Adjunct Assistant Professor Lilly Dancyger will publish a new collection, First Love: Essays On Friendship, in May 2024 with The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House.
Using the murder of Lilly Dancyger’s cousin Sabina—with whom she was very close—as a focal point, the collection reflects on numerous female friendships Dancyger has had throughout her life. These essays bridge Dancyger’s female friendships with maxims about desire and femininity while exploring motifs such as mothering, found family, fluid sexuality, and the intensity of best friendships. Between personal narratives, Dancyger intersperses literature and pop culture references from Tumblr “sad girls,” true crime, Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath to Heavenly Creatures, and nineteenth-century fairy tales.
According to the publisher, “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.”
Lilly Dancyger is a nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse Books. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Burn It Down, an anthology of essays on women's anger as well as Negative Space, a memoir chosen by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. Her work can be read in Playboy, Guernica, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere.
