First Love
Essays on Friendship
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Narrated by:
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Lilly Dancyger
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By:
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Lilly Dancyger
About this listen
A “vivid, thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays” (Associated Press) that treats women’s friendships as the love stories they truly are, from the critically acclaimed author of Negative Space
“A tender, unswerving homage to her found family, but also an insightful study of friendship as identity-crafting.”—Elle
Lilly Dancyger always thought of her closest friendships as great loves, complex and profound as any romance. When her beloved cousin was murdered just as both girls were entering adulthood, Dancyger’s devotion to the women in her life took on a new urgency—a desire to hold her friends close while she still could. In First Love, this urgency runs through a striking exploration of the bonds between women, from the intensity of adolescent best friendship and fluid sexuality to mothering and chosen family.
Each essay in this incisive collection is grounded in a close female friendship in Dancyger’s life, reaching outward to dissect cultural assumptions about identity and desire, and the many ways women create space for each other in a world that wants us small. Seamlessly weaving personal experience with literature and pop culture—ranging from fairy tales to true crime, from Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath to Heavenly Creatures and the “sad girls” of Tumblr—Dancyger’s essays form a kaleidoscopic story of a life told through friendships, and an expansive interrogation of what it means to love each other.
Though friendship will never be enough to keep us safe from the dangers of the world, Dancyger reminds us that love is always worth the risk, and that when tragedy strikes, it’s our friends who will help us survive. In First Love, these essential bonds get their due.
©2024 Lilly Dancyger (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“First Love is like a paper fortune teller as essay collection, but for looking into Dancyger’s past instead of her future. Her life folds and refolds in each of these essays, revealing more as she goes in unexpected flashes, and she makes it look easy as she does it. . . . A heartbreaking, funny, wise companion.”—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“First Love is bracing in its honesty and verve, and is as heady and intoxicating as the relationships it details. It’s an astonishing work, one that made me laugh and cry and feel grateful and nostalgic for my own friendships across the eras of my life.”—Chloé Cooper Jones, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Easy Beauty
“This book is a goddamn marvel of a mixtape—a fervent, generous compilation of love songs brought together so that the whole is even more meaningful than its parts. First Love is poignant, ferociously smart, and unflinchingly honest.”—CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife
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Story
When Amanda Montei became a parent, she struggled with the physicality of caring for children, but even more with the growing lack of autonomy she felt in her personal and professional life. The conditions of modern American parenthood—the lack of paid leave and affordable childcare, the isolation and alienation, the distribution of labor in her home, and the implicit demands of marriage—were not what she had expected. After #MeToo, however, she began to see a connection between how women were feeling in motherhood and the larger culture of assault in which she had grown up.
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Just what I I need
- By CPStar on 10-24-23
By: Amanda Montei
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Girlhood
- By: Melissa Febos
- Narrated by: Melissa Febos
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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When her body began to change at 11 years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defences she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations.
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Great read, audio needs editing
- By Niurka Maldonado on 04-02-21
By: Melissa Febos
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My Good Bright Wolf
- A Memoir
- By: Sarah Moss
- Narrated by: Morven Christie
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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A girl must watch her figure but never be vain. She must be intelligent but never a know-it-all. She must be ambitious, if she is clever, but not in a way that shows. She must cook and sew and make do and mend. She must know (but never say) that these skills are, in some fundamental way, flawed and frivolous—feminine. Girls must stay small, even as they grow. Women must show restraint. And yet. In books, in the landscape of imagination, a girl can run free.
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A brilliant thinker.
- By Sarah Steinberg on 12-05-24
By: Sarah Moss
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Grief Is for People
- By: Sloane Crosley
- Narrated by: Sloane Crosley
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship, and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.
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Beautiful
- By MS on 03-03-24
By: Sloane Crosley
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A Certain Hunger
- By: Chelsea G. Summers
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Original Recording
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Eat Pray Love meets American Psycho in a seductive and sinister debut literary thriller. Food critic Dorothy Daniels indulges in her homicidal urges by murdering her lovers and devouring their organs in this intense, visceral, and lushly told tale of food, sex, power, and the pursuit of a very particular taste set between New York and Italy. Please Note: A Certain Hunger contains adult language and depictions of violence. Discretion is advised.
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Ugh.
- By Kimberly on 02-03-20
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In the Dream House
- A Memoir
- By: Carmen Maria Machado
- Narrated by: Carmen Maria Machado
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope - the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman....
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Devastatingly Beautiful
- By SeattleBookLover on 02-04-20
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Just Kids
- By: Patti Smith
- Narrated by: Patti Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late 60s and 70s and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.
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Darkly Self Centered & Narrow View
- By Sara on 10-05-15
By: Patti Smith
What listeners say about First Love
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Christa Hillhouse
- 05-08-24
Grabbed my heart and wouldn’t let go!
I have looked forward to this release for months. Female friendship was definitely my first love and this collection of essays brings it all back. Such a crucial time in my life, the us against the world mentality, the branching off into the bigger world and leaving those relationships behind, sometimes by choice, sometimes by tragedy. Dancyger’s narration is intimate and transformative. The stories stay with me long after I’ve finished listening for the day.
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- Carson
- 07-02-24
Skip It
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.
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