When Lilly Dancyger started working on her first memoir, Negative Space, nearly 15 years ago, she’d set out to write a tale of grief and loss and discovery—the saga of her artist father, who’d died when Dancyger was 12. But the manuscript kept ballooning, unintentionally, with stories about her friends.
“It felt strange to talk about that part of my life without going into all those relationships, because they really were the most important thing in my life at that time,” Dancyger says when we meet over Zoom in early May. Still, she maintains, the book needed to shave its excess. She couldn’t fill every other page with odes to her roommates and confidants, however substantial their influence in her youth. “As a consolation to myself,” she says, “I was like, ‘You can write about them later, you know?’”
Dancyger kept that promise. Her latest book, First Love: Essays on Friendship—out now from Dial Press—is a tender, unswerving homage to her found family, but also an insightful study of friendship as identity-crafting, a way of assembling tools to compose (and improve) a self. The essays draw from Dancyger’s own life without any gloss or euphemism: The author summons vivid vignettes from her tempestuous youth in New York City; her agony following the death of her beloved cousin Sabina, who was murdered in her early 20s; and her self-reconstruction as a “hypercompetent” author and academic after having dropped out of high school in her formative years. Throughout each of these memories resides a dear friend, often a handful of them, each of whom shaped Dancyger’s understanding of her world, etching her concepts of morality and femininity and creativity into bone. This approach makes First Love more of a memoir-in-essays than a traditional work of cultural criticism, and yet Dancyger makes a remarkable hybrid of the two genres, weaving in references to Sylvia Plath, Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Janis Joplin, and In Cold Blood to make salient points about sisterhood in the age of “sad girl” Tumblr, the true-crime boom, and the iPhone camera.
“I wanted to look outward and take a broader view,” Dancyger says. “Each close relationship in my life is an entryway into a different aspect of myself, a different way of being in the world, so I thought each of these essays could use the relationship to open up and talk about something else.”
Ahead, Dancyger discusses her approach to the enormous topic of sisterly love, and argues for the power of surrounding yourself with people who bring out “different versions” of your personality.
A lot of essay collections are broadly topical, looping in pieces of the author’s personal experience but keeping the focus on wide-lens cultural criticism. You employ the opposite tactic: Your essays are each rooted first and foremost in memoir. Why did that feel like the correct way for you to format First Love?
Anything that reaches for objectivity is less compelling to me as a writer. Even in the pieces in this book that do go beyond the personal and say something larger about culture and about existing in the world as a woman—they’re all still very subjective. They’re all still very much about my experience of those things, because it’s hard enough to speak on my own experience with authority.
I’m not trying to speak for anybody else or be at all prescriptive. This never was going to be a definitive book about friendship, because I don’t think I could write a definitive book about friendship. I can only write about my own friendships and hope that readers see themselves reflected in it. That feels very different to me than saying, “This is what friendship is.”
I appreciate that instinct. I do think many authors are encouraged, for better or worse, to become the ultimate experts on a topic, and I don’t know how possible that is every time.
I mean, I’m a millennial New Yorker, white, a Jewish only child. My experience of friendship is going to be very different from anybody else’s.
I’m curious about how you decided which specific essays—and even which specific relationships—to feature.
Choosing which relationships to include really didn’t have anything to do with which relationships are more impactful or significant in my life. It really was about which relationships made my wheels turn in an interesting way; which relationships I had something compelling to say about. With some that was very clear right away, and with some—okay, there are a couple in there where I was like, This person has to be in there. What can I say about this person? And went looking for the topic based on the fact that it would be weird to leave whoever out. There also were several that I planned and thought about and even drafted, but they just didn’t make the cut on a craft or quality level, even if the relationship was important, the idea compelling.
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In the book, you highlight how the lines between platonic love and romantic love are often blurrier than some care to admit, because of that desire to be so fully consumed by your friends—especially when you’re young. That feeling is so potent, and also so misunderstood.
Absolutely, and I felt a little bit of that, too. [The intensity of the feeling] is not embarrassing, but it’s vulnerable.
It’s just less expected, I think, to spend time articulating how intensely you love your friends. I put that stuff down on the page and then I gave it to the people I had been writing about, and there was a little bit of—I don’t know, a feeling of being exposed. But, also, I wouldn’t have had those stories to tell or had that depth of emotion to express if I didn’t have the kinds of relationships where I could write a long essay about how much I love them, and send it to them and not feel embarrassed. The friends that I did send these essays to responded in really lovely ways, but yeah, I think it is not usual, right? And that’s why [writing the book] felt necessary.
Do you feel as though we’re in an era where these stories about friendship are taking more of a central focus, both in publishing and in Hollywood? Or does it still feel as though platonic love is brushed aside in favor of romance?
Once I started writing about this, I became much more aware of every article, every show, and it does kind of feel like we’re having a cultural moment right now where people are talking more about the importance of friendship, which is great. But I think cultural change happens slowly. So friendship is “having a moment” right now, but that doesn’t mean that these deeply entrenched social norms about who we actually prioritize in our lives, when it comes down to it, have changed overnight.
There’s so much lip service paid to, ‘Oh, this TV show is highlighting how central friendships are to our lives,’ which is true, but is that actually reflected in the way our society is set up? The way that we live? The way that we parent?
There’s a difference between loving your friends and actually holding space in your life for them to be a priority.
Exactly.
And I don’t blame people who don’t do that, necessarily, because it’s hard. Everything is set up for you not to do that, right? Like you go to the hospital, and who’s allowed to visit you, right? It’s not enough to say, “I’m her best friend. Let me in.” You’ll be brushed aside.
I loved your essay titled “Portraiture,” about your friend’s photos of you and how they impacted your self-perception. It made me wonder: In your opinion, how much of a deep, intimate friendship is about seeing yourself reflected, versus really seeing the other person? Is it a perfect blend of both?
I think it’s both. I think that seeing the other person clearly gives you a window into a version of yourself that you could be, and so the relationship is who you are in that context with that person. The question of which of those things do we value and want to hold on to is maybe open to debate.
Also, I am a Gemini, so I think maybe I have an extreme version of that, where I really do feel like I exist as a different version of myself with each person that I’m close to. But not in a false way! I feel like when people talk about this, often it sounds like a Talented Mr. Ripley situation, where you’re intentionally putting on an act, but I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s that there is that aspect of you existing already, and different people access or wake up or connect to those different parts of yourself.
That’s a lot of what the thrill of connecting with someone in a really intense way is—maybe that person’s connecting with a part of you that has never really been witnessed or engaged with before. And that’s what we want most as human beings, I think, right? To be seen and known and loved for all the different versions of ourselves.
That’s part of where the limitation of the precedents we give to romantic love comes in: this expectation that one person should see and understand and love and speak to every single aspect of you. I just don’t think that’s real and possible. There’s a version of me that I am at home with my spouse, and that is a version of me that I’m comfortable being most of the time. Maybe that’s what we pick a significant other based on, like, “Okay, this is the default, main relationship feeling that I’m happy to inhabit and live in most of the time.” But I still crave those connections with the people who are important in my life. I still need to go and visit a close friend and go be this other version of myself for a while.
At the risk of sounding wildly cliché, it is so much harder to be our “full selves” than we often care to realize. There’s so many layers to who we are that we do need to surround ourselves with people who draw out different elements. That’s not a negative thing.
And that doesn’t mean any of those elements are less authentic.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
