this book has been sitting on my shelf ever since i received my arc copy and i just hadn’t been in the mood to read it. i came on here to read a few goodreads reviews and saw one that said it was a mix between Just Kids and Everything I Know About Love and it immediately convinced me to pick it up. that reviewer could not have been more spot on. this book captured the essence of both of those books and the feelings i had while reading them. i laugh, i cried, i enjoyed every second of this.

add this to your list of books to read in your twenties. right now.

This is a homage to the different types of friendships you experience throughout your life. My eyes teared up at least 4 times while reading this. Loved it.

What I took away from this book; Don’t take your friendships for granted. Know when to move on from certain friendships, even when it’s difficult. Sometimes you grow apart from friends that you had a deep connection with for years. Other friendships last a lifetime.

At times, it felt like a grittier version of Dolly Alderton's "Everything I Know About Love," and I mean that in the best way possible. Although friendship is the main theme, the essays also explore a wide range of topics including family dynamics, social media, bisexuality, the complexities of feminine emotions, dealing with grief and loss, addiction, shared motherhood, and other aspects of life. Some essays are tough to read due to their raw honesty, while others tug at your heartstrings, making you want to hug every friend who has been there for you, even those you're no longer in touch with.

Dancyger's writing explores the complexities of female friendships and the many ways we deal with love and loss. This collection highlights the strength of love and friendship through all the phases of growing up.

The opening essay made me cry. Smart, vivid, feminist writing about the power of female friendships. Highly recommend Lilly Dancyger's memoir in essays!

This made me want to immediately pick up my phone and talk to all of my girl friends. Is there anything more special in life than female friendships ? Doubt it.
This captured all the different aspects, potential and feelings of that in a way I’d never thought to describe. Really special

I loved this book of essays. I listened along with reading the text and loved the combo. Great narrator (the author?). The essays were vulnerable and honest and covered a wide range of topic and types of friendship. Adored them.

If there is one thing about me, it's that I will read any book that is a commentary on friendship, especially complex female friendships. Its a topic that is close to my heart and one I find so fascinating. So when I heard of this book, I was instantly on board. Essays seemed like the perfect way to talk about the innumerable ways that friendships weave into our lives. However, these essays were so discordant and I don't feel that they were succinctly tied together or had a tight overarching theme to them. I was left feeling disappointed by the content, the writing, and the flippancy shown in many of the essays.

Thank you to Netgalley for my ARC.

Thank you to Penguin Randomhouse for an e-ARC of First Love in exchange for an honest review.

This collection of essays focuses on the author’s experiences growing up, moving and the people involved in her life in the 90’s and 00’s.
I was really hoping to read a beautiful collection of stories and essays surrounding strong and impactful women, and I kind of got that.
Sometimes the importance of the women was overshadowed by the author’s emphasis on pop culture and party culture. The themes overlapped slightly in her tales of friendship, but I felt it was more about how wild her teen and young adult life was. It allowed for some interesting stories, but it just wasn’t what I was expecting from the book which led to a little disappointment.

I’m familiar with the time era that the author wrote about, which allowed for some nostalgia, and the essays are very approachable! If you are looking for a book of essays that transport you back to the good ole days, filled with musical and theatre references you might enjoy this one!

Lilly Dancyger is the coolest girl you'll encounter, or at least the coolest girl that I've heard about. I don't think girls that cool could have existed in the suburban Scottsdale high school I went to, stuck as it was in a land of malls and residential areas. Dancyger was living in New York, where she was comfortably hanging out in dive bars at fourteen, something that probably couldn't happen in a place where you'd have to ask your mom for a ride. She may have dropped out of high school but she still managed to get a full ride to a private university; we don't inhabit the same universe. So when it began to dawn on me that while this book was about friendship, it was mostly about Lilly Dancyger, I was only mildly annoyed by the bait and switch.

Like most of us, Dancyger had intense friendships in childhood and in her teenage years and early twenties. She's good at capturing how intense those relationships can be and how they ebb and flow, so that the person you shared every thought with one year, is less important the next. There are several other topics addressed in this book, with grief being on of the most prevalent, including grief following a violent death. Dancyger is young and so there's a bit of stretching needed to make this memoir-in-essays work, with a friend writing embarrassingly complimentary segments in one essay. There's little universality here, these are essays about Lilly Dancyger, her life and her thoughts. I'm still looking for a book taking a look at friendship and the role friendship plays in our lives, but I did enjoy reading about Dancyger's life well enough.

