Lilly Dancyger: On the Myth of Objectivity, Navigating the Writing Industry, Addiction, and her Debut Memoir “Negative Space”
Lilly Dancyger spent the last decade working on her debut memoir Negative Space (Santa Fe Writer’s Project), and the result is a complex portrait of a writer discovering and staking claim on their identity as an artist. It is a book about “a wild child in a wild family in a wild city.” It is everything I have ever looked for in a memoir ⸺ art, literary theory, rebel girls, angsty teens in a post-punk New York, and, of course, the story of becoming a writer. It is part memoir, part art-criticism, and part portrait of a New York that no longer exists. It is seeping with nostalgia and yearning, but gloriously avoids sentimentality.
Negative Space is an investigative look into Dancyger’s own memory of childhood and of her father, Joe Schactman, who was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. The memoir explores her parents’ heroin addiction, her father’s early death, and how these events shaped her adolescence. It is an examination of the ways a person carries grief throughout a life, and how it settles in the body, evolving, but never fully leaving.
I spoke with Lilly over the phone about writing from personal experience, the myth of objectivity, addiction, and her debut memoir Negative Space.
Shelby Hinte: Thanks so much for taking some time to chat with me. I actually just finished reading Negative Space last night. I stayed up so late finishing it. Congrats on the publication.
Lilly Dancyger: Thank you.
SH: I know from reading other interviews and also from the text itself that writing it was a really long process. I read your essay in Electric Literature about your publishing journey, so can you start by sharing a little bit about the decade or so that was birthing of this book
LD: Sure. I started this project when I was in college, so I maybe underestimated just how much time and work it would take to finish and publish a book. I kind of figured that it would take me a year or two after college to polish it up and send it out (laughs). I did that and of course was roundly rejected by a bunch of agents. That was my first kind of wake-up call that this was going to take a little more time than I thought. But then that happened like five more times over the course of another eight years or so (laughs). I kept thinking that I was done with the project, you know? I kept thinking that I had pushed it as far as I could only to realize a few months later that there was a whole other element of it that I hadn’t actually cracked yet, or a whole other layer that I was avoiding going into or was not yet skilled enough to tackle. As frustrating as it was, I’m really glad that the previous versions were rejected and that it didn’t end up out in the world until it was really really done.
SH: I feel like that's such a hard thing to know. It sounds like you were learning how to write at the same time as you were writing this book in some ways.
LD: Absolutely, yeah. I was learning how to write and also learning about the industry ⸺ learning what it takes not only to write a good book, but to publish a book which is really a whole other challenge of its own, even once you have the book. Actually getting out into the world is like a whole other mountain to climb.
SH: What would you say was your biggest learning lesson from that?
LD: I guess the biggest thing is just patience and learning the industry and learning the landscape. You know, the first book deal that I ended up cancelling, I accepted that deal in the first place because I didn’t yet know enough about the different types of small presses and all the different publishing avenues that there are ⸺ and the various risks and benefits and sacrifices that are involved in each of them. I just figured it's not a big 5, so it's a small press, which means it'll be the same as all the other small presses, which is very much not true. Once I had spent some time doing my homework and learning about the industry and the various presses and the various editors and the various styles and all of that I was much better equipped to make a smart decision about where to send the book.
SH: Your book turned out so beautiful with the Santa Fe Writer’s Project. How did you come to this final decision that you wanted it to be published with Santa Fe Writer’s Project or another similar small press?
LD: Like I said, I really just did my research. I really took my time putting together a list that was my final submission list and there were about 15 small presses on it. They were all presses that I had researched, looked up all their titles and spent some time investigating their website, following their editors on Twitter, following their authors, checking out their authors’ reviews on Amazon and Goodreads to make sure that they had actually been read by people (laughs). You know, just vetting the presses all around before adding them to my list. And that took several months. While I was revising, I was also very carefully and intentionally building this list and Santa Fe Writer’s Project was one of the ones on that list and they were the ones that made me an offer.
SH: You know, I subscribe to the Astrology for Writers newsletter and I read your interview and I just loved reading about how you did a conjuring with candles and that idea of casting a spell before your last send off. I thought that was so great.
LD: I knew it was going to be my last shot, so I wanted to send it out there with as much juice as possible.
SH: I have to be honest, this is the first book I've read in a while, and I really I honestly can't remember the last time I had this experience, but it brought me to tears and that doesn't happen a lot when I'm reading
LD: Thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment (laughs).
