First Love

February 12, 2024
In these bruising essays, memoirist Dancyger (Negative Space) contemplates female friendships “predicated on deep love and knowing,” yet frequently marked by tragedy. Probing grief and self-discovery, she writes of a “first love” with her cousin Sabina that began at age six and ended with Sabina’s murder at age 20, a formative tragedy that “rippled out... like a web” to future friendships. In high school, she formed an obsessive, cocaine-fueled bond with fellow rebel Haley that unraveled after the two stopped using the drug, ending a friendship whose intensity seemed to predict its demise. Elsewhere, Dancyger describes how her cousin’s murder helped bond her to college friend Carly, whose fiancée later died suddenly. The latter tragedy painfully highlighted the impossibility of shielding loved ones from pain: grief “is an entirely different country from your own, and the only person who can ever find their way through it is her,” Dancyger reminded herself. 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. Agent: Annie Hwang, Ayesha Pande Literary.

March 1, 2024
A New York-based essayist and memoirist reflects on the female friendships that have shaped her life. When Dancyger, the author of Negative Space, was 22, her cousin, Sabina, was murdered. The crime shattered the author, partly because she considered her friendship with Sabina her first experience of love. Although culturally, we often associate first loves with romance, Dancyger's memories of Sabina piqued her interest in a different kind of love: "What about the first childhood experience of love, the first person you truly love other than your parents? Does a first sisterly love set the bar for a lifetime of friendships?" The author reflects on a lifetime of female friendships, including the one with her high school best friend, Haley, whom she felt compelled to protect; her adult friendship with a woman named Liz that survived their rambunctious early 20s; her close relationship with a former roommate named Leah, who helped Dancyger through a terrible bout of grief; and her intensely loving relationship with Sabina, which flows so deeply that the author found herself unable to write a book about the girl's untimely death. At the end of this book, the author writes, "When I finally sat down to write about Sabina, the story that came out was not about murder at all. It was a love story." Dancyger's ode to female friendship is affectionate, frank, circumspective, and passionate. Despite the traumatic nature of many of the memories she recalls, the author manages to infuse each page with an undercurrent of quiet, grateful joy. While the collection sometimes lacks cohesion--most notably in a chapter that focuses on a collaborative photography project that feels disconnected from the rest of the narrative--overall, this is a well-written and -paced read. A tenderly insightful essay collection celebrating female platonic love.

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April 15, 2024
This penetrating collection from the author of the memoir Negative Space (2021) and editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger (2019) takes place on a fire escape and in New York City parks; in the middle of the night and during truant schooldays. The author's first best friend was her cousin Sabina. Their family called them Snow White and Rose Red, and, as in a fairy tale, Dancyger lost Sabina young and tragically. Encompassing many friendships and, accordingly, much of the author's life, these 15 essays are lean yet expansive, with multitudinous truths and images placing readers right with the author as she rebels, flounders, triumphs, and carries on--always, in some way, in the company of friends. ""Mutual Mothering"" exalts the caretaking in friendship, while in ""Portraiture,"" a friendly collaboration to capture the ""current"" of friendship on film leads to Dancyger's writing on ""the impossibility of ever capturing the entirety of a person, in writing or photography."" Impossible perhaps, but Dancyger shows the love, grief, and beauty of a skilled, sincere attempt, and it's beguiling.

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