First Love: Essays on Friendship

ISBN: 0593447573

Author: Dancyger, Lilly

Condition: New

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST A vivid, thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays (Associated Press) that treats womens friendships as the love stories they truly are, from the critically acclaimed author of Negative SpaceA tender, unswerving homage to her found family, but also an insightful study of friendship as identity-crafting.-ElleLilly 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, Dancygers 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 Dancygers 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 Anas Nin and Sylvia Plath to Heavenly Creatures and the sad girls of Tumblr-Dancygers 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, its our friends who will help us survive. In First Love, these essential bonds get their due.