The Care and Keeping of Female Friendships
Heather Domenicis reviews Lilly Dancyger's FIRST LOVE: ESSAYS ON FRIENDSHIP.
I’ve always struggled to begin, maintain, and even end female friendships—I still haven’t completely figured out why. Each ending has been unique, but to cite a few reasons over the years: I moved away, the initial trauma bond wore off and I discovered we weren’t actually that aligned, I didn’t get along with their partner, we grew apart, I was neglectful of quality time in favor of whatever current boyfriend I had, we made bad roommates. I could go on. Since moving to NYC five years ago, seven months before COVID, I’ve felt incredibly lonely. While I have a long-term partner, a few local friends, and a couple very close long-distance friends, I’ve largely struggled to meet new women and build a solid community around me. The ultimate blow to my heart, my ego, and my confidence in my ability to maintain female friendships came when someone I’d considered my best friend all through college essentially ghosted me right around when I moved to the city. Add depression, a job that made me unhappy, and a collection of strange, new medical diagnoses to the loneliness and things have been rough, to say the least.
When I came across Lilly Dancyger’s Instagram post announcing ARCs of her second book, a collection entitled First Love: Essays on Friendship, I knew I needed to read it. I’d just re-watched my favorite shows, Pen15 and Broad City (Dancyger has a great essay on Broad City at Elle Magazine), and needed my next friendship fix. Maybe I was craving female friendship IRL and thought that reading and writing about it would be the next best thing. Creating metaphysical proximity, if you will. Soon enough, I had a copy in my NYC mailbox and a many-months-away deadline for Black Lipstick, which I’d been hoping to write for ever since Mila co-hosted a reading with Miss Manhattan.
First Love calls itself a book of essays on friendship. It is, but it’s also about so much more: grief, mothering, the act of writing, place, bisexuality, family, a devastating murder. Still, everything comes back to friendship, particularly female friendship. The first time I read First Love, it activated old, buried memories of my teen years with my best friend from then, but mostly, reading these essays made me jealous of Dancyger’s remarkable ability to create close friendships and build a chosen family. As feelings of anger, resentment, and guilt over ending so many friendships bubbled up, I thought, How am I going to review a book that made me feel worse?
Objectively, I love Dancyger’s writing, because it’s raw and detailed. When I read her memoir Negative Space, I was inspired by her diligence in research and her ability to paint her substance-abusing parents with love. Unlike many writers, she takes great pains to treat the people in her art with care. Still, through no fault of her own, reading this book caused me to wallow in my shortcomings in the friendship space. I put it down and let the looming deadline approach.
Then I quit my job. That same night, I stayed up late impulsively googling “women’s yoga retreats,” because I felt I needed a rock-hard reset. In the morning, I greeted my partner with “I think I’m gonna go to Nicaragua next week for a yoga retreat with a bunch of Canadians.” He was supportive. An hour later, I FaceTimed with the retreat leader to make sure it was legit, then signed on the dotted line. I started rereading First Love on the flight there.
Reading these essays made me jealous of Dancyger’s remarkable ability to create close friendships and build a chosen family. As feelings of anger, resentment, and guilt over ending so many friendships bubbled up, I thought, How am I going to review a book that made me feel worse?
Before I left, I told my partner I was nervous. He asked me to name the things I was nervous about. “That no one will like me, that I won’t like anyone, and that it will be too hot there.” Thankfully, I was only right about the weather. I formed what felt like a meaningful connection with almost every woman in the group and left with the confidence that I am capable of developing female friendships. By the time I finished First Love on the way back, it had a whole new meaning to me. I was suddenly excited to start writing.
In the opening essay, Dancyger tells us about some psychologists’ idea of first loves: “that they set the mold we’ll spend the rest of our lives looking for.” I’ve always sought out intimacy. Both my first best friendship and my first relationship involved a lot of sleepovers at their houses, thanks to my unstable home life and their mothers’ kindness and generosity. With my first best friend from elementary school, I sometimes stayed at her house for multiple days, happily feeling like the middle sister in their family. Recently, I learned that her mother had considered trying to adopt me when things were looking dicey for me at home, in the way of having a reliable primary caretaker. With my first boyfriend in high school, I took over his older brother’s spot at the dinner table—I was there more often. Many nights, his mother invited me to sleep in my boyfriend’s bed (with him on the couch) during the time my father began slipping into his addictions again. Both of these homes felt safer than my own. Warmer. No wonder I crave intense closeness.