Short story collections are often hit or miss for me but this one I generally enjoyed. I loved how Dancyger wove her relationship with her cousin throughout the book and some of her stories from her younger days read like a beautiful work of fiction.

i will gobble up every piece of content about female friendships but i do wish this one had been more focused on the friendships themselves rather than solely the author, or that it had felt more connected overall.

A fairly bouncy collection of essays that feels more like a cohesive memoir, even if it's nonlinear. It did repeat itself often, and repeatedly hit on the same points that obviously hold a lot of significance for the author (drugs and drinking in the park, mourning on the fire escape, etc.) but which become tiring to read about so many times. The essay about sad young literary women/Sylvia Plath was the strongest and my favorite, I think there was a lot to resonate with here for many readers.

This memoir blends a number of themes that will resonate with women of a certain age. There is an unexpected true crime angle but mostly it is a story of female friendship.

There is something specifically insightful (and slightly devastating) about reading this book as a woman who has never had a friendship like the ones explored between the women in this book’s pages. I have 2 incredible sisters, an amazing mom, an extremely lovable grandmother, but I have never had the type of unparalleled attached at the hip type of female friendship that they often show in movies, tv, or books.

There is a underlying hollowness present in my life, and I’m sure many other women’s, in the shape of a female best friend (the one you do everything with, that you tell everything to, go everywhere with) that due to different circumstances in my life, I have never been able to fill. I think this sensation of isolation from a type of friendship that seems quintessential to girlhood and womanhood is extremely under-talked about, despite my knowing of so many women online who feel this alone. There is a stigma of being a woman with no girl best friends, that you are potentially unlikable, unsupportive of others, view yourself as superior; There is the simple unacknowledged causation of this type of unchosen independence: lack of opportunity that has slowly morphed into self isolation. It feels like you’ve missed a train everyone else had this certain someone else get them a ticket for, and you don’t know where to even begin to be allowed on board.

But in no way is this book about me, and I went into it knowing I needed to put my lack out of mind in order to openly welcome the value and uniquely manifested presence of other women’s platonic love.

Lilly chronicles her tumultuous childhood through her friendships: skipping school, drinking and doing drugs, going out to clubs, lounging for hours on the fire escape; trying to be older than she is while still lavishing in the value of her girlhood relationships. Is there any more commonly normalized and advertised part of being a woman than the confidence and company of a group of girlfriends?

In this book, Dancyger unpacks while also processing deep traumas in her life, reminiscing upon the entrance and exits of multiple impactful and deeply important relationships, the priceless girl friends of days past and future. While in the midst of grief for the loss of her cousin, one of her closest, longest, and most cherished friends, Lilly takes this opportunity to deeply reflect and desperately cling to the women in her life, truly the most invaluable relationships you can be granted in this life.

I am grateful to be a spectator of the magic of female friendships, the transformative power they provide to girls who are slowly growing into women and once they become women, the petty triumphs these friendships’ temperamental drama teaches you to overcome, the companionship of women who will catch you when you fall and listen to you when you yap, push you out of your comfort zone but tuck you back in when you need to get that comfort back. Despite my own personal lack of this type of love, a fact that has cornered me into my shell with an isolating vengeance that often no longer lets me hope for this experience, or seek it, I can deeply appreciate this kind of love’s incomparable value when I see it, and despite the fact that this specific kind of love can at this moment never be able to be truly defined, or bottled for me to entirely capture it myself, Dancyger artfully and idiosyncratically eternalizes it’s impact on her in her life so far, and it’s impact upon her is equally heartwarming and heart-wrenching to experience.

What a beautifully written ode to formative female friendship. These essays are written with so much care and thoughtfulness, the reader immediately becomes emotionally invested.

This book is such a beautiful collection of essays that really encapsulate the vast nuances of and experiences within female friendship. Much of it is deeply personal to Lilly Dancyger’s own life and lived experience, but simultaneously speaks to the universal truths of what it means to have and be a friend.

