Lilly Dancyger: On the Idealized Artist Life, Garnering Sense of Self Through Friendship, How to Make a Writing Group Last, and Her Essay Collection ‘First Love’
The first time many of us will experience love and affection outside our immediate family or blood relatives are with our first friendships.
The girls I shared my first sleepovers with I carry around with me every day in a group chat on my phone. Once upon a time we crafted stories from thin air as we reimagined a backyard to be a ranch, galloping across the grass, now some of us are preparing for wedding days.
In middle school my best friend and I sunk into an obsession with Titanic. We watched it ten, fifteen, twenty times, eyes glued to the screen while we ate raw cookie dough out of a bowl in my basement. Years later we would take our first sips of alcohol together in that same room.
There were three of us in high school. We called each other “The Bermuda,” putting our middle and pointer fingers out in a V, fingertips touching to create a triangle. We took pictures of our hands in that formation all across Seattle.
In Lilly Dancyger’s First Love (Dial Press, 2024), she examines these early loves from every angle. Whether they are still in your life or not, our early relationships taught us how to be in the world. They gently nudged us in one direction or another, like two tree trunks growing around each other.
Many people I know now tout the idea of having a romantic friendship. Why should we not celebrate our deep friendships as we do other types of love? As Lilly mentions in our conversation—we do not write vows to our friends like we do at a wedding for partners. First Love is a book full of vows, a celebration of what I consider to be the most important relationship most of us will ever have: the one we have with our friends.
Kim Narby: I was struck by how much of the book focuses on girlhood and the relationships formed during this very specific decade between fifteen and twenty-five. It reminded me a lot of Melissa Febos’ book of the same name. Is there something about friendships formed during that time that seems more pivotal or formative than friendships formed in later adulthood to you?
Lilly Dancyger: I was really interested in friendship as the fertile ground in which we form our sense of self. And friendships as the connections that reflect back to us, the possibilities of who we might be in the world, and the arenas in which we learn how to build and maintain and navigate intimate relationships. So, in that way, the friendships we have earlier in life and when we’re really in that rapid cycling stage of becoming a self makes sense as ones to focus on. I was so many different versions of myself between the ages fifteen and twenty-five and the different relationships that I was throwing myself into and pulling myself out of during that time were such a big part of those iterations of self and the eventual arrival at a not stagnant, but more stable self. I’m definitely still evolving, but maybe not quite as rapidly and intensely as during those more pivotal years. That’s part of it. Another part of it is just that I haven’t made as many newer relationships in the last decade as I did during that one. I have made new friends in adulthood. It is possible, and can be done—even new, deep, meaningful, and very important friendships. But I think there’s something about the hindsight of distance. There actually were several essays that I attempted and failed at and cut from the book. I didn’t really put it together until just now answering this question that a lot of those were ones that focused on more recent, still forming relationships. Maybe I’ll be able to write about those a little later.
KN: In the book you mention that you were looking for a way to honor your cousin Sabina that wasn’t a typical true crime story. I’m curious what came first—this idea to write about friendship or the essays themselves about friendship? Did you already find yourself writing these pieces and decide to lean into it?
LD: The idea came first. I knew I wanted to write about friendship. But the idea, wanting to write about friendship and wanting to write about Sabina, felt initially like two separate impulses, and two separate threads that I wanted to follow. It was only as I started to feel my way into both of those topics that I realized writing about friendship is the way that I wanted to write about Sabina. I realized they were actually one book.
KN: How did you go about deciding the order of the essays? I think the first and the last essay feel like very clear bookends. That last essay was so beautiful. The last sentence is perfect. It gave me chills. But how did you organize the rest of the book?
LD: The order and the structure was really a challenge because so many of the essays span long periods of time that overlap with each other. There wasn’t an option to just go with a simple chronology. But I did try to create a layered chronology. I assigned each essay a “main time period” even if they move back and forth or span a long period of time. [I asked], what’s the real focus? What era is this most rooted in? Sometimes that’s an earlier era, and then there’s some bits that come into the present and some of them felt more like they were rooted in the present and looking back. It forced me to really think critically about perspective and point of telling and where I’m speaking from and which version of me is speaking in each essay. By layering in that conscious delineation, I was able to make something that feels like a progression forward through time. [There is] development of the consciousness of the narrator of the different essays from a more petulant adolescent self to a more aware conscious, intentional self in later pieces.
