Book Review: First Love by Lilly Dancyger *ARC
“To love someone, I have always understood, is to keep them safe.”
Title: First Love
Author: Lilly Dancyger
Series? N/A
My Rating: ★★★★ ½
Genre(s): Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir
Age Range: Adult
Publication: 7 May 2024 (The Dial Press)
CW: alcohol and drug use/addiction, sexual assault, murder, grief, death, suicide
Thank you to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for providing me with an advanced reader’s copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
First Love is the most beautiful memoir I’ve ever read.
First Love is a collection of essays on the wonderful intimacy and complexity of female friendships, as told by author and essayist, Lilly Dancyger. Dancyger writes about various friendships she has had through her lifetime, how they impacted her growth and development, and how she has and continues to view herself through the lens of these friendships.
As a woman who has had the pleasure of experiencing multiple versions of female friendship over my lifetime, I was immediately entranced by Lilly Dancyger’s essays. More than that, I was engrossed by her profound and almost lyrical writing. My Kindle is filled to the brim with highlights of passages I couldn’t leave behind, making it extremely difficult to pick only one quote for this review.
I wasn’t prepared for the darker aspects of this memoir.
Somewhere along the line, I read multiple comparisons between Lilly Dancyger’s “First Love'' and Dolly Alderton’s “Everything I Know About Love.” Alderton’s memoir is very near and dear to me—I even had my brother-in-law do a reading from the book at my wedding in 2023. There are definitely similarities between the two memoirs, namely the examination and celebration of female friendships. However, it’s important to note that the two are vastly different.
If you’re looking for a warm and fuzzy story about gal pals living it up in their twenties, this is probably not the book for you. Lilly Dancyger writes intimately about her very difficult experiences as a child, teenager, and young adult. There should be one big content warning stamped across the front cover of this book. I’ve outlined a few things to take note of at the top of my review, but I’m certain I’ve missed a few.
Dancyger spends much of this book recounting the murder of her cousin and childhood playmate, Sabina. As she describes, the two were more than cousins; they were sisters, each other’s halves, like two puzzle pieces that perfectly fit into each other. The loss of Sabina was integral in shaping Dancyger’s adulthood.
As she reveals near the end of the book, Dancyger felt compelled to write about her cousin’s murder, but was struck by the loss of the victim’s identity to the morbid curiosity many have regarding the perpetrator. Instead, she decided on an homage to female friendship. And the result was utterly beautiful.
By the end of this book, I felt mentally exhausted.
Out of this collection of essays, so many were incredibly poignant, literally taking my breath away. Dancyger carved out beautiful depictions of the women in her life, so much so that I felt like I knew the group of friends as if they were my own. There were often times when I would catch myself saying “No” out loud when something bad happened to any of them, then quickly glance at my husband to make sure I hadn’t woken him up.
One essay that I found particularly devastating to read was “How to Support a Friend Through Grief” which is told as though through a step-by-step guide to grief. It is heartbreaking and beautiful and touching and all the things. It’s a difficult read, but a pain that feels necessary, in a way.
Another essay discusses how Dancyger feels about motherhood. This is not a new topic, especially not in today’s conversation where more and more women are opting into a childfree-by-choice lifestyle. But what I found to be refreshing about this particular take was Dancyger’s internal conflict. I rarely (if ever) see depictions of women who feel an inherent desire to have children that is riddled with the fear of losing oneself, particularly career and personhood, to becoming a mother. It’s a debate that never has a clear resolution and I appreciated this perspective as someone who is entering that chapter of her own life.
Every time I put this book down, first of all, I didn’t want to. I actively never wanted to stop reading. I read until my eyes were dry and blurry. One time, I read until I fell asleep past 1AM with the Kindle still in my hand. But second of all, when I put the book down, I felt this profound wistfulness. Like a nostalgia for something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
First Love by Lilly Dancyger is a breathtaking depiction of female friendships and the desire women feel to comfort, and be comforted by, the other women in their lives.
Synopsis: 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.
Do you enjoy essay collections? Let me know in the comments.
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