first love: essays on friendship by Lilly Dancyger
rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
review below the cut
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“Does a first sisterly love set the bar for a lifetime of friendships?”
A book about friendships, a book about identity, a book about pain and womanhood, a book about love. This is what Lilly Dancyger offers us in this touching memoir.
First love starts out as a love letter to her younger cousin, who the author loved deeply, and who was killed before she reached adulthood. We see how the pain changed her and shaped her future, but we also see how she kept on loving, how she remained close with her girl friends and how they were so important in her journey through her grief.
“I wanted to pull these women to me and hold them there, keep them in my sight where I knew they were safe, keep them within arm’s reach where I could pat the backs of their hands and smooth their hair and tell them they were loved.”
Friendships are about the most important relationships we have in our lives, especially as teenagers, especially as girls, as women. And Dancyger has so much respect for teenagers, she writes about those years of her life with such tenderness, with such love, but also she doesn’t deviate from the pain that surges during those tenuous years.
She even gives the Plath and the sad tumblr girls their flowers, which I appreciated. She connects these sad girl with the sadness one of her friends went through which later developed into severe depression until she ended her life. And it is touching that despite these being very different types of sadness, she delivers each of them with respect, not diminishing one to uplift the other. She allows teenagers to be sad, but she also wonders if this sad literature doesn’t correlate to the increasing suicide rates we’ve seen in the past years. And of course, she talks about her friend for pages upon pages until she mentions her depression, not reducing her to a tragedy.
I loved getting lost into her friend group and felt myself comparing her relationships with those I’ve had over the years. And although I’ve never even stepped foot in New York, didn’t have even a fraction of the troubled life she had, deep down my relationships with my own girls were the same: filled with memories of love.
In a world where female friendships are so looked down upon and sometimes even mocked, said to be rooted in jealously and hate. Dancyger paints a completely different picture, one that is much more accurate. Friendships are complex and so are we, and we change, we drift apart but still the memories remain, the shapeshifting that we allow to happen with these friendships remain and we cherish them, whether we want it or not.
In the end we return to Sabina, her cousin, the reason behind this book, and it’s beautiful how she closes this memoir.
“I spent years preparing myself to write a crime story, waiting for the desire to know more about Sabina’s murder to bubble up in me. I expected it, but it hasn’t arrived. When I finally sat down to write about Sabina, the story that came out was not about murder at all. It was a love story.”















