Writing a Book of Love Stories: A Conversation with Lilly Dancyger
Lilly Dancyger’s searing and poignant essay collection, First Love: Essays on Friendship (The Dial Press, 2024), explores female companionship, care, and survival. Beginning with her close childhood bond with her cousin, Sabina, Dancyger understood the love of friendship as a revelation. For Sabina, six-year-old Dancyger would fetch cereal boxes from high shelves and send carefully drawn love letters when they were apart. It was the first time Dancyger recalls desiring another person’s happiness as much as her own.
Her third book after her memoir, Negative Space, about the loss of her artist father, and the anthology, Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, the essays in First Love are urgent and expansive, often weaving personal narrative with pop culture, true crime, and literary voices such as Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath. They vary in length and stylistic choices, while coming together to create a seamless rendering of Dancyger’s closest bonds. After Dancyger’s cousin was murdered in early adulthood, Dancyger felt an overwhelming tenderness and appreciation for the friendships in her life. In First Love, Dancyger writes of the friends who carried her through tumultuous teen years, took care of her through grief and heartbreak, and became chosen family in adulthood. These are the women who ultimately helped her survive.
I was delighted to speak with Dancyger about her approach to writing a book of love stories, structuring an essay collection, and getting out of her comfort zone. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lizzie Lawson: Your cousin, Sabina, feels very much like the heart of First Love. How did you intend your friendship with Sabina to open and color the rest of the friendships in this collection?
Lilly Dancyger: She was the catalyst. In a way, the whole book is about her, even essays that don’t mention her. Losing her was one thing that made me think about my friendships the way I do, [that] made me value them so much and made me want to make sure my friends know how important they are to me. That is the context of the whole book, and it was a way to write about her—and even write about her death—without writing a book about murder. Because this isn’t a book about murder. It’s a book of love stories.
LL: I saw that you were recently part of an AWP panel on the topic of structuring essay collections. Was the overall structure of First Love difficult to land on?
LD: It was difficult because a lot of the essays cover large spans of time. They are technically in chronological order, but it’s a messy, spiraling chronology. I had to assign each piece a fixed point in time to attach onto a larger timeline, even though many of the essays cover long, overlapping periods. I had to decide what was the main time frame of each piece, even if it also reaches backward and forward through many years.
I was also paying attention to the emotional and thematic flow. I didn’t want to have too many brutal, heavy pieces back-to-back. There was also the length. I didn’t want too many long essays in a row. There are a lot of considerations to make all those things work.
LL: First Love is made up of braided essays, essays of various lengths, and one written as instructions. What made you gravitate towards different forms in this collection?
LD: I wanted to keep it fresh and interesting for readers and for myself. The first few pieces I wrote were all longer braided essays. That’s a form I love and could keep doing forever. But I felt myself getting comfortable in the form, so I thought it was time to do something else. If it was comfortable and predictable for me, then it’s going to be boring and predictable for a reader. I didn’t want readers to be like, Okay, here we go, another personal essay with a bunch of research in it. How is she going to tie it all together this time?
I pushed myself to keep it challenging and keep doing something new. The shorter pieces came about because, as I was writing, the essays kept getting longer. I was having fun with the long form, but then I was like, God, these are going to be exhausting to slog through, with one eight-to-ten-thousand-word essay after another. I needed to break it up a bit.
Originally, I was trying to recalibrate my own internal rhythm and sense of scope. I gave myself an assignment: Write a couple flash essays under a thousand words to remind myself I can do a lot in a thousand words. I just did it as a challenge to see if I could write something shorter, and I didn’t think I was going to include them in the book. I thought maybe when I went back to writing the book I’d be able to write something more moderate length, like three thousand words. But I had so much fun with the flash pieces and ended up really liking some of them, so I included a few in the book.
Having a short piece between longer pieces keeps readers on their toes. I want readers to be engaged and open to what might come rather than thinking they already know what’s going to come next.
LL: I was also struck by the experimental essay, “Portraiture,” in which you allowed an artist friend to take photos of you at random while you held eye contact. I love the reversal of giving up control as the writer who’s been portraying others as well as the collaborative nature of writing an essay with a friend in a book about friendship. How did it feel to collaborate on an essay? Is that ever something you would do again?
