First Love: Essays on Friendship

(Hardback)

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A bracing, intimate essay collection about the power and complexity of female friendship in the wake of violence, from the critically acclaimed author of Negative Space. When Lilly Dancyger's beloved cousin Sabina was murdered just as both girls were entering their young adult lives, the shock and grief altered her perception of what it meant to be a woman in the world, and rippled through her closest friendships. The loss of her first love-Sabina-becomes the springboard for this bold and refreshing exploration of the bonds between women, from the intensity of adolescent best friendships and fluid sexuality to mothering and chosen family. Each essay in First Love is grounded in a close female friendship in Dancyger's life, expanding outward to dissect cultural assumptions about feminine 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 pop culture and literature ranging from nineteenth century fairytales to true crime, Anais 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 incisive exploration of what it means to love each other. First Love elevates friendships to the love stories they truly are, giving them the deep consideration that romantic relationships have enjoyed for centuries. 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.

Reviews

This book is a goddamn marvel of a mixtapea fervent, generous compilation of love songs brought together so the whole is even more meaningful than its parts. Dancyger elevates friendship to its proper station, naming the loves of her life and storytelling about the riches, comforts, and insights those relationships have offered her and her beloveds. First Love is poignant, ferociously smart, and unflinchingly honest.CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife

What if our first and deepest female friendships were the real love stories Lilly Dancygers First Love inhabits the space between young women before their bodies, identities, ideas, and dreams get sucked into the social void of commodity and objectification. Like the moment just before capturing a photograph, female friendships in these stories are their own ontology, a magical space of being where anything is possible. Its a dazzling array of essays.Lidia Yuknavitch, bestselling author of Thrus

Author Bio

Lilly Dancyger is the author of the memoir Negative Space, 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. Dancyger'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.