Anyone who has experienced profound loss understands the nonlinear nature of grief. The echoes in absence are circular, spiraled, looping. To read Lilly Dancyger’s memoir is to travel along the arc of a specific loss through her eyes: as a daughter to Joe Schactman, who died too young at 43. Yet, Negative Space embraces readers in a universal sorrow, beautifully wrought on the
Santa Fe Writer s Project
Lilly Dancyger s
Negative Space is a double biography that tells Dancyger s story while simultaneously discovering her dead father s life.
At once an exploration of grief and a literary séance in which the author speaks to her father through art and interviews with his friends and exes, this book is also a coming-of-age narrative where grief and anger become a path that leads to destruction, addiction and, ultimately, redemption.
Dancyger remembers her childhood as happy. She grew up around positive people, parents who were creative and encouraged her to be the same, and she was always surrounded by art. However, the heroin addiction her parents struggled with, their split, and her father s death which wasn t from an overdose eclipsed that auspicious beginning.
Negative Space: An Interview With Lilly Dancyger
Catapult and Barrelhouse Books editor Lilly Dancyger talks about her debut memoir Negative Space.
Author:
Lilly Dancyger editor of the anthology
Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger and assistant editor of Barrelhouse Books never intended to write a memoir. She originally set out to write about her father Joe Schactman, a member of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene who died unexpectedly when she was young.
The book she eventually wrote,
Negative Space, combines Dancyger s reporting skills honed while earning her bachelor s and master s degrees in journalism with her rosy childhood memories growing up in the East Village and San Francisco to reveal instability fraying at the edges. Her interviews with those that were close to her father and analysis of his sculptures, paintings, and prints guide her to a better understanding of her loving father, whose escalating addiction to heroin sometimes overshadowed his creative