Lilly Dancyger is the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger from Seal Press, and the author of Negative Space, a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. She is the founder and host of Memoir Monday, a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series co-curated by Narratively, The Rumpus, Guernica, Granta, Literary Hub, and Catapult, featuring the best memoir writers of today. Her writing has been published by Longreads, The Washington Post, Glamour, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and she spends way too much time on Twitter (where you can find her at @lillydancyger).

EB: Have you always been someone who’s written nonfiction? Or did you come to it later?

LD: I’ve been writing my whole life, in lots of different genres. I wanted to be a poet when I was a small child. I have somewhere a hand-written, stapled book of poetry that I made when I was eight years old. Later, I thought I wanted to be a novelist. And then it was in college that I first realized that I really enjoyed nonfiction. I came to it by way of journalism—I started taking journalism classes and joined the student newspaper in undergrad, and then it kind of expanded out from there. I took a research nonfiction class and a criticism class, and I started realizing how much variety there is in nonfiction and getting excited about that. I also realized I was better at it than fiction.

EB: [laughing] Same.

LD: I took a couple fiction classes and realized pretty quickly that wasn’t something I had the aptitude for.

EB: Yeah, all my fiction from my high school and college years was pretty bad.

LD: I wrote a couple short stories but they are very much short stories written in an intro to fiction class.

EB: With your journalism background, how do you see the type of nonfiction writing you did for your memoir versus the reporting you do for journalistic pieces? How is your process similar or different when writing memoir versus journalism? What skills overlap?

LD: The process is similar in that I start by gathering as much as I can. For a journalism piece, that’s interviews, background information, studies. And with personal writing, it’s memories and scenes images, snippets of conversation, reflections. But whatever it is, I need to start in this collecting mode. I just keep hoarding information—and then once I have a document full of stuff, then I start to think about shape and flow and how to make it look nice, all that. And that’s when they starting to become different—there is more reflection and more about how I feel in the personal writing, of course, and in journalism it’s more focusing on the external facts of a situation. Memoir is more about trying to find an accurate portrayal of the internal facts.

EB: I totally relate to the gathering element. I feel like such a hoarder when it comes to research.

LD: That way, you never have to face the tyranny of the blank page. By the time I start writing, I have so much material that I feel like I’m more just playing with it and rearranging it into an order that makes sense and feels good and that’s when I start to make connections. I love when sources tell me different things and I put them up against each other and start to ask, what does it mean that these are different? Is one right and one wrong? Do they cancel each other out? Or are they both true? Reconciling different versions of the truth is something I’m fascinated with.

EB: Me too. My writing students often panic and say, “Well I remember it like this, but my sister remembers it like that” and I say, great! That’s where it starts to get interesting.

LD: Yeah! Exactly.

EB: I know you’ve been working on Negative Space for a really long time, and I’d love to hear—what did you think the book was going to look like when you originally started it versus this final version being published by Santa Fe Writers Project?

LD: Originally it was going to be an artist monograph—one of those big coffee table art books with color reproductions of all my father’s pieces, with the text almost like a supplement. The art was going to be the primary focus. I wanted to tell his story just as a way to make sense of the art. I was not conceiving it as a memoir at all—that element kind of crept in slowly, by way of feedback from other people. Every time I would talk to someone about the project, they were interested in what it was like to research my father’s life, and to interview all these people who knew him, and to fill on the gaps of things I didn’t know about. People were interested in the process, and how I was reacting to the information that I was collecting. So it became a journalism style, where the readers were going to come along with me as I investigate this story. And then from there, it continued in that direction, until it finally became a memoir—though it also retained the journalism elements and the art elements. All of those versions are part of the final book.

EB: While this book is undoubtably a memoir, it’s also a lot of other things too—reporting on your father, art history, art criticism. I actually wanted to ask more about father’s artwork—I absolutely loved that you included images in the memoir. To me it would have been dishonest (and kind of weird?) to have a book about an artist that didn’t include any images of his work. But was that a challenge to find an editor and publisher who was okay with that? Did you have to fight to keep the images in?

LD: A lot of people gave me advice during the querying process, saying the book might be easier to sell if it was just a memoir—if it was just one thing, if it fit in just one category. But that was not advice I ever considered taking. It wasn’t even an option to me. His art was my way into the story. The art is the lens—it’s the access point into the story of my father and into my continued ongoing relationship with him. Also, his art is the aspect of my relationship with him that is still the most present. I’m in my living room right now and I see like eight pieces of his artwork from where I’m sitting. I’m still surrounded by his art—it’s a very big part of my life, and it’s absolutely central to the story of my family, of my father, of his memory. It wasn’t even that I was being stubborn about not wanting to take the art out. The way I saw it was that if I take the art out, this whole thing doesn’t exist anymore.

