Exploring her artistic legacy, Dancyger confronts what it means to create and build meaning from absence. They are written with full splendor, tenderness, and possibility. Ultimately, he comes painfully alive as Dancyger charts an elegiac path to her own self-discovery.' Cynthia Carr, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz 'Using images and text, Negative Space shows us the New York art scene of the 1980's and the author's late fatherbut neither are ghosts here. Together, they form a chorus that I could not turn away from.' Melissa Febos, Award-winning author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me 'Lilly Dancyger creates an unflinching account of her artist father's snakebitten life and his struggles with addiction - peeling back the layers around an artistic practice that seems weighted with vulnerability. Dancyger's father emerges from these pages as vividly as if I'd known him.' Carmen Maria Machado 'This book is so many things: a daughter's heartrending tribute, a love story riddled by addiction, a mystery whose solution lies at the intersection of art and memory. ' Negative Space is a lovely and heartbreaking book navigating pain, inheritance, and loss. 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. As an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she'd created about her father-the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime. 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.

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? Dancyger's father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene.

Despite her parents' struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one.

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