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9th Ave: Lilly Dancyger and Nina Renata Aron
October 8, 2021 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm PDT
Free
Join us on Friday, October 8th at 6pm PT when Lilly Dancyger reads from and discusses her memoir, Negative Space, with Nina Renata Aron at 9th Ave!
Masks Required for In-Person Attendance
Join us virtually by registering at the link below
Praise for Negative Space
“Negative Space is a lovely and heartbreaking book; navigating pain, inheritance, and loss. Dancyger’s father emerges from these pages as vividly as if I’d known him…” —Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
“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.” —Melissa Febos, Award-winning author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
“Candid, thrilling, wickedly smart, Negative Space is one of the greatest memoirs of this, or any, time.” —T Kira Madden, award-winning author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
“Practically hot to the touch.” —BookPage (Most Anticipated Fall Nonfiction)
About Negative Space
A memoir from the editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, Negative Space explores Dancyger’s own anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness her father hid from her, as well as her own.
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 like animal bones, human hair, and broken glass, 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 a world that had taken her father away. 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 sculptures, paintings, and prints as a guide, Dancyger sought out the characters from his world who could help her decode the language of her father’s work to find the truth of who he really was.
About Lilly Dancyger
Lilly Dancyger is the author of Negative Space, 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, an anthology of essays on women’s anger. Her writing has been published by Longreads, BOMB, Guernica, The Washington Post, Glamour, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and you can find her on Twitter at @lillydancyger.