#lilly dancyger

[readingtostaysane]

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.”

[goreprofonde]

“We’re told the Wicked Witch wants the ruby slippers because they have magic powers—but so does any material object once possessed and cherished by a deceased loved one.”

- Lilly Dancyger, ‘The Wizard of Oz’ Is a Story About Grief.

[dk-thrive]

I was home, but even at home I floated around the edges, slightly removed.

My childhood started in New York City and then ping-ponged back and forth across the country until my mother and I finally came back to the East Village the summer before I started high school. As soon as my Converse touched the sun-scorched sidewalk, I grew deep, stubborn roots. New York was home; it was where I had learned to walk on the cracked sidewalks, and where all of my earliest memories were formed. In the first few years of my life, my heartbeat and breath had aligned themselves to the rhythm of New York so that nowhere else ever felt right. When we moved back, I felt like I was finally returning, as if from a long war. But I also felt like I was starting over, with no friends, no routines, nothing familiar or grounding. Both were true. I was in the strange position of coming home to somewhere unfamiliar… During the day, my mother tried to find work and an apartment, and I walked around the old-and-new neighborhood, trying to make up for seven years of absence. I traced and retraced routes between the three nearest subway stations, the park, the river, the corner stores and diners. I memorized subway lines and my coffee order, fast-forwarding familiarity. I sat on the same bench in Tompkins Square Park every day until it felt like mine. Pacing the neighborhood, scenting it like a cat, I felt equal parts a vast, quenching relief and an aching, hollow sadness. I was home, but even at home I floated around the edges, slightly removed.

— Lilly Dancyger, Negative Space (Santa Fe Writer's Project, May 1, 2021)

[rainsongmp3]

— lilly dancyger, “kissing girls”

[airplanes924]

Books I've Read in 2024

Number 49

First Love by Lilly Dancyger

[deadddontheinside]

burn it down, women writing about anger

[bigtickhk]

'Burn It Down' Diagnoses, Analyzes The State Of American Women's Anger

The anthology demonstrates that American women are just now at the starting line of exploring and understanding their anger; it's more about how they live with anger than about what makes them angry.

Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger edited by Lilly Dancyger https://amzn.to/2NkkHFB

[deehollowaywrites]

Catapult | What Catwoman Taught Me About Sexuality and Power | Lilly Dancyger

A new column from Lilly Dancyger on female villains, Catwoman, and finding power in sexuality through a costume.

I felt unstoppable; visible like something to witness rather than something to possess.