Negative Space

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What to expect

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 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.

Critics Review

  • “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.”

    O, The Oprah Magazine

  • “[A] fierce, intimate work.”

    Refinery29

  • “Negative Space is a beautiful restoration act.”

    Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water

  • “A lovely and heartbreaking book.”

    Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

  • “Candid, thrilling, wickedly smart, Negative Space is one of the greatest memoirs of this, or any, time.”

    T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

  • “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.”

    Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body

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