That was one of the main concerns in the structure. But then I also was thinking about proximity and flow and pattern in terms of not wanting to have too many super long essays all in a row. There are some super long ones. I understood I was asking a lot of the reader with those 8,000-10,000 word essays. As a way to acknowledge and respect that, I tried to put some breathers in between.
I also tried not to put too many really heavy, dark, depressing pieces back-to-back. There is plenty of that, but there’s also plenty of lightness and joy and sweetness.
KN: Your essay “In Search of Smoky Cafes” is about visiting Paris just after high school. You talk about this idealized artist life that you’d hope to find on that visit—smoking in Parisian cafes and chatting with other artists late into the night. Is writing always the type of art you thought you would pursue? And what does your idealized artist life look like now as compared to then?
LD: Writing was always part of it for me. But, especially when I was younger, I thought of art making as more of a general idea. I wrote, but I also drew and I made all my own clothes, and I did ballet, and I made up songs, and I made jewelry, and I made my own tarot deck. I was just making stuff in whatever form all the time. I really admire people who approach creativity in that way. I know some people who still do that. I have a lot of respect for that omnivorous approach. But for me personally I get very hyper focused on things, even a specific writing project. I can really only do one at a time if I’m going to really, really do it. So writing just won out. I still dance for fun and I draw for fun sometimes, but just as a creative outlet, not pursuing it with the same ambitions as writing.
My idealized artist life now is a much quieter one. When I was a teenager, a big part of the appeal to me was the social aspect of it. I wanted to be in the creative world. I wanted to be talking to other artists and sitting in a cafe and smoking cigarettes and talking for hours at a time about art. I don’t smoke anymore, but I still like to talk to artists about their work. I still really value the literary community that I’ve found and made, and the ability to talk to other writers about what they’re working on. But I think the piece I value most these days is the solitary, quiet, generative space of actually doing the work, just me at my desk with the words. That’s what it’s all about for me.
KN: New York City serves as a character in this book. In certain essays such as “Best Friends Forever”, you seem to suggest that New York itself has been a first love of yours. You told your mom: if you leave New York, I’m not coming with you. How has your relationship to New York, especially as an artist, changed over the years?
LD: I think everybody who’s in a long-term relationship with New York has a tumultuous element to that relationship. A big piece of how my relationship to the city has changed is that I finally left the East Village after years of refusing to leave and saying I would never leave. Staying put became this act of defiance and refusal—not wanting to let it be taken from me by the changes in the neighborhood. But eventually, I just had to wave the white flag. Lamenting the changes of the city is so tired. It’s like, yeah, okay, the city is always changing and yeah, we know it used to be different. Tell me something I don’t know. But the truth is that the loss of the East Village that I remember is a real genuine source of grief in my life. Grief for the loss of home feels just as real and cuts just as deep as grief for the loss of people that I’ve lost. But just watching it disappear around me and refusing to leave, I eventually had to accept that that was actually really bad for my mental and emotional state. I could feel myself becoming so bitter and miserable and angry and sad. I realized, I’m not actually taking a stand. I’m not actually making an impact on whether the neighborhood is changing or not. I’m just torturing myself. So leaving and moving uptown—it doesn’t sound that far; I’m still on the same island—but it felt like a world change. It really felt like moving away from home. I’ve been uptown for five years now, and it still doesn’t really feel like home yet. It still feels like I’m staying somewhere else.
KN: I have been following Jeanna Kadlec’s Substack (Astrology for Writers) for a long time. She mentions your writing group often, and I know two of you had books published this month (Love Is a Burning Thing by Nina St. Pierre), which is very exciting. Can you tell me about how your group was formed, and how it functions? Do you workshop? Do you hold space to write together?