In middle school, my then-best friend and I shared our bodies without shame, skinny dipping, sharing showers and twin beds just because we could, examining our naked selves in the mirror and trying to figure out which stage of pubic hair or breast development we were in according to The Care and Keeping of You. IYKYK. Dancyger’s essay “Partners in Crime” explores the intense intimacy of teen girl friendships, drawing parallels with the 90s cult classic film Heavenly Creatures. The friendship she writes about is with a girl named Haley, and it’s closer than close. Think: greeting each other by touching tongue rings and sharing deodorant via rubbing armpits together. Yeah. And cocaine. A lot of cocaine. When their friendship dwindles with age, Dancyger describes a sense of grief and loss: “Part of me wanted to search for our old connection, to take both of her hands in mine and say, Hey, it’s me.”
My high school best friend and I also drifted when we went to separate colleges. When I graduated, I invited her to my graduation dinner with my family and a few friends. I felt a bit awkward doing so, even though I genuinely wanted to see her. She joined us, and while I’m sure she felt awkward too, it was good to see her. I wanted to bridge the gap between us, braid the invisible string connecting us into one of those friendship bracelets we used to make. I wanted to do what Dancyger described, grab her hands and say “Hey, it’s me! Remember us? How close we were? Remember making up synchronized swimming dances on family vacations to Florida and buying our first thongs and sharing clothes? I miss you so much!” But I didn’t. She left dinner early, and we hugged when she left. That was the last time I saw her. Now she lives three hours away from me, but I feel a sense of warmth and pride whenever I see how happy she appears on social media with her loving partner, cute dog, and the career she’s always wanted. Whenever one of us posts about a major life event, we message a bit, offering heartfelt congratulations or condolences, asking about our families, cheering each other on from afar. A different kind of grief. A restructuring of our love.
In “Sad Girls,” Dancyger explores the generation-spanning phenomenon of the sad girl aesthetic, from the idolization of Sylvia Plath to the eponymous era of Tumblr that’s now morphed its way to TikTok. Depression jokes, crying videos, the rebranding of BPD as “Beautiful Princess Disorder.” Dancyger also dissects the sadness of one of her own best friends, Heather, who eventually took her own life. In the essay, she wrestles with the difference between regular teenage girl sadness and the all-consuming diagnosed-bipolar sadness that Heather experienced.
While I’ve never purposely identified with the sad girl aesthetic, I’m quick to joke about my lows. During the yoga retreat, I noticed my new roommate—a sweet 22-year-old girl and the youngest among us—filling out a workbook about navigating low mood and depression. I myself had gone on this retreat hoping to learn how to feel joy again, as lately I thought maybe I’d lost the ability entirely. But I also wanted more than to just feel joy—I wanted to embody it fiercely, express it outwardly, share it with those around me. At the beach with my roommate, after two days of yoga, Pilates, and sharing circles, I floated in the cool water under the blazing sun and looked at her and joked, dryly, “This ocean just cured my depression.” She laughed. “For now, at least.”
Then we walked along the beach with the other women, marveling at blue crabs, gathering seashells like little girls, and I wondered if my joke was really a joke. Later, my roommate and I held much-needed space for each other, talking about how our depression manifests: listlessness, sleepiness, irritability. It’d been so long since pillow talk with a friend. I remembered a roommate in college, how we’d talk into the night across the cinder block room, how we had a painful falling out months later. I almost wanted to reach over to my retreat roommate’s twin bed and hold her hand while we talked. At some point, she told me her love language was gift giving, and on the last night, she gave me a piece of amethyst she’d brought with her. As Dancyger writes, “We were discovering the power in suffering together, rather than alone.” Now I have a badass friend who lives in Canada. And maybe it won’t last, but I hope it does.
As these women talked about their peaceful home births and gentle parenting, I blurted out “I was born in a jail” and watched their faces fall.
In “Mutual Mothering,” Dancyger describes the phenomenon of women mothering other women. She writes about helping a friend raise the baby she’d had as a teen, her friends helping her through a breakup, and taking care of fellow park kids, “leaning on each other in the absence of stable home lives; drying each other’s tears, fighting each other’s battles.” As a teen with an unstable home life myself, I leaned on my high school boyfriend and his mom more than I leaned on other girls. Until the yoga retreat, I was pretty much unfamiliar with the concept of mutual mothering. Besides my roommate, most of the women were in their 30s, 40s, and 50s (I’m 27). Many of them were mothers. At dinner one night, they shared their birth stories. A few of them had had home births with the intention of welcoming their children into the world in a warm, welcoming environment rather than a harsh, fluorescent lit hospital. They talked about skin to skin, leaving the vernix on their newborns, burying their placentas under trees in the backyard.
I thought about my own entry into the world. My mother had introduced me to illegal street drugs in her third trimester. By month 7 or 8 in utero, I was in Riverside County Jail with her. When she went into labor, correctional officers took her to the nearby hospital, alone. No one called my dad. I hear they keep inmates in handcuffs while they give birth. And I was a C-section.
