Lilly dancyger
Author of
First Love (Dial Press, 2024)
Negative Space (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2021)
Burn It Down (Seal Press, 2019)
Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship, and Negative Space. She lives in New York City, and is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. She teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA programs at Columbia University and Randolph College, and her work has been published by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Elle, and more.
Twitter / Instagram / www.lillydancyger.com / Represented by Annie Hwang
BOOKS BY lilly
First Love (Dial Press, 2024)
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’s devotion to the women in her life took on a new urgency—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 fairy tales 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.
Praise
A vivid, thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays that treats women’s friendships as the love stories they truly are, from the critically acclaimed author of Negative Space—Associated Press
A tender, unswerving homage to her found family, but also an insightful study of friendship as identity-crafting.—Elle
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?
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.
Featuring Schactman's artwork throughout, Negative Space explores Dancyger's grief, anger, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness her father hid from her, as well as her own.
Burn It Down (Seal Press, 2019)
A rich, nuanced exploration of women's anger from a diverse group of writers
Women are furious, and we're not keeping it to ourselves any longer. We're expected to be composed and compliant, but in a world that would strip us of our rights, disparage our contributions, and deny us a seat at the table of authority, we're no longer willing to quietly seethe behind tight smiles.
We're ready to burn it all down.
In this ferocious collection of essays, twenty-two writers explore how anger has shaped their lives: author of the New York Times bestseller The Empathy Exams Leslie Jamison confesses that she used to insist she wasn't angry -- until she learned that she was; Melissa Febos, author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning memoir Abandon Me, writes about how she discovered that anger can be an instrument of power; editor-in-chief of Bitch Media Evette Dionne dismantles the "angry Black woman" stereotype; and more.
Broad-ranging and cathartic, Burn It Down is essential reading for any woman who has scorched with rage -- and is ready to claim her right to express it.