EB: Of course. That makes so much sense. And it was just so satisfying for me as a reader to see you describe his pieces and then turn the page and there they were. But I also just personally love nonfiction that blends genre, or when visual art and text work together. Another thing I particularly admired was your use of the hypothetical or imagined scene. I am always telling my memoir-writing-students that there is room for fiction in nonfiction—especially when you have holes in your family’s story that you are trying to fill in. (See: Maxine Hong Kingston.) You just always have to be honest with your reader about when you are going into made-up territory. Can you speak a bit more about your decision to include those speculative scenes and how you went about creating them?

LD: I had a lot of challenges in terms of figuring out how to make my father’s story feel tangible and real, and make people feel immersed in it and invested in it. I interviewed people and tried to get as much detail from them as possible. But I’m interviewing people about stuff that happened 30, 40 years ago, and a lot of people I interviewed are people who have done a lot of drugs, or maybe were on drugs at the time that these things were happening. People told me as much as they could remember, but there was not really enough detail there to write the kind of scenes I wanted about my father’s life. And then the lacking in those scenes became even more apparent when I added more of my own story, because I had all these vivid scenes I created from my own memories.

Once I reached the end of the road in terms of what research could tell me, there was still a gap between where I was and where I wanted to be. And I realized that the only way to fix that was with my own imagination. You have to take a lot of liberties to create imagined scenes, and I don’t think I could have let myself do that at the beginning of the project—only after years of research and building out the rest of the story and verifying everything I could. Only then did I think, okay, I think I know the story of these characters well enough that I can imagine something that feels real, or at least feels probable. I don’t know if that’s how it really happened, but I’m saying this is my best guess.

EB: I always tell my students that you can imagine things in nonfiction, as long as you’re always putting in those phrases clearly indicating to the reader that that’s what you’re doing.

LD: Exactly. You have to let the reader know: obviously I wasn’t there, but this is how I picture it.

EB: You mentioned research, and I’d love to hear more about how you gathered information for the Negative Space. I mean, you did so much research for this book—from going through your father’s documents and books, to interviewing his old friends, to studying and photographing all of his art—so impressive. So, how did you go about your research for this book? What is your process like—research first and then write? Write and research simultaneously?

LD: There was a lot of back and forth. First, I did a lot of research, and I thought I was done with that stage, and I was ready to sit down and write. But then, of course, I immediately identified a ton of holes once I started working on it, and I would go back and do more research, and then I’d sit down to write again—and that happened over and over again for the first five or six years. I was kind of always collecting and looking for more information and more detail and more people to talk to, while also writing and revising the material I already had. Eventually, though, I had to decide once and for all that I was done researching, because every time I interviewed someone new or read someone else’s letters or whatever, it blew up one aspect of the story. I would have to change everything relating to that, and then to change everything that came after that. One piece of information can shift the landscape of the story, and I kept altering the trajectory and the realizations and direction of the story, and finally I said I can’t keep doing this forever. At a certain point, someone I interviewed emailed me and was telling me to talk to this other person, and I just had to say I’m not doing any more research. I need to just work with what I have. It’s not that I didn’t want to talk to that person—of course I did—but I also don’t want to write this book for my entire life.

EB: Oh, I relate to that so hard. At a certain point I just started saying, “Oh, sorry, my editor says I can’t do anymore research!” It made it easier if I blamed someone else. (Sorry, Naomi!) You have to do what’s right for the book. Speaking of which, I also wanted to say how much I appreciated your essay about turning down a book deal that was a bad fit for your project. So much of being a writer is feeling like you just need to be grateful anyone wants to publish you ever—but you also need to be an advocate for your own work. What other advice do you have for younger or newer writers attempting to get their first books out there? Anything you wish you knew a decade ago? Wish you could tell yourself?

LD: Take your time! Chill out! Stop rushing! It might take years! That’s okay!

EB: [laughing] Oh my god, I know! I was in such a hurry when I started my book. Why??

LD: I was so fixated on finishing the thing, and getting it published, that I always felt like I was running behind. But there was no deadline. I wasn’t running late—it was taking as long as it took. And that’s fine. That’s the amount of time that I needed. It took eleven years.

EB: Wow.

LD: But, you know, if someone had told me it would take eleven years, I don’t think I would have done it. That was the lie that I told myself: that it was going to take two years and then I just needed a few more months, and a few more months, and a few more months… for eleven years. I think I made the whole thing much more stressful than it needed to be—what if I had just taken my time and understood that it was going happen was going to happen? You can’t rush it. But I don’t know. I might not have done it if I knew it was going to take this long from the start.

