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First Love

(The Dial Press, 2024)

LAMBDA Literary Award Finalist

A bold, poignant essay collection that treats women's friendships as the love stories they truly are, from the critically acclaimed author of Negative Space

Lilly Dancyger always thought of her closest friendships as great loves, complex and profound as any romance. When her beloved cousin was murdered just as both girls were entering adulthood, Dancyger felt a new urgency in her devotion to the women in her life—a desire to hold her friends close while she still could. In First Love, this urgency runs through a striking exploration of the bonds between women, from the intensity of adolescent best friendship and fluid sexuality to mothering and chosen family.

Each essay in this incisive collection is grounded in a close female friendship in Dancyger's life, reaching outward to dissect cultural assumptions about identity and desire, and the many ways women create space for each other in a world that wants us small. Seamlessly weaving personal experience with literature and pop culture—ranging from fairytales to true crime, from Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath to Heavenly Creatures and the "sad girls" of Tumblr—Dancyger's essays form a kaleidoscopic story of a life told through friendships, and an expansive interrogation of what it means to love each other.

Though friendship will never be enough to keep us safe from the dangers of the world, Dancyger reminds us that love is always worth the risk, and that when tragedy strikes, it's our friends who will help us survive. In First Love, these essential bonds get their due.

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  • First Love is bracing in its honesty and verve and is as heady and intoxicating as the relationships it details. It's an astonishing work, one that made me laugh and cry and feel deeply grateful and nostalgic for my own deep friendships across the eras of my own life. —Pulitzer Prize finalist author of Easy Beauty, Chloé Cooper Jones 

  • This book is a god damn marvel of a mixtape. A fervent, generous compilation of love songs brought together so the whole is even more meaningful than its parts. First Love is poignant, ferociously smart, and unflinchingly honest. —CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife

  • First Love is like a paper fortune teller as essay collection, but for looking into Dancyger’s past instead of her future. Her life folds and refolds in each of these essays, revealing more as she goes in unexpected flashes, and she makes it look easy as she does it. . . . A heartbreaking, funny, wise companion. —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

  • What if our first and deepest female friendships were the real love stories? These stories hold open the possibility that female friendships are their own ontology, an extended flash, a magical space of being where anything is possible. A dazzling array of essays. —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water 

  • From childhood to adolescence and on to adulthood, the author’s intense bonds with other women, based on commonalities as varied as kinship, substance abuse or caregiving, place these essays integrating personal experience and cultural allusions alongside Leslie Jamison’s work. —Bethanne Patrick, The LA Times

  • A tender, unswerving homage to [Dancyger's] found family, but also an insightful study of friendship as identity-crafting, a way of assembling tools to compose (and improve) a self. —Lauren Puckett-Pope Elle

  • A soul-stirring compilation of essays about how our earliest intimacies—sisterly, friendly—so often resemble the intensity of romance, how the delineations between different kinds of relationships can blur, how if and when those relationships change or end it can feel like the most devastating heartbreak. —Michelle Hart, Electric Literature

  • We’re on a path to understanding friendship in a new light, and I know I’m only grateful to witness the carving of that path, thanks to people like Lilly Dancyger.  —Julia Hass, Literary Hub   

  • "A necessary, moving essay collection" —Ilana Masad, NPR

Negative Space

(Santa Fe Writers Project, 2021)

Despite her parents’ struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges? A memoir from the editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, Negative Space explores Dancyger’s own anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness that was hidden from her.

Dancyger's father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him—despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against the world that had taken him away. But as an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she'd created about her father—the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime—using his paintings, sculptures, and prints as a guide to piece together a truer story.

