What a fantastic essay collection centered around female friendships and found/chosen family. I applaud the author for really delving into the intricacies and little details of friendship and how it changes over time. Friendship is often viewed as the little brother to romantic relationships when it comes to writing, so I'm really glad friendship is explored so beautifully through this collection.

Thank you to NetGalley for the eARC!

I cried throughout reading this entire book. It was completely, utterly, beautiful. I am in shock, awe, and just… so happy to have read this. It felt like a hug.

I’ve always seen my female friendships as equally, if not more at times, valuable than my traditional romantic relationships. And this novel beautifully encapsulates those ideals.

I have so many other books to read and yet I want to reread this one already.

A superb collection of essays about the important women in the author’s life. The stories were tender and moving and deftly illustrate the power of women’s friendships and found family. The writing is lovely - sharp yet full of emotion. The cultural critiques are seamlessly woven into the narrative. I had an amazing reading experience and of the 15 essays, I especially loved The Rose Tattoo, Mutual Mothering, and The Fire Escape.

I have not read other works by the author and immediately added Negative Space (and Burn it All Down) to my bookshelf upon finishing First Love.

Thank you very much to Random House and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.

A lovely look at friendship and the power of friends in our lives. i admired the emotional power of these essays and how grounded they are in place. esp the landscape of New York City.

This book is a great analysis on women, young girls, and their friendships. Reading this book I found that multiple times I resonated with something the author said, or a chapter/story she told. We all remember our closest friendships and how they change and touch our lives. Lilly successfully writes on these exact moments and creates a beautifully challenging and introspective look at what it means to be a friend.

Lilly, do you need a hug? I want to give you one.

This was so beautifully written. A lot of the messages truly resonated with me since I’m sure we’ve all experienced different types of love that all vary in duration and depth. I didn’t expect the more poignant and bittersweet themes like grief and sadness, but those are so pivotal to the female friendship. I liked how a lot of my grief was verbalized once again.

I applaud this essay compilation.

Thank you, Netgalley and Penguin Random House, for the ARC!

This is an exquisite exploration of female friendships in essay form. The author talks about everything from "sad girl Tumblr" to the devastating murder of her cousin Sabine, who she was very close to. If you, like me, have grieved lost friendships far harder than broken romantic relationships, this book is for you.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

“First Love” is a lovely, thoughtful, moving book about female friendships throughout the author’s life, informed in particular by the sudden loss of her cousin Sabina. This is one of my favorite types of books - memoir-style vignettes plus touches of cultural criticism - and beautifully done. The essay “Portraiture” in particular is outstanding, following along conversations with Dancyger’s friend Courtney as they collaborate on a photography project that examines friendship, subjectivity, and presence.

Thank you to The Dial Press/Penguin Random House and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

I loved this exploration of female friendship. In life I often feel so frustrated on the emphasis of romantic love being the most prioritized form of love. This essay collection so eloquently captures the complicated, intense, deep, meaningful nature of female friendships.

Thank you to the publisher, Random House, The Dial Press, and Netgalley for this eARC!


Although it is often overshadowed by romantic stories, I love the subject of female friendship. This essay collection is a beautiful ode to the special love between friends and all of the different ways it can present itself and evolve over time. Dancyger's prose captures the subtle complexities of her relationships in such a beautiful, delicate way.

I will most definitely be picking up more works by Dancyger.

Thank you to the publisher, Random House, The Dial Press, and Netgalley for providing me with an early copy of this book in exchange for my unbiased review.

Wow. This book was absolutely incredible. I picked it up, and couldn't put it down, it probably took me 4 hours cover to cover. This collection of essays focuses on female friendships and the profound love women have for each other. If you liked Dolly Alderton's "Everything I Know About Love", I guarantee you will love this book.

The essays were all written so beautifully, but also so accessibly. Each one, while I couldn't always relate to the exact experience, I felt the emotions so deeply. I think female friendships are so important and not given enough recognition. I obviously can't speak for all women, but I feel like my friendships are the most important relationships I have ever had and will ever have.

I can't express enough how much I loved this book. Truly a masterpiece.

I really enjoyed this essay collection about female friendship! I did not relate much to the author but I love reading about how other people live and their relationships.

I was impressed it included writing about friendships that ended--run their course or for other reason. I feel like I've read so many books about friendship in my life but that aspect is normally glossed over. This made the book seem so much more realistic.

