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Learn moreA 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 had 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.
Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. She’s the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger, and her writing has been published by Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Playboy, Glamour, Longreads, The Rumpus, and more. She lives in New York City.
Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. She’s the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger, and her writing has been published by Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Playboy, Glamour, Longreads, The Rumpus, and more. She lives in New York City.
Reviews
“Much like her father had, Dancyger crafts a striking composition out of found objects, a poignant portrait of the identities we construct out of grief.”
“[A] fierce, intimate work.”
“Negative Space is a beautiful restoration act.”
“A lovely and heartbreaking book.”
“Candid, thrilling, wickedly smart, Negative Space is one of the greatest memoirs of this, or any, time.”
“This book is a true accomplishment, one that often left me stunned and disturbed in all the right ways, all the ways brilliant art does.”
“An unflinching account of her artist father’s snake-bitten life and his struggles with addiction—peeling back the layers around an artistic practice that seems weighted with vulnerability.”
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