How Writing Can Raise the Dead: An Interview with Lilly Dancyger, author of ‘Negative Space’

“Describing what it feels like for somebody to not be there is a very abstract process. Pretty much this whole book has been trying to figure out how to do that.”

One night in college with a mug of cheap wine and “the courage built up to invade the privacy of a dead man,” Lilly Dancyger opened a box of her father’s notebooks for the first time. Dancyger’s father, Joe Schactman, was an artist in the 1980s East Village scene who died when she was just an adolescent. After his death, his notebooks had offered a “vague promise of answers” about who he was. What she found and did not find started her down a course that led to her candid, clever, and heartbreaking memoir, Negative Space, which was published on May 1, 2021.

Negative Space is a fresh take on the genre of memoir, a narrative woven of Dancyger’s memories, her interviews with family and friends, and reproductions of her father’s art. Dancyger expertly employs this hybrid form to reexamine her childhood and the mythology she’s built around her father. In the process, she is faced with the legacy of her father’s art, her parents’ struggles with addiction, and finding a way to feel her father’s presence in a life shaped by his absence.

Lilly Dancyger edits and instructs for both Catapult and Barrelhouse. She is the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger from Seal Press. In the two weeks since Dancyger published Negative Space, it has received much deserved praise, including selection as one of the best books of the month by Apple Books and Oprah Daily.

In April, I had the privilege of speaking with Dancyger about her debut memoir. Over the course of our conversation, we talked about when to step away from a project, the difference between blame and anger, and putting loss into words.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Eliza Harris: First, congratulations on your memoir, Negative Space, which has already been selected as a most anticipated title of 2021 by Electric Lit, Literary Hub, and Refinery 29. How many years have you been working on this book, and how does it feel to be on the other side of writing it?

Lilly Dancyger: Thank you! It’s been about eleven years, maybe almost twelve at this point, but I will stick with eleven. It feels surreal; it doesn’t quite feel like I’m on the other side of it yet. The last big push is trying to send it out into the world with as much momentum as I can. It still feels weird that it’s a real book and not just a document on my computer that I’m going to be working on by myself for the rest of time.

EH: After working on Negative Space for over a decade, how did you know when it was done?

LD: That’s a good question because I thought it was done several times, but I think those times it was just that I wanted it to be done. I just said, OK, that’s good enough. I kind of ran out of steam, but then for one reason or another, I kept going back and revising again, and again, and again, and then finally something clicked and it was different. I just knew it was done. It felt like a book; it finally felt like something I would be proud to have people read. I told my husband, “I think the book is done. But for real this time!” because I’d made similar announcements several times in the past.

EH: Do you have any advice for a writer who’s been working on the same project for many years and is starting to lose faith in it?

LD: I would just say it’s OK to take breaks. Needing some time away from the project doesn’t mean that you’re abandoning it. It’s going to take a long time, no matter what, so you might as well spend time being out in the world and living new experiences, absorbing other literature and other kinds of art, and feeling reinvigorated and reinspired, rather than trying to push through when it’s miserable and you hate it and you think the whole thing is crap—that’s not when you’re going to write your best work, right? So take a break, walk away. I took several breaks. Some of them were a couple of months long, and I think the longest one was about a year. I always came back to it, and I always had a new perspective and a new excitement for the work, which I think is the most important thing. When you stop feeling that, you’ve got to put it away for a little while.

EH: Part of what I find really exciting about Negative Space is that it’s not easily classifiable. It’s part memoir, part journalism, and also a visual narrative. What did combining these genres allow you to do that they couldn’t separately?

LD: For this particular story, I don’t think I would have been able to tell it without all those elements. I tried at various points to tell a simpler version of the story. Originally, it was just going to be an art book. There was no memoir in it at all. Then, after I started bringing in some of the memoir element, it was going to be just an art-book-memoir. But then people kept asking about the process and wanting to know what it was like to learn all this stuff about my father, and that’s how the kind of journalistic, “come along with me on this investigation” element of the story came to be. It just needed all those elements. Especially the visual element—I know a lot of people saw it as supplemental, but I always saw the visual element as just as much a part of the story as any of the other narrative threads.

EH: Negative Space is of course your story, but through combining these genres you’re also able to tell the story of your late father, artist Joe Schactman. Are there any specific considerations that you feel like you had to take into account when telling somebody else’s story, especially a close family member?