SH: Yeah, definitely. I mean I think it's nice to feel things sometimes (laughs), but I was trying to wrap my head around why, you know other than whatever I might be going through personally, but like specifically with your work, why it had that effect on me. One of the things that came up for me was that you write about grief and the complexity of relationships so candidly, and specifically the complexity of identity. Nothing in your book feels like it's ever trying to convince anyone of a particular set of beliefs like I don't know for example addicts are worthy of compassion or [on the contrary] just mere “drains on the system” or that your father is all good or all bad. Your book really seems to reject the idea of binaries and of simplification.
LD: Yes, definitely. That's something I was conscious of, and also learned more about through the process as I was struggling to tell the story as honestly as possible. I kept coming up against contradictions and eventually just realized that the true version of this story has to contain all those contradictions. It has to have room for all those things to be messy and to not fit into a neat and tidy container of how you might want to view one character, or how you might want to view the trajectory of something like grief. It was challenging but felt necessary to not reduce the story down to something one-dimensional that might be easier to describe.
SH: I feel like that is pretty rare with nonfiction. I have definitely read nonfiction that does that, but Negative Space really holds room for contradiction which seems unnatural in our society which is so obsessed with having clear categorizations of everything. I was kind of curious, in your own opinion, why do you think people feel so compelled to name things, and more specifically, what do you think has allowed you to bristle up against that nature so well?
LD: I mean things are easier to control when they fit into a neat category. It’s easier to feel like you understand the world around you and like you're in control of the world around you when everything just is what it is and it doesn't require that energy of you. It takes a lot more mental and emotional energy to hold something that is multiple things at once. Whether that is a relationship, allowing anger and love to exist together, allowing grief and joy to exist together. Those things are uncomfortable – feeling like you’re being pulled in both directions. I don't know why, but we just are programmed, I think, to want things to be simple things, to want things to be easy and to want things to be one thing. I understand that impulse.
I think that's kind of where I started, you know? I started thinking like - OK well am I grieving or am I happy? Am I feeling love or am I feeling anger? - It was in really digging into those questions that I realized that there isn’t any one answer to those questions.
SH: I read your essay in response to that viral photo of the kid in the backseat [of a car] with his parents passed out, overdosed on opiates, and I was thinking about how stigmatized addiction is – specifically with parents in this way that is like you can't be both an addict and a good parent. Your book makes a case for your parents while also reckoning with the fact that there were moments where they weren't such good parents. What was that evolution like for you and what does it feel like doing it in public?
LD: I mean I think that was just part of resisting that binary one or the other. I know, and I knew from the beginning, that the easy answer, the simple story that people would be able to digest quickly would be to say that my parents were bad parents because they were addicts. I have definitely felt that in some moments, but that also is just very much not the whole story. It's just obviously not the whole story because I have a lot of happy memories from childhood. There were a lot of things that I think my parents did really well. So contradiction is inherent in trying to tell a true version of the story. I didn't go into it trying to be a crusader, or an advocate, or to dictate the way we talk about addiction. I was just adding my story to that conversation and showing the complexity and the many things that can be true at once.
SH: At one point later in the book you write about discovering your father had harmed your mother, and you wrote “I waited for my idealized, mythologized version of my father to distort now that I knew about this selfish, coercive side of him. I felt like it should. But it didn’t. . . The two versions of him existed together in my mind, butting up against each other, contradicting each other, but neither erased the other.” ⸺ I couldn’t help associating this with the phrase “cancel culture” and how we so quickly “cancel” anything that doesn’t align with the liberal zeitgeist ⸺ I know this isn’t a simple question, but what are your thoughts on “cancel culture” and distilling people to either good or bad?
LD: I mean, I don’t really think “cancel culture” exists. I think there are very few examples of somebody who's actually been “cancelled” and that have actually been ruined and shunned from society. For the most part, it is accountability and people are taken to task for bad things that they've done or said. We're just so used to people in power being able to do whatever they want that throwing attention to wrongdoing and demanding accountability and demanding better looks extreme compared to what has happened in the past. But really, most these people are not being harmed, even their careers are not being harmed in any real substantial way.
SH: On the topic of contradiction, as someone who's trained in journalism by a pretty elite university and also having written a book that seems to make a case for the validity of memory even if it contradicts other people's sense of the facts, what are your beliefs around like the notion of objective truth?
LD: Objectivity doesn't exist. It’s a myth.
SH: (laughs) Thank you. I love that!
How do you undertake writing “facts” or into some sort of “truth telling” while understanding that objectivity doesn't exist? What is that like?
LD: I think it allows me to get closer to the truth because I'm not pretending to not exist as the teller of a story. So incorporating my own biases, weaknesses, hopes, and angers allows for a true story because I’m not pretending that those things don't exist.
