Lilly Dancyger
Lilly Dancyger’s Unanswerable Questions
The Jewish writer chats with Alma about her debut memoir, "Negative Space," and the difficulty of writing grief.
Lilly Dancyger’s debut memoir, Negative Space, is a book “in pursuit of answering unanswerable questions,” an endeavor she views as very, very Jewish.
“The whole book is a process of striving to understand, while also acknowledging the limits of what is possible to know and embracing grey areas. Which feels really Jewish to me, in the way that I understand what that means,” Dancyger explains to Alma.
The memoir is an examination of the life and work of her father, the artist Joe Schactman, who struggled with a heroin addiction and died when Dancyger was 12 years old. It’s also a reflection of her own life as she dealt with grief and found her own voice as a writer in the ensuing years. It’s not an easy subject matter, but Dancyger, who previously edited Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, a powerful collection of essays on anger, dives into the task headfirst in Negative Space.
Ahead of the publication, we chatted about writing grief, finding Judaism, and her father’s impression of Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof.”