LD: I love my writer’s group. They’re actually one of the friend groups that I tried to write about, and it didn’t quite get there in time to be included in the book. I wanted them to be in there, but they’re all over it because they read all the essays. Our group has been going for six years now. It formed originally from a social media post, but that was a previous version of the group. A bunch of people left and some new people joined. There’s five of us and we’ve been together for six years. The original version was older than that. We try to meet once a week, but it doesn’t always happen. We all have busy lives. And so usually it’s rare that we have a month where we actually meet four times, but the idea is to meet once a week and we don’t write together. But we share work when people have it. And when people don’t have work to share, we just get together and talk about what we’re working on and what we’re stuck on and what we want to be doing and what’s in our way. Just the act of showing up and taking each other seriously as writers, and showing up as our writer selves to talk about our work and listen to each other talk about each other’s work, is so valuable and meaningful. Not to mention the actual advice and feedback that I couldn’t live without at this point.
KN: Do you have any advice for anyone looking to form a writer’s group or keep one going long term?
LD: I’ve heard from a lot of people who are looking for a writer’s group. They want to step into this preexisting thing. But you just have to start one. There’s not a whole lot of barrier to entry to start one. You just need a few people. I know people who have writers groups of three, and that works for them. For us, because we’re also busy, five feels like the minimum. Then if two people are away, you know, five allows us to meet more consistently while having flexibility for some people to miss some meetings sometimes. But the really important thing is to get on the same page about commitment and seriousness and drive. Our group works because we’re all very driven, serious people. I mean, we’re not serious people, you know, we joke and we laugh and we have a good time, but we’re serious about the work and we’re serious about our careers and building and focus. I think a writer’s group where everybody was in it just because they were writing for fun and they just wanted to share work, and they didn’t really have a lot of ambition to publish would also be fine if that’s where everybody was at. But I think a group where there’s a mismatch of some people are very driven and really want to get stuff done and go somewhere with their work, and some people were like, what’s the big deal? We’re just here to have a good time. That might not work as well. So I think making sure you’re aligned on, yes, everybody’s committed to showing up every week. Everybody’s committed to reading the work carefully and giving the kind of feedback that people are looking for.
KN: I’m really interested in the conversation you and your friend Courtney had about documentation versus experience and your essay “Portraiture”. Courtney noted that as a photographer, documenting had taken her out of experiences. However it seems like there is a need, and a benefit, to taking time to document. After one of your friends passed, you found solace in the pictures on her Instagram. As a non-fiction writer, you need to have experiences to document, which as you noted in one essay, leads some writers to covet painful experiences in order to have something to write about. Have you felt this push and pull with experience and documentation in your life? Has it lessoned at all as you’ve gotten older?
LD: I found that conversation around photography so interesting and it stretched my thinking a little bit. But I don’t feel that documentation gets in the way of experience for me when it comes to writing. And maybe that’s the difference in medium, like you’re saying, with photography, you literally stop in the middle of an experience to take a picture, whereas with nonfiction, with writing, you reflect on it later. I do sometimes have that strange experience of like, I’ll be in a moment, in an experience and I’ll start thinking about how I’m going to write about it later. And I have to be like, okay, stop. Stop forming the narrative and just live your life. Maybe that contradicts what I just said. I guess it’s there, but I don’t resist it. I don’t see it as a problem to be overcome because at this point it’s such a big part of how I move through life and how I make sense of my own experiences. I understand that anything that happens in my life might end up being written about eventually, and when I was first dating my husband, I made a half joke, you know, I was like, by the way, this is all on the record.
KN: How did he take that?
LD: He laughed. He’s fine with it. I’ve written a little bit about our relationship peripherally, but not a ton. I don’t know who I would be or how I would be if I didn’t have that external place to process and make sense of experience. The process of writing about my life is so deeply ingrained at this point in how I live my life that I don’t even try to extricate them anymore.
KN: have you found after doing all this writing about friendships that your friendships with those people or your relationship to friendship has changed at all?
LD: I think a lot of the essays helped clarify or even bring some of the relationships closer. Part of the impetus for the book to begin with was that friendship doesn’t usually get this depth of consideration. People don’t usually take the time to articulate everything that a friendship means to them in the way you might write wedding vows or whatever for a spouse. So it was very nice to articulate what these relationships mean to me, and then have the opportunity to share that with the people I’d written about. It was a little scary and vulnerable to do that for the same reason. That’s not something you usually do, here’s 6,000 words about what you mean to my life. Let me know what you think. It was definitely a vulnerable experience. But so many of the conversations that I had with the people I wrote about during the process of writing about them or after sharing the essay drafts with them were really lovely and affirming.
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.
