Pop culture feeds on romantic couplings, but we all know the truth about who keeps us alive. Our friends, what would ever we do without them? It is passionate platonic friendship that concerns Lilly Dancyger in her second book, First Love: Essays on Friendship . A collection of personal and critical essays, First Love began when she was writing her first book, Negative Space , a memoir about grieving her father, later selected by Carmen Maria Machado for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. “I was writing a chapter about my teenage life, when I was getting into drugs,” Dancyger tells me. “And there just wasn’t room to go into the relationships that were so important in my life at that time.” She promised herself she would return and write about them later. Today that project is here: it tastes of whiskey and smells like cigarette smoke, and inside, reveals a tender heart roaring with loyalty. Each new essay on friendship reads like its own little universe, “with its own history and customs and themes and flavor,” she says. I spoke with Dancyger via phone about why love is softness, the problem with murder memoirs, and that gush of pleasure we get when a book all comes together at the end. Amy Reardon: I love this sentence: “We snarled and bristled, puffed ourselves up and bared our teeth, but only to protect the softness we’d made for each other where no one else had.” Can you talk about the tenderness and softness at work in this project? Lilly Dancyger: In that piece, I’m talking about the group of friends that I had as a teenager. We were the bad kids, we were degenerate getting into trouble, drinking a lot, shoplifting fighting. We were like dirty, grungy street kids that I don’t think people generally associate with softness, and softness was not what we showed to the world. I wanted to remind people or tell them, for the first time if they had never thought about it, that kids who act out like that are doing it for a […]
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