EB: Yeah, that’s a good point. I started writing my first material relating to my book in fall 2012, and it is finally getting published next summer—almost exactly a decade. I couldn’t comprehend a decade when I was twenty-three.

LD: I work as a developmental editor, and I try to be kind and gentle in my letters to clients—that this is going to take a while. Some of them want me to just give them a couple little things to fix and they’re done, but I try to tell to take a step back and let this be a process. Try to enjoy the process of writing the book, the process of figuring out the structure, the process of making all the connections and finding the shape and finding the point. Theoretically, that is the fun part, right? Isn’t that why we do this, because we love writing? So enjoy the writing. I was trying to rush through that part.

EB: So true. But everyone is in such a hurry. I also find I have a lot of students who are writing about really hard, traumatic things in their memoirs, and I think they want to rush through the writing part because they don’t want to dwell in that space, or they want to quickly write about something before they fully process it so they don’t have to think about it anymore.

LD: Yeah, but when you finish the book, then you have to talk about it constantly!

EB: [laughing] Such a good point. Speaking of your work as an editor, you’ve also edited the anthology Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger. What was your experience like putting together your own memoir versus a collection of essays by other writers?

LD: I felt more like a facilitator or a shepherd for Burn It Down. Like I was bringing this work into the world. Obviously, I am very invested in the anthology, and I care deeply about that book, but it’s not my baby in the same way that Negative Space is. Which, in a way, made it easier to do promotion for it, because I could go on and on about how much I loved the essays, how brilliant I thought the writing was. I felt like I was championing other writers that I love, that I was doing it for my community, and contributing to the conversation on a very topical subject. Burn It Down had a clear hook and angle—everyone wanted to talk about women’s anger. With Negative Space, it feels much more scary and vulnerable to put out in the world. Like I’m walking around without any skin.

But the whole process of getting a book out is the same—placing excerpts, getting reviews, planning events. I’m glad I got to learn some of that first, with Burn It Down. So I feel less like I’m getting thrown into the deep end this time around.

EB: I can relate to finding it easier to promote and champion other people’s stuff. I feel weird bragging about my work in the same way that I will repost a former student’s essay all over social media.

LD: Yeah. I’m already sick of myself, and I feel like everybody else is sick of hearing about me, too. But, oh well, you gotta do it.

EB: Yeah, no one warned me that at a certain point in the book-writing process, you were going to get sick of reading about yourself. I’m on my third round of revisions with my editor right now, and I’m just like, no one cares about this pet bird I had that died.

LD: The proofreading phase was torture. I did not want to read the book again.

EB: Cool, can’t wait for that! Anyway, going back to other writes you love—who makes up your writing community? Who helped support you through the past eleven years?

LD: I have a really amazingwriters’ group.We meet every week, and we’ve been meeting for almost four years at this point. It’s kind of incredible—I am so appreciative that we’ve managed to keep this momentum. We all make it a priority, even though we’re all really busy and stressed, and even during periods where nobody has new stuff, which happens, we still meet and talk about what’s going on, what projects we’re thinking about, and whatever is going on in our careers. Those talks have really helped me identify what’s actually a problem versus what I’m spinning out about.

EB: I could not agree more. I would feel lost without my writers’ group. It’s like 50% writing and 50% group therapy.

My second-to-last question is really a two-part one: what do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction? And what do you find most rewarding? 

LD: The answer to both is the process of thinking critically about the world around me and about myself—figuring out what I actually think and feel and believe. That’s what writing nonfiction allows me to do, but writing nonfiction also requires me to do those things. Sometimes I hit this point in writing a personal essay, where I’m like, well, shit, I think I have to grow more as a person before I can process my feelings or figure out what I actually think or feel about this and finish the essay. That is personal growth that I might not actively pursued otherwise—unless I was writing that essay, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that I don’t know exactly how I feel about whatever random thing I’m writing about. It’s both the hardest and most rewarding part.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man” writer?

LD: I chose a short chapter from Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water. It’s called “A Burning,” and I’ll just share the last two paragraphs of it here—but the whole two-page chapter is something I come back to over and over again:

That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside of me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like holy water. And always the voice of a father in her head. Like me. Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze? I took the image of a burning woman into my heart and left belief to the house of father forever.

I don’t hate the fire. I hated the people who did not believe her. And I hated the father that let her burn. And I hated the men who… I think I hated men. The more I was around them, the more I came close to spontaneously combusting. Drawing them dangerously close to the flame.