As these women talked about their peaceful home births and gentle parenting, I blurted out “I was born in a jail” and watched their faces fall. One woman in particular—an energy healer and one of the kindest people I know—looked at me with eyes that held so much compassion. I added something to the effect of, “She left when I was two, then died before we got a chance to reconnect.” They all told me to let myself be mothered that week, and that maybe I should look into rebirthing.
Dancyger describes the aim of mutual mothering as “to nurture and care for another person, to provide them with tenderness and emotional shelter from a world that mostly doesn’t give a shit about them.”
I’m not sold on the rebirthing, but I easily gave into the mothering, almost too easily. All week, I absorbed their wisdom, shared my stories of parental drug use and abandonment, the chronic stress I felt as a child. My constant anxiety and hypervigilance among other innate trauma responses, the many medical diagnoses that have crept up in adulthood, how I’ve been trying to navigate them and manage my conditions. How yoga and Pilates in 95-degree heat was not exactly advisable for a person with POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome). How I had to turn in early each night to apply topical capsaicin to my vulva to ease the chronic pain down there. One of my diagnoses, hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, makes me too, for lack of a better word, bendy, and yoga can hurt me if done incorrectly. In yoga class, the instructor literally supported me with her hands while the energy healer with a medical background coached me into better alignment for my body. The instructor whispered in my ear, “Look at all these mummas around you,” and I wanted to cry. I’m not healed, obviously, but it’s a start. Dancyger describes the aim of mutual mothering as “to nurture and care for another person, to provide them with tenderness and emotional shelter from a world that mostly doesn’t give a shit about them.” I may have met all these women in passing, but they showed me the tenderness and shelter I’ve been seeking all my life. I get it now.
I may have met all these women in passing, but they showed me the tenderness and shelter I’ve been seeking all my life. I get it now.
As we all traveled back to the airport together in one van, my roommate and I discovered we were on the same flight for the first leg of the trip. We requested to be seated together, then proceeded to sit on the tarmac for an hour, causing us to miss our connecting flights and get stranded in Chicago close to midnight—something that would normally make me miserable, angry, and anxious. But to be stuck together could be fun, if we made it. I took a turn mothering and led us through the rebooking process, advocating for us to get hotel and meal vouchers. I decided to make everything fun, everything a joke. A future memory.
Waiting in the too-long-line in the hotel lobby, my roommate said, “I wish I had a cigarette right now.” I asked her if she smoked at home? The retreat had been substance-free. “No, not really. Like, at parties, sometimes. But not really, I’m just stressed out.” “Same,” I responded, wishing for one too. I thought about all the girls Dancyger shares cigarettes with in First Love, in the park, on her fire escape. Rolling for each other, lighting each other’s, cupping a hand to block the wind—all part of a regularly recurring bonding ritual.
A Colombian man asked me to translate something for him on his translation app to help him book his room. I obliged, feeling brave. I could smell smoke on him and saw the outline of a pack in his jeans. “Tienes un cigarillo extra?” I asked, hoping I’d spoken correctly. He offered. Muchas gracias. My roommate and I ordered deep dish pizza and waited for it outside, sharing the cigarette like we’d known each other for ages. We savored the headrush we got as non-smokers, laughing at each other coughing. It felt like we were getting away with something after coming from a wellness retreat where we’d only eaten whole foods and treated our bodies like temples. It was like the universe decided we needed a last hurrah before embarking on the journey of long distance friendship. One final secret moment for just the two of us.
When I finished a draft of this review, I sent it to my retreat roommate for her sign-off before sending it to Mila. I’m trying to take more care in how and when I write about others. Dancyger has great philosophies on this topic, which she shared in the craft class I took with her. And she carries those practices out in First Love, writing each person as they are—real. Sometimes she explicitly states that she’s leaving something out, because it’s not hers to share. But when the story is hers enough, she shares it sharply and vividly, like an intimation from your super-smart best friend.
Early on, Dancyger recalls a theory that we remember our first loves due to the primacy effect: “the psychological principle that people recall the first item on a list more reliably than subsequent ones.” The primacy effect doesn’t apply to these essays—each one will stick with you. But while the primacy effect has certainly applied to my own friendships, reading First Love made me revisit and reexamine all the ones I’ve loved and all the ones I’ve lost—and the ones that still float somewhere in between.
Hello! From Hawaii. Brought to tears. Very much relate. Thank you for sharing. Beautiful reflection. I’m sorry about your mom and how you were brought into this world. Thank you for writing about mothering and especially capturing the forgotten joys of adolescent female friendship. ❤️
From your wonderful review arises a longing for intimacy that will sprout continuity—a kind of deep emotional connection. Personally, I am catatonic. I was not able to sprout proper continuity from the intimacy I would have with female friends.