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“This book is a goddamn marvel of a mixtape—a fervent, generous compilation of love songs brought together so the whole is even more meaningful than its parts. Dancyger elevates friendship to its proper station, naming the loves of her life and storytelling about the riches, comforts, and insights those relationships have offered her and her beloveds. First Love is poignant, ferociously smart, and unflinchingly honest.”—CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife

“This book is a goddamn marvel of a mixtape—a fervent, generous compilation of love songs brought together so the whole is even more meaningful than its parts. Dancyger elevates friendship to its proper station, naming the loves of her life and storytelling about the riches, comforts, and insights those relationships have offered her and her beloveds. First Love is poignant, ferociously smart, and unflinchingly honest.”—CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife “What if our first and deepest female friendships were the real love stories? Lilly Dancyger’s First Love inhabits the space between young women before their bodies, identities, ideas and dreams get sucked into the social void of commodity and objectification. Like capturing a photograph just before it is taken, in these stories female friendships are their own ontology, a magical space of being where anything is possible. A dazzling array of essays.”—Lidia Yuknavitch, bestselling author of Thrust

“This book is a god damn marvel of a mixtape. A fervent, generous compilation of love songs brought together so the whole is even more meaningful than its parts. Dancyger elevates friendship to its proper station, naming the loves of her life and storytelling about the riches, comforts, and insights those relationships have offered her and her beloveds. First Love is poignant, ferociously smart, and unflinchingly honest—it will empower readers to name the many loves of their lives.”—CJ Hauser, bestselling author of The Crane Wife

“First Love is like a paper fortune teller as essay collection, but for looking into Dancyger’s past instead of her future. Her life folds and refolds in each of these essays, revealing more as she goes in unexpected flashes, and she makes it look easy as she does it. . . . A heartbreaking, funny, wise companion.”—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel “What if our first and deepest female friendships were the real love stories? 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 bracing in its honesty and verve, and is as heady and intoxicating as the relationships it details. It’s an astonishing work, one that made me laugh and cry and feel grateful and nostalgic for my own friendships across the eras of my life.”—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 “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   “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 “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 Weekly

Author Information

Lilly 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.

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