• First Love

  • Essays on Friendship
  • By: Lilly Dancyger
  • Narrated by: Lilly Dancyger
  • Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 rating)

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First Love  By  cover art

First Love

By: Lilly Dancyger
Narrated by: Lilly Dancyger
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Publisher's summary

A “vivid, thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays” (Associated Press) that treats women’s friendships as the love stories they truly are, from the critically acclaimed author of Negative Space

“A tender, unswerving homage to her found family, but also an insightful study of friendship as identity-crafting.”—Elle

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.

©2024 Lilly Dancyger (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“In a vivid, thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays, Lilly Dancyger explores the powerful role that female friendships played in her chaotic upbringing.”Associated Press

“Her latest book, First Love: Essays on Friendship . . . is a tender, unswerving homage to her found family, but also an insightful study of friendship as identity-crafting, a way of assembling tools to compose (and improve) a self.”—Elle

“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, Literary Hub

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Grabbed my heart and wouldn’t let go!

I have looked forward to this release for months. Female friendship was definitely my first love and this collection of essays brings it all back. Such a crucial time in my life, the us against the world mentality, the branching off into the bigger world and leaving those relationships behind, sometimes by choice, sometimes by tragedy. Dancyger’s narration is intimate and transformative. The stories stay with me long after I’ve finished listening for the day.

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