First Love

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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

“Fiercely felt and finely etched.”—Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams

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’s devotion to the women in her life took on a new urgency—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 fairy tales 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.“First Love is bracing in its honesty and verve, and is as heady and intoxicating as the relationships it details. It gripped me in a tight embrace on page one and still has not let me go.”—Chloé Cooper Jones, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Easy Beauty

“This book is a goddamn marvel of a mixtape—a fervent, generous compilation of love songs brought together so that the whole is even more meaningful than its parts. First Love is poignant, ferociously smart, and unflinchingly honest.”—CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife

“Lilly Dancyger holds open the possibility that female friendships are their own ontology, an extended flash, a magical space of being where anything is possible. It’s a dazzling array of essays.”—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water

“First Love is a feminist, fresh look at friendship: how the deep love of other women can keep us alive, thinking, and reaching for our best selves.”—Alisson Wood, author of Being Lolita

“A soul-stirring compilation of essays about how our earliest intimacies—sisterly, friendly—so often resemble the intensity of romance . . . how if and when those relationships change or end it can feel like the most devastating heartbreak.”—Electric Literature

“We’re on a path to understanding friendship in a new light, and I know I’m only grateful to witness the carving of that path, thanks to people like Lilly Dancyger.”—Literary Hub

“Reading Lilly Dancyger’s First Love, I felt immediately returned to first loves of my own—late-night phone calls and sardine-sleeping-bag sleepovers, falling asleep to the sound a friend’s voice saying, Are you still awake? Dancyger understands the urgency and entanglement of these early intimacies . . .”—Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“I can’t think of a better person to gently unlock the secrets of friendship than Lilly Dancyger.”—Jess Zimmerman, author of Women and Other Monsters

“Lilly Dancyger writes about women’s interior lives with the kind of attention and care that the world is sorely lacking.”—Jude Ellison S. Doyle, author of Trainwreck and Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“First Love is like a paper fortune teller as essay collection, but for looking into Dancyger’s past instead of her future. . . . A heartbreaking, funny, wise companion.”—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“First Love is tender, intricate, and smart. These layered essays sparkle with intelligence and intimacy. I felt held by this book.”—Joy Sullivan, author of Instructions for Traveling West

“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.”—Publishers WeeklyLilly 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 others. She lives in New York City and is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts.CA

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