Lilly Dancyger - Negative Space

Using images and text, Negative Space shows us the New York art scene of the 1980s and the authors late fatherbut neither are ghosts here. They are written with full splendor, tenderness, and possibility. Exploring her artistic legacy, Dancyger confronts what it means to create and build meaning from absence. 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

Negative Space is a lovely and heartbreaking book; navigating pain, inheritance, and loss. Dancygers father emerges from these pages as vividly as if Id known him.

Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

This book is so many things: a daughters 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, and didnt wish to. Like all great works, like those of the authors father, this book resists description but articulates something profoundabout grief, art, and lovethat could not have been communicated in any other way.

Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me

Lilly Dancyger creates an unflinching account of her artist fathers snakebitten life and his struggles with addiction peeling back the layers around an artistic practice that seems weighted with vulnerability. Ultimately, he comes painfully alive as Dancyger charts an elegiac path to her own self-discovery.

Cynthia Carr, author of Fire in the Belly:
The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz

Negative Space is a brilliant, moving, unique, thought-provoking meditation on the artistic life, fathers and daughters, and the struggle to live life at the highest pitch in each generation. This is a rare book about art, and one to treasure.

Mark Greif, author of Against Everything

This fierce, intimate work explores the ways in which we construct identities for the people with whom were closest, and how we must eventually look beyond those constructs in order to see the world the way it really is

Refinery 29, Most Anticipated Books of 2021 List

Dancyger dives deeply into the liminal space of grief and loss in order to re-collect traces of her father as well as pieces of self. As she travels the past picking up remnants and clues from her fathers art and life, Lilly brings to form new stories of family and identity as their own works of art. Negative Space is a beautiful restoration act that brings her own art and heart to life.

Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water

In Negative Space, Dancyger achieves that beautiful, often elusive, balance of writing about addiction with equal parts examination and empathy. Unraveling the missing facts about her fathers life, addiction, and death, through memory, investigation, and his art, she writes with an eye to understanding that we are all more than one thing, that parents are humans first and parents second, that people in the throes of addiction are multi-dimensional. As someone who struggled with heroin addiction for many years, as her father did, the care with which she told this story is exquisite. At turns heartbreaking, reflective, and light, I tore through this book and, when I was done, found myself returning to pages I had marked, passages I had underlined, because the story unfolds in layers, just like life does.

Erin Khar, author of Strung Out:
One Last Hit and Other Lies that Nearly Killed Me

Negative Space is made of a daughters love, a detectives quest, and a true wordsmiths gift of beautiful prose. Dancyger pursues the clues left behind by her father in the provocative, often disturbing artwork he made, clues not only to his mind but to the central mysteries of her life. Her story itself becomes provocative, harrowing--and deeply moving. 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. In writing about her artist father, Dancyger has herself created a work of art.

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

Dancygers memoir is a page turner, the details in this book stayed with me, I dare you to put it down.

Sofia Perpetua, journalist, goodreads.com

Copyright Lilly Dancyger 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying recording or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dancyger, Lilly, author.

Title: Negative space / Lilly Dancyger.

Description: Santa Fe : Santa Fe Writers Project, 2021. | Summary: 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? Dancygers 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 shed 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 fathers work to find the truth of who he really was. A memoir from the editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, Negative Space explores Dancygers own anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness her father hid from her, as well as her ownProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020027267 (print) | LCCN 2020027268 (ebook) | ISBN 9781951631031 (paperback) | ISBN 9781951631048 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Dancyger, Lilly. | Adult children of drug addictsUnited StatesBiography. | JournalistsUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC HV5132 .D353 2021 (print) | LCC HV5132 (ebook) | DDC 362.29/14092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027267

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027268

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For my father, Joe Schactman.
And for everyone living with an absence.

To write this book, I relied on my own memory where applicableas well as my fathers notebooks and letters, my mothers journals, and over two dozen interviews. The stories I collected through these interviews often contradicted each other, and sometimes themselves. I did my best to find something like the truth in the in-between spaces where all of these various sources overlapped.

For a long time, I struggled with the presumptiveness of telling someone elses life story without their inputespecially someone as proud and opinionated as my father. But the more I saw how rarely two people remembered the same event in the same way, the more I realized that even if I could have interviewed my father directly, I still wouldnt have gotten the truth, whatever that even means. So this story is a truthone of many.