Lilly Dancyger

A rich, nuanced exploration of women's anger from a diverse group of writers Women are angry, and from the #MeToo movement to the record number of women running for political office, they're finally expressing it. But all rage isn't created equal. Who gets to be angry? (If there's now space for cis white women's anger, what about black women? Trans women?) How do women express their anger? And what will they do with it-individually and collectively? In Burn It Down, a diverse group of women authors explore their rage-from the personal to the systemic, the unacknowledged to the public. One woman describes her rage at her own body when she becomes ill with no explanation. Another writes of the anger she inherits from her father. One Pakistani American writes, "To openly express my anger would be too American," and explains why. Broad-ranging and cathartic, Burn It Down is essential reading for any woman who has burned with rage but questioned if she is entitled to express it.

A bold, poignant essay collection that treats women’s friendships as the love stories they truly are, from the critically acclaimed author of Negative Space. Lilly Dancyger always thought of her closest friendships as great loves, complex and profound as any romance. When her beloved cousin was murdered just as both girls were entering adulthood, Dancyger felt a new urgency in her devotion to the women in her life—a desire to hold her friends close while she still could. In First Love, this urgency runs through a striking exploration of the bonds between women, from the intensity of adolescent best friendship and fluid sexuality to mothering and chosen family. Each essay in this incisive collection is grounded in a close female friendship in Dancyger’s life, reaching outward to dissect cultural assumptions about 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 literature and pop culture—ranging from fairytales to true crime, from Anaïs 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 expansive interrogation of what it means to love each other. 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. In First Love, these essential bonds get their due.

"Dancyger crafts a striking composition out of found objects, a poignant portrait of the identities we construct out of grief."--Oprah Daily   "Candid, thrilling, wickedly smart, Negative Space is one of the greatest memoirs of this, or any, time." --T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls   Despite her parents' struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges? Dancyger's father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him--despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against the world that had taken him away. But as an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she'd created about her father--the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime--using his paintings, sculptures, and prints as a guide to piece together a truer story. Featuring Schactman's artwork throughout, Negative Space explores Dancyger's grief, anger, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness her father hid from her, as well as her own.   "Negative Space is a beautiful restoration act." --Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water   "This book is so many a daughter's heartrending tribute, a love story riddled by addiction, a mystery whose solution lies at the intersection of art and memory. Together, they form a chorus that I could not turn away from, and didn't wish to." --Melissa Febos,  author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me   "Dancyger creates an unflinching account of her artist father's snakebitten life and his struggles with addiction - peeling back the layers around an artistic practice that seems weighted with vulnerability. Ultimately, he comes painfully alive as Dancyger charts an elegiac path to her own self-discovery." --Cynthia Carr, author of Fire in the The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz   "Negative Space is a lovely and heartbreaking book; navigating pain, inheritance, and loss. Dancyger's father emerges from these pages as vividly as if I'd known him." --Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House "This book is a true accomplishment, one that often left me stunned and disturbed in all the right ways, all the ways brilliant art does." --Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body  "Dancyger achieves that beautiful, often elusive, balance of writing about addiction with equal parts examination and empathy." --Erin Khar, author of Strung Out "Negative Space is a brilliant, moving, unique, thought-provoking meditation on the artistic life, fathers and daughters, and the struggle to live life at the highest pitch in each generation." - Mark Greif, author of Against Everything For readers of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls and The Night of the Gun by David Carr.