LD: It was really fun, and it was also challenging and scary because we went in with an open, experimental, “come what may” attitude. I think that’s a great attitude for making art, except I already committed to including it in my book. I guess if it went totally sideways I would have cut it, but I wanted it to work. I wanted to be open to wherever it went, but that’s a big release of control. It’s scary to not be in control of something that’s going into your book. But it was also exciting, and I’m grateful to my friend Courtney for being so game to do this project with me.
I would be open to collaborating in the future, but I also think this piece in particular was a one-time thing. It’s its own weird, slippery creature that we were figuring out while we were doing it, and I think that fluid, ever-evolving nature is so integral to what the piece ended up being. I don’t think there’s any way to recreate it. Another collaborative project would have to be something totally different. With “Portraiture,” the form itself felt truest to a depiction of this particular relationship. It’s something collaborative, experimental, and a little weird.
LL: In the essay, “On Murder Memoirs,” you wrote about how you thought you were supposed to write a murder memoir for Sabina, though that wasn’t what ended up happening. When did you realize that First Love was the book you were actually writing?
LD: It’s funny, I didn’t consciously articulate that rerouting to myself until I was writing the final essay. I was already working on a book of essays about friendship, and Sabina was part of it. I understood that and had articulated in various ways why she was an important part of this book about friendship. I also knew I wanted to include an essay about true crime and a kind of meta piece on writing about murder, [and] how fraught that is and the violence inherent in it.
It wasn’t an entirely conscious choice from the beginning to write a book of love stories, but it was after I’d written all the other essays in the book and began writing the last piece that I realized, Oh, I did this dramatic swirl around the story I thought I was going to tell. This is what I produced instead.
LL: You also delve into the ethics of true crime and how the genre often commits further violence by “solidif[ying] the murder as the defining detail of a victim’s life.” You write about your own self-protective instinct to shield yourself from the worst details. I was struck by the realization that sometimes the best answer is to not write the thing, or to approach it in a completely different way. Can you talk more about your rejection of true crime and how this is an act of kindness to yourself and Sabina?
LD: For a long time, it felt inevitable that writing about my cousin Sabina would mean writing about her murder. But when I started to feel ready to write about her, I still couldn’t delve into the details of the murder. So I had to find another way. I didn’t realize right away that my attempts to write about Sabina without letting it become a story about how she died and my essays about friendship were the same project—but combining them became the key to both.
By letting the essays about Sabina be part of this larger story that I was telling about the role of friendship in my life, they became about something other than the ugliness. Even the essays that address her death directly still aren’t “about murder.” So it wasn’t as straightforward as sitting down to write and saying, I’m not going to write true crime. It was more a process of finding my way into the story by paying attention to the parts that felt most important and also the parts that I just really didn’t want to touch.
LL: Female friendship is one of my literary obsessions, which is why I immediately gravitated toward this book. I love seeing how authors portray these highly affecting but more undefined relationships as opposed to romantic and familial relationships that have clearer roles. What other books on friendship would you recommend?
LD: I just started reading the forthcoming novel, Amphibian by Tyler Wetherall. It’s about an obsessively close friendship between two girls, and I’m loving it so far.
LL: In these essays, friendship serves many different functions—“Partner in Crime,” for example, describes a codependent teenage friendship, and “Mutual Mothering” features friends that care for one another “with the tenderness of mothers putting Band-Aids on scraped knees.” I’m also thinking about the concept of a love story and how society often reserves love for romantic relationships. I was wondering, to close things out, if you could speak to your relationship with friendship as a form of love and its place in your life.
LD: That’s essentially the heart of the project: What would it look like to treat friendships as love stories? To write about them with the depth and nuance and care that romantic relationships get all the time? Friendships are where I learned how to love other people in a meaningful, reciprocal way and where I learned what it means to sustain that love over a long period of time. They are absolutely love stories, so I wanted to write them that way.
Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship (The Dial Press, 2024) and Negative Space (SFWP, 2021). She lives in New York City and is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, Off Assignment, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. Find more about her work and her writing workshops at lillydancyger.com.
Lizzie Lawson (@lizziemlawson) is a writer and teaching artist from Minneapolis, MN. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, The Sun, Passages North, Wigleaf, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and more. She earned an MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University and can be found at lizzielawson.com.