First Love, Lilly Dancyger
First Love, Lilly Dancyger
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First Love
Essays on Friendship

Author: Lilly Dancyger

Narrator: Lilly Dancyger

Unabridged: 5 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/07/2024

Synopsis

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST • A “vivid, thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays” (Associated Press) that treats women’s friendships as the love stories they truly are, from the critically acclaimed author of Negative Space

“A tender, unswerving homage to her found family, but also an insightful study of friendship as identity-crafting.”—Elle

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.

About Lilly Dancyger

Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. She’s the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger, and her writing has been published by Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Playboy, Glamour, Longreads, The Rumpus, and more. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Quirine

This book felt like a mix between Patti Smith’s Just Kids and Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love. I couldn’t stop reading this one. I laughed, I cried, I related so often (especially the essay ‘In Search of Smoky cafes’ in which the author talked about her teenage longing for living a boh......more

Goodreads review by gabrielle

thank you to the publisher and netgalley for the e-arc! it feels very strange to dissect someone's work of memoir pieces, so i won't be saying much, but: although this had a few good lines that i highlighted, i ultimately didn't feel very blown away by the content. and that's okay! the author wrote i......more

Quotes

“From childhood to adolescence and on to adulthood, [Dancyger’s] intense bonds with other women, based on commonalities as varied as kinship, substance abuse or caregiving, place these essays integrating personal experience and cultural allusions alongside Leslie Jamison’s work.”—The Los Angeles Times

“The collection stands out not just for its elegant, unadorned writing but also for the way she effortlessly pivots between personal history and spot-on cultural criticism.”—Associated Press

“A tender, unswerving homage to [Dancyger’s] found family, but also an insightful study of friendship as identity-crafting, a way of assembling tools to compose (and improve) a self.”—Elle
 
“Early in First Love: Essays on Friendship, Lilly Dancyger writes about her fire escape [. . .], a perfect metaphor for the refuge found in friendship, for the ways we hold and make space for one another, and this book is an extension of that: a hand to squeeze, a shoulder to lean on.”—The Millions

“What if our first and deepest female friendships were the real love stories? Lilly Dancyger holds open the possibility that female friendships are their own ontology, an extended flash, a magical space of being where anything is possible. It’s a dazzling array of essays.”—Lidia Yuknavitch, Literary Hub

“First Love is like a paper fortune teller as essay collection, but for looking into Dancyger’s past instead of her future. Her life folds and refolds in each of these essays, revealing more as she goes in unexpected flashes, and she makes it look easy as she does it. . . . A heartbreaking, funny, wise companion.”—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“First Love is bracing in its honesty and verve, and is as heady and intoxicating as the relationships it details. It’s an astonishing work, one that made me laugh and cry and feel grateful and nostalgic for my own friendships across the eras of my life.”—Chloé Cooper Jones, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Easy Beauty

“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.”—CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife

“Reading Lilly Dancyger’s First Love, I felt immediately returned to first loves of my own—late 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.”—Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams

“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.”—Publishers Weekly

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