LD: Do your research. Try and absorb as much as you can, and try to see the person from as many angles as you can, but then also acknowledge that there will always be a gap between what you’re able to learn and the actual truth of who a person is. That was something that I had to confront over and over again. No matter how many interviews I did, or how many of his notebooks I read, or how much time I spent studying his artwork, or thinking about what he would say, or do, or think about certain things, there always was going to be some distance. I was never going to really fully and totally be able to capture everything about him or embody his perspective. I had to be OK with knowing that I was never going to get all the way there, while still pushing to get as close as I could.

Needing some time away from the project doesn’t mean that you’re abandoning it. 

EH: In Negative Space you describe being faced with truths about your father that contradict your own memory, and, in response, you write, “I realized that this reality wasn’t any stronger than the one in my memory. I may have been able to learn more about who he was as a man, but even the ugliest truths wouldn’t change who he was to me as my father.” I was so compelled by your portrayal of truth and memory as existing simultaneously, even when they seem to conflict. Did writing your memoir change how you thought about the “truth” of the past? How do you navigate wanting to tell a true story while relying on memory?

LD: I think if you had asked me before I wrote this book if I thought there was one true version of the past, I probably would have said no. I always understood that to some degree, but having to reconcile that on the page is a totally different beast and makes you really confront the kind of nonexistence of a singular truth. Especially at the beginning, I went into this thinking like a journalist, you know? I wanted to get the “truth,” but it was just this slippery nonsolid thing that I could never quite get a grip on. I had to eventually lean into that and then engage with the fact that it was going to be impossible for me to tell one unimpeachable version of this story.

EH: At the same time, you describe writing as a spell through which you’re able to conjure your father and have a relationship with him beyond mourning his absence. What do you think gives writing the power to not just articulate grief but, as you write, “raise the dead?”

LD: It was just the closest thing I was going to get to a conversation with him now. Spending this decade engaging on such a deep level with his work and with stories and memories of who he was as a person, there were points where I really could feel his presence more, not in like a ghostly haunting way . . . I mean, a little [laughter]. That just came from me trying to describe what it felt like to be so immersed in writing this book for a third of the time I’ve been alive. It felt very much like having an ongoing conversation with him, especially because, for almost half the time that I knew him, we were not living in the same place and we wrote each other letters, so it felt a lot like that.

EH: I think the way that you write about grief in this book will push against many people’s misconceptions of grief as a linear process and singular emotion. Can you talk more about the experience of trying to put loss into words?

LD: Yeah, I didn’t really realize until I was doing it how hard it is to describe loss or absence. It’s like proving a negative in science; proving that something does not exist is a lot harder than proving that it does. Similarly, describing absence is very challenging. It’s more abstract than describing someone’s presence. You can describe somebody as they’re sitting there next to you, and you can describe what it feels like to be in the room with them, and what they sound like, and how they make you feel, and what they smell like and look like and how they move and talk, and all of that, but describing what it feels like for somebody to not be there is a very diffuse, kind of abstract process. Pretty much this whole book has been trying to figure out how to do that. And it’s hard, especially because it’s not always the same. Sometimes I feel his absence very profoundly and then sometimes it is just a fact in the background of my life, like so many other facts and experiences.

EH: Anger is another experience that you capture beautifully in Negative Space. Particularly, you render the complexity of loving someone struggling with addiction, feeling anger at the choices they’ve made while understanding addiction as “the furthest thing from deliberate choice.” Your previous book, Burn It Down, is a collection of essays by women about anger. Could you talk a bit more about your interest in, and experience of, writing about anger, for either of these books?

LD: These projects are very much related in my mind. I don’t think I would have been in the position to edit Burn It Down if I hadn’t already been writing Negative Space for several years by the time that project came to me. I had already been writing a lot about the strange ways that anger has behaved in my own life, unearthing it, engaging with it, and coming to understand that logic doesn’t erase it. Like in this example we’re talking about, knowing that somebody did their best, knowing that they couldn’t help it, knowing that they didn’t mean it—that, in my experience at least, doesn’t really do much to eliminate anger.