SH: In the book you mention feeling like there was a sort of chip on your shoulder around wanting to get into a prestigious college after having dropped out of high school. Now in adulthood and having had some successes, what has it been like looking back on your earlier education?
LD: I'm really glad that I dropped out because I was right that I didn’t need high school. I'm glad that I had the experiences that I did as a teenager. I feel like I used my time well ⸺ learning about myself in the world and bonding with people who I am still close with. I wish I hadn’t gone to grad school (laughs). I wish I had been more confident and self-assured in my own choices earlier, you know, to stick to my guns and remember that I had already forged my own path and I was doing fine. I think I probably would not have gone to grad school, but I think I felt like I was proving something. I only realized after the fact that I didn’t really need to prove that to anyone, so now I am just in a lot of debt.
SH: You mention in the book that even though you dropped out of high school you gave yourself a really rigorous self-education of reading books that I don't ever remember reading until I was way further along in college and your father also had this sort of precarious relationship with this idea of self-education.
There’s a lot of controversy about whether or not art can be taught - I'm thinking, and this is maybe a little bit dated now, of that essay which then became the collection of essays titled MFA versus NYC's. So, what are your thoughts, do you think that art or writing can be taught?
LD: I think it can be guided. I think there is a lot of reinventing the wheel that happens when you are learning entirely on your own. I think that mentorship and guidance can be really useful ⸺ having somebody who has been around the block a few times telling you about the pothole you are about to step into, or offering you suggestions and things you should try, or things you should read, or things should look. I think that's all very valuable. I wouldn't teach writing if I thought there was no value in it, but I think the artist or the writer has to bring the goods to the table for that to work. There’s an idea that anybody can be a writer, but I don't know if that's true. I don’t know how much I believe in innate talent, but there has to be an ability to learn, and to absorb, and to understand mechanics of what you're reading and what you're being taught and be able to implement them yourself and be able to have original ideas and a vision for how to put them into practice. I don't think everybody works that way and that's OK.
SH: One of the similarities between you and your father in this book is this shared understanding of the need to survive in a society with certain capitalistic values and trying to situate yourself within it while also feeling a drive to sustain your identity through art. There is a phrase you reference that your dad says - making art for art’s sake - and I wonder what has been the biggest lesson that you've learned about navigating or balancing these two opposing spaces?
LD: Art and commerce are distinct from each other, but they’re inextricable and they need each other. I have learned that “playing the game” a little bit, establishing a career, and networking, it’s not all as disgusting as I was made to believe (laughs). There is a way to do that authentically. I have managed to switch my thinking so that it's not about networking and schmoozing and building a brand and all that stuff that just sounds gross. It's more about building community and being useful in that community and that’s ok, and I feel ok with doing that.I don’t feel like I’m selling out. I feel like I’m giving my work the best chance it’s going to have to be seen by people which is what you want when you’re making work to share with people.
SH: What has been the biggest piece of building community for you?
LD: I think just showing up and supporting other writers in as many ways as possible. I see working as an editor as supporting writers, also going to events, and running an event series myself so I can invite writers I like to come and read. Also trying to be accessible and transparent on social media. Just giving to the community is the best way to naturally become a part of a community instead of just showing up and being like here’s my work, why isn’t everybody reading and sharing it?
SH: What’s one of your favorite projects you’ve been a part of?
LD: There are so many. Between teaching and editing I feel like I get to touch a lot of really great work and just kind of shift it in another direction slightly and help it make its way out to the world. It’s less about an individual piece or project and more about being in a position to see great work before it’s out in the world and help shape it and help get it there in general. It's very cool and exciting and fulfilling.
SH: At one point in the book you mention sometimes struggling to convince yourself that writing is art and so I'm curious, do you think of writing as art
LD: I do. I mean not all of it. Maybe not like branded content (laughs). Writing is like cooking in that way. There’s a lot of it that's done just in the day-to-day utility ⸺ we write emails, we write memos, we write a lot of stuff that just is functional, but sometimes we write out of inspiration and to do something new and to do something exciting. When it gets to that point then I think of it as art.
SH: What is your advice for young writers, especially those that aren't getting an MFA or pursuing traditional forms of education?
LD: Read more than you write.
Lilly Dancyger is the author of Negative Space (2021), a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, and the editor of Burn It Down (2019), a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women's anger from Seal Press. Lilly is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. Her 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.
About the Interviewer
Shelby Hinte is a writer and educator living in the Bay Area. She received her MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University where she was the recipient of the 2019 Distinguished Graduate award. Her fiction has appeared in Maudlin House, Entropy, Witness Magazine, Hobart, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel about women and vortexes in the desert. You can follow her @shelbyhinte_ and read her work at www.shelbyhinte.com
