, yet he speaks of the man like he’s only ever seen him on TV. In subtler excuse-making, not unlike Evangelicals discussing King Cyrus, Vance also talks about how God uses flawed men (including murderous sexual deviants from the Old Testament) to bring about his divine plans. “King David is terribly unfaithful to his wife and brutally violent in his administration” reads to me, at least, as a justification of more than just King David.

Vance dates the beginnings of his political reorientation to his bewilderment at the unabashedly emotional response of shocked Never Trumpers on election night 2016. Much like his point about Covid overreaction, it is certainly true that some people were very annoying in late November of that year. I would also say, though, that picking a political team out of a desire to avoid sore losers is a harder sell after the events of January 6, 2021—a date that the book slides right by.

Dunham, too, has regrets about her 2016 political commentary (at the time she was a prominent Hillary spokesperson). But, having not joined any administration and instead having moved to England, it suffices for her to casually drop, between parentheses, “I know now, I wish I’d just posted a BERNIE sign in my window instead,” and be done with the issue.

The list of similarities between Vance and Dunham can seem strangely long: they both suffer from anxiety and relentlessly imagine nightmare worst-case scenarios, they both spent their teens in AOL chatrooms, they both excel at cultivating powerful mentors but chafe at authority, they both say nicer things about their fathers than their mothers—it goes on and on. But the overlap between their books isn’t merely a set of intriguing coincidences. Both memoirs revolve around the tensions between work and parenthood, and in different ways tell the same story: to have a high-powered career is to be in an environment that would prefer you didn’t have a uterus.

Vance, as a man and father, comes at this the way he comes at everything else in the book—with a few personal details followed by a handful of studies. His story of falling in love with Usha makes her sound truly amazing: beautiful, brilliant, grounded, forgiving. Her commitment to having a family is one of their shared values. And his story of their first son starts with him googling “challenges of raising a boy” before the child is even born, which, I guess, explains where all the charts come from.

Here Vance works hard to position himself as someone who understands what contemporary women are going through and wants to make it better. “Set to the side the different expectations for men and women in the workplace and the home,” he writes. “The basic biological facts of childbirth, recovery, and breastfeeding mean that for at least the first few months of a child’s life, their mother will necessarily carry more of the burden. A standard that rewards spending less time with children (or delaying childbirth) will necessarily fall hardest on women—at least those who decide to have families.” And while this is, again, all very term-paper-sounding, with no sense of the toll children have had on Usha’s particular body and career, he’s not wrong.

Vance sounds the alarm that women are having fewer children than they want, and Dunham’s two books provide a heartwrenching demonstration of that effect in action, with all the gory, individual details Vance is disinclined to mention. In Not That Kind of Girl, Dunham refers to having babies abstractly (one day she’ll look back with her grandchildren, etc.). She assumes they will be there, but, other than a brief hint that her endometriosis might make it difficult, the kids themselves seem inevitable. If she and her sibling got here, her future kids will as well.

Famesick provides the painful reality check. The endometriosis that lurked in book one dominates in book two, causing tremendous physical pain that she suffers through in order to make her show. The stress of the job exacerbates its symptoms and those of her Ehlers-Danlos syndrome; ultimately, at the age of thirty-one, she has a hysterectomy. The pressure also leads to a Klonopin addiction, for which she eventually goes to rehab. As she puts it:

Everything that had happened publicly was harder than I let on…I always struggled physically but my symptoms, which seemed diffuse, were never collated into a diagnosis, especially in a world where the pain of girls and women is dismissed. Stress has a measurable effect on autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, and worsened my physical symptoms, so ironically making Girls—arguably the best thing that had ever happened to me but also the hardest I had ever worked—only served to make me sicker.

The absence of children is a sadness coursing through Dunham’s book, but her current life certainly includes other joys. She married in 2021 and seems to be enjoying a rich life with her husband, friends, and a menagerie of animals (making her, technically, a childless cat et cetera lady—a term Vance apologizes for in his book, though his accusations of pet-eating among Haitian Americans seem to merit no regret). But no one can have it “all”—career, family, worldly success, spiritual values—without giving something up. It’s just a question of what (or who) gets sacrificed.

Because for all that Vance insists that he is promoting an alternate, Christian vision of society where women and children would prosper, he refuses to grapple with the real costs of his policies to women and children. He deservedly touts the increased child tax credit in the Working Families Tax Cut Plan without explaining why such a credit had to be part of a bill that provided most of the tax benefits to those earning more than a million dollars a year or that was financed with cuts to health-insurance subsidies, SNAP, and Medicaid. Vance also applauds Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to reform health care to ensure that no one “died in the streets,” yet neglects his aggressive first-term campaign to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, the first bill that insisted pregnant women not be denied insurance for having a “preexisting condition.” As someone who went through this scenario while pregnant in the pre-Obamacare days, I could provide him with either charts or graphs or harrowing personal anecdotes, as needed.

Vance concludes his book on a hopeful note, telling how Usha has recently changed her mind and agreed to his request to have a fourth child, which he had been asking for and she had been refusing “for years.” Having been so circumspect about the details of her pregnancies with the previous three, as well as her experiences of labor and postpartum, we’re left to guess why she might have been hesitant in the first place. Since it’s not her memoir, it’s fair that she keep her privacy; as told, however, we get the punchline without the setup, and a vague sense that what women really need to increase their fertility is to get harangued by the vice president.

One last synchronicity: Dunham begins Not That Kind of Girl with a quote from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary about Emma longing for something to happen to her. In Communion, Vance mentions René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, which Girard based on his reading of Bovary, in two sequential chapters. (Briefly, mimetic desire is the idea that our peers shape our wants, and that while thinking we pursue things because of our innate interest in them, we are actually imitating those we admire.) Vance credits Girard, whom he learned of from billionaire Peter Thiel, with helping him understand social pressure at Yale; he also credits Girard’s scapegoat theory, in addition to Thiel’s mentorship, with pushing him, at that time an atheist, toward Christianity.

Thiel also spent roughly $15 million on Vance’s 2022 Ohio Senate run, but in the book, he is introduced primarily as a Christian role model. The Senate campaign itself is described as “a quirky intellectual project: an effort to make what I thought were more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy.” A quirky intellectual project with much greater success than most, I suppose. In Communion, Thiel is not a financial benefactor but the person who, via Girard, gets Vance out of the meritocratic status game and focused on what really matters. It’s also true that, for as much as Vance claims to have rejected empty, careerist Yale Law School values, he himself notes that “a White House job” (or, presumably, a Senate seat) is the most impressive perch out there to Yale students. Mimesis and meme come from the same Greek root, mimos: imitator.

Madame Bovary thus floats over both stories—maybe not surprising, since they are about people desperately working to make something extraordinary of themselves, even at great cost, not satisfied with the humdrum anonymity of ordinary life. At the novel’s end, Emma Bovary, who so passionately wanted something to happen, gets her something, but most of it is terrible. She kills herself, her husband dies, and her young daughter is sent to live in poverty with distant relatives and work in a cotton factory.

The book doesn’t end on Emma and her longing, however. Flaubert focuses instead on the pharmacist Monsieur Homais, a cunning, hypocritical, relentlessly ambitious man, a secondary character now achieving main-character status. Homais has worked aggressively, writing articles, picking intellectual fights, and refusing to take responsibility for the sins he encourages in others. He has tried to advance his social position, clout, and wealth, and the world, while punishing Emma, rewards Homais for his shameless hustle.

The last line of the book is: “He has an enormous practice; the authorities treat him with consideration, and public opinion protects him. He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honor.”

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