Julene's Reviews > Negative Space

Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger is a marvelous tribute to her artist father. She weaves their family story, one of addiction and art, into a healing manifesto of her deep love for her father. With her mother sharing the family stories through time, and friends of her father who she interviews, she finds facts of his life from before he met her mother and into the intimate aspects of their life. It is a healing journey through grief.

Drawn into this book through the grit of the Lower East Side, I remember from my time in NYC, and the quest to be an artist from the outsider perspective, I loved how she was able to validate both his life and his art. And how she created her own artistic life as a writer through the lens of her father. It is also bi-coastal, for a time they lived in California, a painful time of a separation. Moved back to NYC with her mother, she skipped high school, eventually getting a GED, and with the experience of reading her father's books she was accepted at the New School, then accepted into Columbia to study journalism, in both schools she felt out of place. She was more at home working in the local bar on the Lower East Side (LES), where she worked her way up to being a bartender, the position with the most flexibility for her school schedule. This is a story of how the drive to be an artist perseveres, and a story of healing.

She went through a period using coke, and stopped. She wrote, "Now that I knew that I wasn't just doing coke for fun but that I'd fallen into the same trap I spent my childhood watching my parents try to climb out of, I couldn't do it anymore. The part of me that wanted to not repeat the pattern was stronger than the part of me that liked being high."

Another quote, "I still don't really know what stability means, or if it's a real thing that's possible to attain. But I know that when you don't have it, it seems like the promise of safety. Like redemption. But it can also feel impossible—the steps that are necessary to reach it don't come naturally if they're not what you're used to, like joining a dance class three weeks into their study of a new combination. When you don't know how to do the things you're expected to do, it can be so much easier to declare them bullshit and say you never wanted to be a part of it anyway. But how sweet to fall into step, to feel like maybe you know what you're doing just enough to fake your way to that magic place called stability, where you'll finally be able to let your guard down."

She learns so much about her families choices that she was unaware of as a child. As is true for children in general, but growing up with a mother and father addicted to heroin formed her in ways she began to understand as she wrote this book and got to know her parents through her adult lens. It's a book she was compelled to write, and I'm so glad she did.