Lena Dunham is a mother now. The Girls creator, 40, and her husband, indie musician Luis Felber, also 40, welcomed a daughter via surrogate, and Dunham wrote about it herself in a Vogue essay published on September 16.

The magazine posted a photograph on Instagram of the new family together, Dunham holding the baby while Felber kissed the top of her head. Small detail, but it says a lot about where this couple has landed after five years of marriage.

Dunham wrote that her daughter arrived 13 days past her due date, and that she was so focused on the surrogate during delivery that she almost forgot to look down at her own child until she heard the baby cry. "I saw her face, gasping just as she did," she wrote, describing the baby's eyes taking in light and shadow for the first time. When the midwife told her to say hello, Dunham did exactly that. "You… you look nothing like I thought you would, but exactly right," she wrote of the moment. "We've been waiting for you, do you know that?"

This birth caps a road that started long before Felber came into the picture. Dunham has spoken before, in Vogue and in her book Famesick, about undergoing a full hysterectomy in 2017 at 31 because of endometriosis. She revisited that decision on Today in April, telling Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones that calling it a "choice" doesn't quite capture it. "If you're in pain 24 hours a day, it isn't really a choice because no one can live like that," she said, adding that the average diagnosis delay for endometriosis runs about ten years.

She'd wanted to be a mother long before the surgery, she said, and it took time after the operation to process what she'd given up to end the pain. But she also told the hosts she'd met plenty of people who built families in plenty of different ways since then, and that she'd arrived somewhere grateful, whichever way it happened for her.

As for Felber, he's not exactly new to public life himself, just not in the way Bollywood readers might expect. Born in Winchester in 1986 to a Peruvian mother and British father, he spent early childhood in Peru and Chile before returning to Britain at seven. He performs as Attawalpa, a name pulled from his middle name Atahualpa and his Peruvian heritage, something he's said shapes his music "sonically as well as visibly." He taught himself guitar off MTV, played in bands through his twenties, wrote for other artists, and even worked on a track with Mick Jagger that turned up on the HBO series Vinyl in 2016. His own debut album, Presence, came out in October 2022.

He and Dunham met on a blind date set up through mutual friends, ended up walking London for hours, and moved in together within months. Felber has said he decided to propose after Dunham mentioned marrying him someday while she was in the hospital, he took it as an invitation rather than a hypothetical. They married in September 2021 at London's Union Club.

No word yet on the baby's name.