First Love

February 12, 2024
In these bruising essays, memoirist Dancyger (Negative Space) contemplates female friendships “predicated on deep love and knowing,” yet frequently marked by tragedy. Probing grief and self-discovery, she writes of a “first love” with her cousin Sabina that began at age six and ended with Sabina’s murder at age 20, a formative tragedy that “rippled out... like a web” to future friendships. In high school, she formed an obsessive, cocaine-fueled bond with fellow rebel Haley that unraveled after the two stopped using the drug, ending a friendship whose intensity seemed to predict its demise. Elsewhere, Dancyger describes how her cousin’s murder helped bond her to college friend Carly, whose fiancée later died suddenly. The latter tragedy painfully highlighted the impossibility of shielding loved ones from pain: grief “is an entirely different country from your own, and the only person who can ever find their way through it is her,” Dancyger reminded herself. In these essays, love is inextricably bound with pain, a duality the author renders with a lyrical and affecting rawness. Cathartic and intense, this leaves a mark. Agent: Annie Hwang, Ayesha Pande Literary.