A great read about female friendship, life stages, grief, love, and compassion. I loved the essays in this novel and how they all connected in some way, shape, or form. The prevalent themes of loss, longing, and gratitude made the book feel whole and so heartwarming. Dancyger did a wonderful job expressing a painful loss at a young age, and the way that grief manifests throughout a lifetime without dampening the light from that individual's personhood. As a reader, I felt like I got to know Sabina and how wonderful a human she was. The full-circle feeling of this book was masterfully done and I think it is a must read for women and young girls alike--and generally anyone who has ever loved anyone enough to know the lengths they'd go to keep them safe.

Lilly Dancyger is a master of her craft. What a beautifully written collection of essays that showed a snapshot into the intricacies of growing up amongst female friends and your chosen family. Although the book did jump between timelines, it still felt incredibly thoughtful and cohesive throughout. Additionally, despite some chapters being stronger than others, they all deeply resonated with me and I know I will remember Lilly, Sabina, and their stories for years to come.

Heartwarming and heartbreaking all once, there’s very few books I’ve read where the writing feels like poetry. First Love is one of them.

“To love someone, I have always understood, is to keep them safe.”

I did not love this book, mainly because I am the wrong audience for it. I just found the disclosure of details uncomfortable.

This book made me cry several times over. I absolutely love the exploration of female friendships, the importance of found family over blood family, and the look at the deep love held between friends. Dancyger mixes personal anecdotes with cultural references (such as in the essay "Sad Girls" and "On Murder Memoirs") in a way that is very powerful and relatable. While at times a hard read due to content, this was an incredibly beautiful, well written collection of essays that has become a favourite non-fiction read of mine.

I am not generally a fan of essay collections because oftentimes the stories are so disconnected. But this book was great because there is a flow to the stories that is present from one to the next even when they tackle completely different topics. I found it all to be really enjoyable to read about a life. The haphazard moments, the tenderness of friendship, the heartbreak of grief and lost moments, to the ways life comes together as one ages and settles. It felt very reflective of the life experience in a way that is specific to the author's life story that it conveys, but also generic to any and everybody.

I received an ARC on NetGalley and I'm so glad that I did. I did not expect the depth and reflection on the life of her relationship with her cousin. It was absolutely heartbreaking and beautiful. I think this book defines beautifully what I would argue is our collective Roman Empire: female friendships. All encompassing and all consuming. This book was a beautiful and thoughtful collection of essays on what it's like being a woman, the complexities of life and girlhood, and ultimately the driving force of our lives which is to love and be loved by women.

I was given this book on Netgalley in exchange for a honest review, thank you.

Overall I would rate this book closer to a 4.75 which I have on storygraph. This book is about friendships (mostly female) throughout the authors life.

In the beginning this book was a little slow for me, but after the Sad Girls chapter I was really hooked on this book. I stared to relate to the stories more and how the book intertwined with societal pieces. I also started to see how Lilly viewed her friends as a chosen family like I do too.

My favorite chapter in the book was Mutual Mothering. I laughed and cried to this part of the book because it reminded me of all my close female friends and the same love I share for them as we take care of each other going through life so delicately. I think writing a book as special as this having chapters dedicated to moments with your friends who have made you who you are in your life is a great piece of work for other females and people to grasp the beauty of friendships in different times in your life.

I also think you captured anxieties people face about things like friendships over long distance, being a mother, and having babies in a light that is so relatable.

I love, love, loved this book of essays about female friendship. In two distinct ways, I led a similar life to Lilly Dancyger: we both lost our dad as kids and have been haunted by it ever since, and having been raised like an only child, I put all my eggs in the friendship basket growing up. I still do. My friends were and continue to be my everything. This book resonated with me so much, and I’m hardly like Lilly in most ways: she was raised mostly by her single mom, struggled financially, dropped out of school, partied, and did a lot of drugs in NYC. It’s telling that we could be so drastically different yet her work moved me so significantly. She does not write like a millennial. In fact, she seems so much older than she really is, and this is talked about in the book as well. Lilly feels she was born during the wrong era.

There’s a lot of sadness in these pages - friendships that naturally grow apart as one person wants to hold onto a stale idea of who the other is, horrific deaths, mental illness, loss, and heartbreak. That’s why it’s so important to have female friendships to get through the worst of times. As a mother and wife myself, I still find some of my most happiness in life through friendships. I think the author does a great job of speaking to people who turned to friendships in lieu of family, siblings, parents, etc.