Digging up all that stuff about yourself and your family history and long-buried things that you didn’t know were there takes a lot out of you, physically, emotionally.
There were definitely some points where I had to take some time away from it. The more I was uncovering about him, the more I was also realizing things about myself, and things about my grief that I didn’t know were there, and anger that I didn’t realize was there, and then I started connecting the threads and realizing, oh, that period when I was a teenager, I wasn’t going off the rails for the hell of it that’s actually a pretty clear connection to losing my father two years before all that started, which somehow hadn’t occurred to me before. But my own story just kept being pulled into it. And for a long time I was convinced I could do that kind of in a vacuum. I really just wanted to write about my father and his artwork. Especially because I was really reluctant to bring my own story into it at all. A memoir from the editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, Negative Space explores Dancyger’s own anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness her father hid from her, as well as her own. Using his sculptures, paintings, and prints as a guide, Dancyger sought out the characters from his world who could help her decode the language of her father's work to find the truth of who he really was.Lilly Dancyger: It was a lot. A memoir from the editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, Negative Space explores Dancygers own anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness her father hid from her, as well as her own Despite her parents struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against a world that had taken her father away.Īs an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she had created about her father-the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime.
She idolized him-despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials like animal bones, human hair, and broken glass and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges?ĭancyger's father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. A memoir from the editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, Negative Space explores Dancyger's own anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness her father hid from her, as well as her own.ĭespite her parents' struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one.
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