I specifically love the way that Lilly Dancyger’s writing finds a way to shape the mundanities of friendship and everyday life into narratives that feel magical and meaningful and whole. Because in the end, it really is all about the moments spent sitting on the fire escape with your besties, sitting and talking and drinking and smoking for hours. That *is* the magic. Her writing is so engrossing and transportive that I felt like I was right there with her and her friends as they figured life out and laughed and cried and grieved their losses and took on the world. <3

The way that these essays collectively traced the through-line of how friendships evolve and change over time and through the defining years of middle/high school, early twenties, late twenties, early thirties, etc. made me ache with nostalgia for all of the friends I’ve loved and lost over the years, and want to text the ones who are still by my side to this day how much I love them.

Fave essays were The Fire Escape, Partner In Crime, Sad Girls, How To Support A Friend Through Grief, and Mutual Mothering. I also highly recommend the essay collection Burn It Down, which Lilly Dancyger edited a few years back!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a digital ARC of First Love in exchange for an honest review. I also purchased my own physical copy of the book and listened to the audiobook (read by the author) on Spotify.

Thank you NetGalley, Penguin Random House and Lilly Dancyger for the advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for review.

This essay collection is moving and truly beautiful. I feel as if it touched a part of me I didn't know how to describe. A comprehensive look at female friendships, and what love means between them, First Love is a deep dive into emotions and how our friendships are woven in tandem with them. Many times I felt seen while reading this. Many times I felt recognized. First Love not only addresses female friendships but the gambit of grief and loss, familial difficulty, and the constant struggle to quantify our feelings.

At different stages I reflected and thought of different loves I have had along the way, and found new respect for the role they played in who I am today.

The writing itself is beautiful, and I feel honoured to have shared in Lilly's journey.

Good writing that is unfortunately eclipsed by unabashed mentions of the Israeli occupation with no acknowledgment of its violent settlements in Palestine.

What a beautiful collection of essays on deep, soul-sustaining friendships! Lilly Dancyger is such a good writer that even when your world couldn’t be more different than her experiences, she manages to get to the heart of these relationships and make it widely relatable. The book is a love letter to her people and it’s stunning in its in intimacy. You feel lucky as the reader to be let in this way.

🔸ARC REVIEW🔸 First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4.5)

GENRES: Memoir, Essays

🌶️ HOT TAKE: Your first, formative experiences of conditional (sometimes obsessive) love are with your friends, not your romantic interests.

🧶 THE SUMMARY:
The anchoring essay(s) in this collection is one of grief, loss, and of first love. The author’s first best friend, her cousin Sabine, was murdered when they were both young adults. The author reminisces on the close relationship they had growing up, and how as adults, they were just staring to come together again before she was violently, and randomly, killed. After her death, the author leaned heavily on her female friends and the subsequent essays in the collection explore how our experiences impact what we seek and exchange in our friendships through closer looks at the author’s friendships over the years.

💁🏻‍♀️ MY THOUGHTS:
🔸 In the concluding essay, the author discusses how she originally set out to write a true crime memoir about the circumstances surrounding her cousin’s death as a way to process the trauma and share her cousin’s story, but she ended up writing this instead. I love how the message of this book, whose premise is so emotionally raw, ended up being one of love and hope instead of one of violence or death. It felt like such a good celebration of the value of friendship and I loved every minute of it!

🔸 Each essay in the collection talks about a new friend, what that friendship dynamic looked and felt like, and in some ways how it has evolved in the time since. I appreciated how the author chose to include both friendships that have burned out and others that have stood the test of time and evolved to meet it. I particularly liked the essays toward the beginning of the collection, where the dynamic was a little darker (due to the heightened emotions of youth) than the later essays, but overall, I loved this one.

Thank you to Netgalley and The Dial Press for the arc, provided in exchange for an honest review. 

🔗 SIMILAR BOOKS:
📙 BFF by Christie Tate: Another essay collection inspired by the death of friend (this one from a long illness). This one is a little more psychologically curious, and would be an interesting foil because the author is largely unpacking her struggle with forming and sustaining female friendships.

📙 Veronica by Mary Gaitskill: A fiction book where the now aging narrator is thinking back on a friendship she made as young adult with an older woman that she had reconnected with right before her death to AIDS. This book definitely focuses more on the darker side of female friendship, where love is also tangled up in jealousy and competition.