The Memoir as Detective Story with Lilly Dancyger

It can be difficult for writers to learn to put our stories front and center. That was originally the case with today’s guest, Lilly Dancyger. She originally set out to memorialize her father, Joe Schactman, through a book that would feature artwork and stories she’d collected from friends.

Schactman was a highly original artist and sculptor who was part of the same 1980s East Village art scene that included David Wojnarowicz and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He was a loving father but also struggled with addiction; he died when Dancyger was only 12.

“I kept saying the book I was writing was an artist monograph, but every day the words stared back at me, so clearly, defiantly, a memoir,” she writes an essay entitled “Not a Memoir.” Through a long process spanning several years, however, she decided to foreground her own story, alongside that of her father.

One big shift was learning to think of her memoir as more of a detective novel, where her 10+ year search to find out more about her father led to think of each interview or event as a “clue” that furthered the plot, and added “stakes” to the story.

Lilly Dancyger is the author of the memoir, Negative Space, as well as the editor of the anthology Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger. She lives and works in NYC.

Discussed:

Negative Space (memoir) Bookshop | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble | Amazon

Memoir as Detective Novel (essay)

Writing & Publishing Addiction Narratives Workshop (with Erin Khar)

Not a Memoir (essay)

Melissa Febos: Abandon Me (Excerpt)

LillyDancyger.com

Credits:

This episode was edited by Paul Zakrzewski and produced by Magpie Audio Productions. Theme music is "The Stone Mansion" by BlueDot Productions.