This book was really interesting. I was offered a chance to read it through NetGalley. I found the essays really engaging.

felt very dolly alderton-seque, and portrayed the beauty of female friendships in an unfiltered and unflinchingly honest light. i love essays and i love writings about friendships, so this was a great read for me!

I love that female friendships are getting a platform. So rarely do we realize that our first loves are our friends. I hope everyone reads.

This is a nice essay collection about the power of female friendship. Some of the essays really worked, but some of them didn't land. The Sylvia Plath essay was the best. The author really did a great job explaining how much she cherishes her friends. You can tell how much she loves and adores them. I want to be her friend as well. She seems like a nice and loyal person.

Thank you NetGalley and The Dial Press for a copy of "First Love" by Lilly Dancyger in exchange for an honest review. I needed this book. I believe it came to me just at the right time in life. I'd recommend this book to anyone who loves the topic "coming-of-age" and enjoys reading about the discussion towards the meaning of friendships and what makes it just that. It felt honest and raw, and I appreciate that Dancyger was able to give us that vulnerability. It carries some heavier topics and made me very emotional. I feel like everyone should read this!

Very nicely written essay collection, I did find myself wishing that each essay had more narrative memory and faith in the reader to remember people's names from the last essay featured. Although a shared theme was definitely present, I did feel like there were some essays that felt repetitive and out of sync with some of the stronger ones.

This is an essay collection breaking down the roles female friendships have played in Dancyger's life at different points. I loved this ode to friendship and the complexities of friendship.

First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger is a lush collection of essays that centers on growing up, building personal relationships, and changing our identity organically as life progresses. Dancyger’s writing is full of compassion, love, and the yearning one feels growing up in a constantly changing world. While looking at the complexities of friendships, Dancyger also analyzes the impact of media on girlhood, which I found to be really interesting.

This essay collection accomplished so much despite its short page count with exceptional strength in sentence structure and prose. The essay I found to be the most impactful was “Mutual Mothering” as I’ve also felt similar emotions when considering motherhood/watching my friends become mothers themselves. I loved Dancyger’s commentary on grief and how it can move through friendships.

Thanks to Netgalley and The Dial Press for the ARC.

Fifteen essays span Dancyger’s collection which center on the authors most prominent female friendships, asking if it’s romantic love that is or should be, really most central in our lives. “With romantic love,” Dancyger writes, “there’s usually the expectation that you get one at a time. But sisterly love allows for multiplicity, overlapping and interlocking.” The essays examines the author’s relationship with her late cousin, and other central figures as she makes her way across the bridge from adolescence into adulthood. The prose is crisp, and Dancyger weaves in interesting and prescient theory and pop cultural connections.

I was enjoying this group of stories … then realized she was writing about her life and her friendships …the stories were scattered back and forth from her life, and I didn’t finish it. I read about the author and realized she was trying to talk about her murdered cousin and the effect on her …didn’t really come across that in depth in the first quarter.

lilly dancyger's memoir 'first love: essays on friendship' chronicles the author's life thru the meaningful friendships she had throughout. by tracing her life through her non-romantic relationships, the reader is able to see how these friendships impacted & changed her, and also how she was able to cope with a number of traumatic life events. i found this narrative strategy to be really effective for me, as there was a common thread throughout each chapter, even though they were told out of order. as someone who had a lot of close friends growing up, i did resonate with some of the emotions dancyger had towards her friends, even though our lives looked vastly different. definitely check this one out!

A look into friendship from within and outside the family unit - or rather - from within the born family and the chosen family, and shocking amount of conversations about what it means to be a woman and the friendships we have as an extension of our gender. Well written for cis-gender and trans-gender women alike (in fact pointing out that she does not agree with certain stances on excluding trans women), I look forward to reading more that her voice has to offer.

This was a really heartwarming group of essays on girlhood and friendship. I enjoyed it much more than I was expecting to going in. I can't wait to read more by this author.

Lilly Dancyger shares an intimate collection of essays on female friendship and these bonds that have shaped her throughout her life.

Relating pop culture references like "sad girl Instagram," Sylvia Plath, fairytales, true crime, and Heavenly Creatures with her own experiences in mothering her friends and being mothered, feral girlhood, adolescent obsession and falling out, and the sudden loss of her cousin and best friend--Dancyger melds vulnerability, entertainment, and intimacy in a beautiful and engaging way.

From the first love of girlhood connection to the women who sustain us emotionally and mentally in adulthood, this book is truly a gift to those who think deeply about our non-romantic relationships and how important they are to a full and balanced life.

(3.5 stars rounded up to 4)

It’s well written but I would have preferred that it wasn’t so orderly. This didn’t seem like essays but rather just a story.

I didn't expect to like this book as much as I did, but Dancyger's writing always does something for me. It strikes a chord, even though I could not relate to some of these horrific situations in the essays.

Several years ago, at the Barrelhouse-hosted writing conference Conversations and Connections, I attended a session led by Lilly Dancyger. I admit to forgetting what it was about (I’d have to dig up my notes) but I came away just so impressed and have followed her career ever since. She’s a literary genius, something that’s evident in First Love, her essay collection about friendship. It's brilliant and vulnerable and gorgeous—and so much more. The cover photo is of a younger Lilly on a fire escape with two friends—a scene that readers will come to know throughout the pages of First Love as the tiny New York City apartment retreat when life became too much and where Lilly and her friends sought refuge with bottles of whiskey and cigarettes, especially when Lilly’s beloved twenty-year-old cousin Sabina, was murdered.

Lilly writes with such depth and love, not only about Sabina but the indelible bonds between the friends who got her through that trauma. These are the friends who became Lilly's family during her feral childhood and teen years of spending all night roaming New York City's streets and parks, not attending (and eventually dropping out of) school and working as a bartender. We follow them through the pivotal years of their lives, of failed relationships and growth. Lilly's gasp-out-loud writing made me feel like I knew Raiona and Sydney and Leah and Heather and Carly—and that I, too, wanted to hang out on the fire escape drinking with them, telling them my secrets, grieving their and my losses. (There's a lot of that in First Love.)

"Remember that, of course, there is no map for grief. That her grief is an entirely different country from your own, and the only person who can ever find their way through is her. Feel silly for thinking you could impose order or something like this. That you could offer her anything more than your presence."

First Love is heart wrenching and raw at times yet tender at others. It is, above all, a goddamn masterclass of a love story. 5 stars. Thanks to Netgalley and The Dial Press for the ARC.

Overall this was a gorgeous collection of essays. It was more of a memoir than I had expected, but that made it more powerful. Reading the author's struggle with the grief after her cousin's murder was emotionally devastating and raw. I really enjoyed the commentary on Anais Nin and Sylvia Plath. In some ways it felt like it could have been stronger as two books, one a memoir on grief, and another essays on friendship, but it made for a unique collection.

Thank you to NetGalley for the digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed this book and the many chapters of Lilly's life. It was very nice to pick up over the span of a few months. Something that I found fun about this book is that I found so many things that I am interested in watching and reading. I feel there is nothing more to say, you simply need to read it for yourself.

When I first started this book, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I definitely didn’t expect to be sobbing after the first chapter?! This was an incredible and refreshing look at friendships between women that I think everyone should read. I enjoyed that the author even included the harmful relationships.