First Love

“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

Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love- Essays on Friendship and Negative Space. She lives in New York City, and is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. She teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA programs at Columbia University and Randolph College, and her work has been published by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Elle, and more.

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