Debbie Harpham
from author’s website
Lilly Dancyger is the author of Negative Space (2021), a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, and the editor of Burn It Down (2019), a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger from Seal Press.
Lilly is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. Her writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and she spends way too much time on twitter (where you can find her at @lillydancyger).
ABOUT NEGATIVE SPACE:
Despite her parents’ struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges?
Dancyger’s father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him–despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against the world that had taken him away. But as an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she’d created about her father–the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime–using his paintings, sculptures, and prints as a guide to piece together a truer story.
Featuring Schactman’s artwork throughout, Negative Space explores Dancyger’s grief, anger, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness her father hid from her, as well as her own.
PRAISE AND RECOGNITION FOR NEGATIVE SPACE:
“A lovely and heartbreaking book.” –Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
“Lilly Dancyger creates an unflinching account of her artist father’s snakebitten life and his struggles with addiction – peeling back the layers around an artistic practice that seems weighted with vulnerability. Ultimately, he comes painfully alive as Dancyger charts an elegiac path to her own self-discovery.” –Cynthia Carr, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
“This book is so many things: a daughter’s heartrending tribute, a love story riddled by addiction, a mystery whose solution lies at the intersection of art and memory. Together, they form a chorus that I could not turn away from, and didn’t wish to.” –Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
“As she travels the past picking up remnants and clues from her father’s art and life, Dancyger brings to form new stories of family and identity as their own works of art. Negative Space is a beautiful restoration act.” –Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water
A “fierce, intimate work” –Kristin Iversen, Refinery29
“Every line of this wise memoir hits hard. But despite all the darkness in Negative Space, it reads like a testament to the power of family love.” –Apple Books
“Dancyger crafts a striking composition out of found objects, a poignant portrait of the identities we construct out of grief.”–Oprah Daily
“The beauty of Negative Space […] is that the author’s retelling pushes against the boundaries of what we understand as a biography — and turns the narrative into a something like a whodunit, a supernatural thriller in which a journalist interrogates a ghost, a story in which art speaks about the past eloquently, and a biography of how a writer came to be.” –Gabino Iglesias, NPR
“Negative Space is a significant debut. Using her exceptional journalistic skills, Dancyger recounts the indelible life of Joe Schactman, her father, an artist and a heroin addict, who died when she was 12. Dancyger’s dexterous usage of time functions as a critical lens, panning in, out, and around, keeping memory fluid.” –Yvonne Conza, LA Review of Books
“With empathy and gorgeous prose, Dancyger excavates, explores, and attempts to understand her father–a brilliant artist and addict–as he was: flawed, complicated, and so very, very loved.” –Carolyn Quimby, The Millions
“Each sentence is a finely wrought work of art unto itself.” –Jane Ratcliffe, Electric Literature
“The strongest portions of Negative Space explore Dancyger’s experience as the child of addicts. She largely parented herself, and when she builds a more stable adulthood than the one modeled by her parents, it’s a hard-won victory. Other children of addicts who experienced difficult transitions into adulthood will find much to relate to here.” –Jessica Wakeman, BookPage
“This striking memoir does what an outstanding memoir should: It not only encourages its readers to explore their pasts from new perspectives, but models the bravery needed to gaze behind the curtain of memory and face whatever realities you may find there.” –Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine
“Dancyger’s eye for detail and devoted pursuit of grim truths make this an enthralling read. By shining light into the dark corners of her family’s past, she creates a brilliant and gut wrenching memoir.” –Adrienne Urbanski, BUST Magazine
AUTHOR VISITS:
Author visits with Lilly Dancyger are available via NovelNetwork.com.