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  • "A lovely and heartbreaking book." —Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
  • " Negative Space is a beautiful restoration act." —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water
  • "Candid, thrilling, wickedly smart, Negative Space is one of the greatest memoirs of this, or any, time." —T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
  • "This book is a true accomplishment, one that often left me stunned and disturbed in all the right ways, all the ways brilliant art does." —Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body
  • "This book is so many things: a daughter's heartrending tribute, a love story riddled by addiction, a mystery whose solution lies at the intersection of art and memory. Together, they form a chorus that I could not turn away from, and didn't wish to." —Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
  • "Dancyger creates an unflinching account of her artist father’s snakebitten life and his struggles with addiction – peeling back the layers around an artistic practice that seems weighted with vulnerability." —Cynthia Carr, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
  • "Negative Space is a brilliant, moving, unique, thought-provoking meditation on the artistic life, fathers and daughters, and the struggle to live life at the highest pitch in each generation." —Mark Greif, author of Against Everything
  • "In Negative Space, Dancyger achieves that beautiful, often elusive, balance of writing about addiction with equal parts examination and empathy." —Erin Khar, author of Strung Out
  • “The beauty of Negative Space [...] is that the author's retelling pushes against the boundaries of what we understand as a biography — and turns the narrative into a something like a whodunit, a supernatural thriller in which a journalist interrogates a ghost, a story in which art speaks about the past eloquently, and a biography of how a writer came to be.” —Gabino Iglesias, NPR
  • "Negative Space is a significant debut. Using her exceptional journalistic skills, Dancyger recounts the indelible life of Joe Schactman, her father, an artist and a heroin addict, who died when she was 12. Dancyger’s dexterous usage of time functions as a critical lens, panning in, out, and around, keeping memory fluid." —Yvonne Conza, LA Review of Books
  • "Every line of this wise memoir hits hard. But despite all the darkness in Negative Space, it reads like a testament to the power of family love." —Apple Books
  • “Dancyger crafts a striking composition out of found objects, a poignant portrait of the identities we construct out of grief.”—Oprah Daily
  • A "fierce, intimate work" —Kristin Iversen Refinery29
  • “With empathy and gorgeous prose, Dancyger excavates, explores, and attempts to understand her father—a brilliant artist and addict—as he was: flawed, complicated, and so very, very loved.” —Carolyn Quimby, The Millions
  • “Each sentence is a finely wrought work of art unto itself.” —Jane Ratcliffe, Electric Literature

Burn It Down

(Seal Press, 2019)

Women are angry, and from the #MeToo movement to the record number of women running for political office, they’re finally expressing it. But all rage isn’t created equal. Who gets to be angry? (If there’s now space for cis white women’s anger, what about black women? Trans women?) How do women express their anger? And what will they do with it-individually and collectively?

In Burn It Down, a diverse group of women authors explore their rage-from the personal to the systemic, the unacknowledged to the public. One woman describes her rage at her own body when she becomes ill with no explanation. Another writes of the anger she inherits from her father. One Pakistani American writes, “To openly express my anger would be too American,” and explains why. Broad-ranging and cathartic, Burn It Down is essential reading for any woman who has burned with rage but questioned if she is entitled to express it.

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  • "Burn It Down is a potent literary offering--a revolution born within the collective rage--expressed, unleashed, sublimated, and capsuled to honor our feminist legacy. Scorched earth speaks through these brilliant women who teach us that vulnerability and ire writ large will save those who have been shamed and condemned. Glorious, punk as hell, and utterly necessary."—Sophia Shalmiyev, award-winning author of Mother Winter
  • "Burn It Down is deeply affirming for any woman who has struggled with anger in this difficult world. There is no judgement here; only alchemy." —Kelly Sundberg, author of Goodbye, Sweet Girl
  • "The twenty-two essays collected in Burn It Down are a gift of sanity and clear-eyed moral vision in an increasingly degraded moral world. This book galvanizes women’s collective and individual rage, even as it redefines how we could and should understand that anger — and ourselves."—Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings and The Other Side
  • "A powerful book" (Chicago Review of Books)
  • "An impressive collection of essays" (LA Review of Books)
  • "An extraordinary collection of talent" (NPR)
  • "This book doesn’t splash water onto female rage, it stands back in awe at the immensity of the flames." (The Washington Post)
  • "Required reading" (Literary Hub October preview)
  • The Millions "Most Anticipated" list for October
  • "It’s the literary equivalent of screaming into a pillow, and reading it will make you feel so much less alone." (Yahoo! October preview)
  • "Make room on your shelf next to Eloquent Rage, Good and Mad and Rage Becomes Her" (BookPage review)
  • "Burn It Down legit changed my brain. I found myself thinking about anger in general and women’s anger in particular in a whole new way, and seeing how reigning in and policing our anger has been sustaining patriarchal structures for centuries. Read this beautiful book and feel your beautiful rage." (The Rumpus "What to Read When the Patriarchy's Got You Down" list)
  • "Burn It Down is both educational and cathartic. It infuriates and simultaneously relieves." (Bust fall preview list)
  • One of the most recommended books of the season (Literary Hub)