Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

FIRST LOVE

Lilly Dancyger

Essays on Friendship

When Lilly Dancyger was twenty-three years old, her best friend and cousin, Sabina, was violently raped and murdered. In the face of devastating loss, Dancyger slowly healed by gaining strength and support from her female friends. FIRST LOVE is a beautiful reflection of that, and we are so pleased to share it with you. Each essay in the fierce and passionate collection examines a different female friendship in her life, starting with her first love, Sabina.

Just as each friendship unlocks a new realm of self-discovery for Dancyger, each essay in this memoir begins with the deeply personal and ripples outward to examine broader cultural assumptions about feminine identity and desire, and the many ways women create and hold safe spaces for each other and ourselves in a world of covert (and often overt) patriarchy. Dancyger's focus ranges from the eighteenth-century notion of romantic friendship to the New York punk scene of her teen years, to film and nature-based spiritual practices, creating a kaleidoscopic portrait of female identity, and how women nurture each other.

At its core, FIRST LOVE is a celebration of the role female friendships play in women's live. Friendships that are breathtaking, soul-shaking, manic-joy-inducing love stories. Although our friendships cannot cocoon us 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 it.

Lilly Dancyger is the author of NEGATIVE SPACE, a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, and the editor of BURN IT DOWN, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women's anger. Lilly's writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City and teaches creative nonfiction at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Available products
Book Published 2024-05-07 by The Dial Press
Book Published 2024-05-07 by The Dial Press

Comments

Reading Lilly Dancyger's First Love, I felt immediately returned to first loves of my ownlate-night phone calls and sardine-sleeping-bag sleepovers, falling asleep to the sound a friend's voice saying, Are you still awake? Dancyger understands the urgency and entanglement of these early intimacies--the chrysalis and consolation of these bonds--but also the ways we are reborn into friendship across the course of our lives. Her prose is tender and true, fiercely felt and finely etched; her insights precise and ever-peeling, pulling back layers of feeling to get at the additional layers underneath. From buzzed youth to domestic routines, from fire-escape marathons to the confessional booths of late-night taxi backseats, she writes into the deepest reaches of love and invites us to feel witnessed and rearranged by what she finds.

In these essays, love is inextricably bound with pain, a duality the author renders with a lyrical and affecting rawness. Cathartic and intense, this leaves a mark.

This book is a goddamn marvel of a mixtape - a fervent, generous compilation of love songs brought together so that the whole is even more meaningful than its parts. First Love is poignant, ferociously smart, and unflinchingly honest.

First Love is a feminist-fresh look at friendship: how the deep love of other women can keep us alive, thinking, and reaching for our best selves. Lilly Dancyger pulls from her own life to create raw, beautiful, and haunting essays.

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.

Lilly Dancyger writes about women's interior lives with the kind of attention and care the world is sorely lacking. I'm so excited for First Love, a book about one of the most central parts of any coming of age storythe solace, love and grief to be found between best friends.

Korean: Munhakdongne

The complicated alchemy of intense female friendship drives so much of our culture, but for many of useven the people shaped by itits workings remain something of a mystery. I can't think of a better person to gently unlock the secrets of friendship than Lilly Dancyger.