I think anger and blame are different. You can decide not to blame someone, to not hold it against them, but you can still feel anger for how you were affected. Being able to hold those simultaneously is something that took me a while to come to. Because I was already so immersed in untangling that for myself, I felt equipped to shepherd these essays by other writers grappling with similar questions about where anger lives in their lives and coming to understand that it plays by its own rules and you can’t corral it, or erase it, or banish it. If it’s there, it’s going to be there, and you just have to accept it and let it exist.

It was just the closest thing I was going to get to a conversation with him now. 

EH: In Negative Space, you also describe feeling anger toward institutions of education, from the time you dropped out of high school through pursuing your master’s in journalism. Currently, you teach a number of narrative nonfiction classes for Catapult, including one six-week class on creating a  memoir outline. Did these negative experiences as a student impact how you teach?

LD: I think definitely. I mean, for one thing, I’m not promising social elevation or financial security through my classes in the ways that certain institutions of higher education do, and nobody is going a hundred thousand dollars into debt to take a class with me. So I think that is one big important difference. But also, just on a more day-to-day level, I’m very aware of trying not to be prescriptive. I try to give my students as much tangible, practical advice as I can. I don’t like overly abstract teaching where you leave like, OK, that was interesting, but I still don’t know what to do. But I also don’t tell people that there’s one right way to do things, because that was something that I was always hugely turned off by in my educational experience, starting in elementary school up through graduate school—this idea that the teacher knows best and their way is the only way. Especially because, through Catapult and my workshops for Barrelhouse, I’m teaching my peers. I’m teaching fellow writers, some of whom have at least as much experience as me or more, but my expertise might fill a gap in their knowledge. And so I don’t speak to them as if I am the holder of some great knowledge that they must come to me to access. I’m just offering what I’ve learned from my own experience and hoping that it’s useful to them.

EH: For your memoir outline class in particular, how do you help students find the collection of moments that will translate their life into a great story?

LD: That’s why we work with outlines in that class, so we can pull back and try and get a bird’s-eye view of the story. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds when you’re in a manuscript and you’re tinkering on the sentence level. It’s kind of impossible to hold a whole book in your head at one time. Working with outlines allows us to pull back and see the shape that a story is making. I’m a very visual thinker, so I think of it in terms of shapes and patterns, seeing which pieces are holding everything together and which pieces are kind of extraneous and just sitting there.

You can decide not to blame someone, to not hold it against them, but you can still feel anger for how you were affected. 

EH: Outside of the writing workshops you teach, how are you finding writing community during this time of isolation?

LD: I have a really amazing writers’ group. We used to meet in a diner downtown, but we’ve been meeting over Zoom for the last year. They really keep me going. We meet weekly, but we also have a group chat and we’re texting every day, talking about various work and writing-related frustrations, questions, and ideas, and sometimes just venting, and bitching, and joking too. Also, Twitter. I’m mean, there’s a lot of horrible, toxic shit on Twitter, but for me personally, it’s definitely been a net positive. I’ve connected with a lot of great writers and great people there. It’s always been something that makes me feel connected to the community and makes me feel like I have some semblance of a social life. I work from home and was a little bit of a hermit even before the pandemic, so social media was always important to me in that sense, but I think it really has been a big part of getting me through this last year, for sure.

EH: I think for a lot of people right now, Twitter is both our Achilles’ heel and saving grace.

LD: [laughter] I really enjoy it. It’s where I get to like hang out with my friends. It’s where I’ve gotten a lot of the best career opportunities of my life. But it’s also a massive time suck and I’m always trying to balance that: understanding that it is useful, but that it’s also pointless for me to be on Twitter and networking as a writer if I am never actually writing anything because I’m just on Twitter.

EH: [laughter] I just have one last question for you. What is next on the horizon for you? 

LD: I am currently working on a book proposal for an essay collection, but I’m not going to go into detail regarding what it’s about, just yet. It’s been really keeping me grounded to have something to put creative energy into, to obsess over in a generative way as a counterpoint to the hectic and stressful and overwhelming and exciting—and kind of intoxicating and terrifying—process of promoting a book. It’s such a different mode. I’m an author right now, as opposed to a writer, and I feel like those are two very different things. As an author, I’m speaking to you about my book and being this public person and trying to beg people to buy my book without sounding like I’m begging [laughter]. Having something else to work on that’s nourishing me creatively and reminding me that there will always be more work—that it’s not just about this one book and if it succeeds or fails—that’s been important.