October 15, 2025
“So this story is a truth – one of many.”
This is how Lilly Dancyger begins Negative Space, her deeply personal memoir about the complicated bond between a father and daughter. Most memoirs written by children of drug-addicted parents often depict a love-hate relationship. Or rather, an angry hateful child trying to find ways to love. Lilly’s story is surprisingly different. Her love and ache for her missing father are all-consuming, so much so, she dedicates years of her life to investigating his life in order to write this novel.
Her father, Joe Schactman, was a troubled artist who spent much of his adult life addicted to heroin. He died when Lilly was only 12 years old, from undetermined causes. Even though his addiction consumed much of his life, Lilly doesn’t remember him only as a drug addict. To her, he was larger than life. She writes that as a child, she looked at him “like he glowed.” His presence filled her world, and his sudden absence left behind a deep hole she would spend years trying to fill.
After his death, Lilly’s grief was overwhelming. She blamed her mother for leaving her father, believing that the separation had taken him away from her. Only later does she realize that her mother had to leave to save herself, and to save Lilly, too.
In her teenage years, Lilly’s pain shows up in destructive ways. She drops out of school, becomes addicted to cocaine, and spends most of her time drifting. Her life mirrors some of the chaos her father lived through. But unlike him, she finds a way to climb back. At 16, she decides to return to school. And by 18, she’s enrolled at the New School. Later, she earned her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
It’s after these turning points that the real work begins, though. Lilly sets out to uncover the truth about her father’s life, or a truth she’s never quite seen. She interviews his friends, lovers, and fellow artists to piece together who he really was, not just as an addict or as her dad, but as a person. In trying to tell his story, she ends up finding her own. Through writing Negative Space, she learns that her identity, her career, and even her sense of self are all tied to the complicated love she feels for her father.
One of the most striking things about this book is how honest Dancyger is. She doesn’t hide from the ugly parts of her story or her father’s. At the same time, she refuses to make him a villain. Instead, she sees him as both good and flawed, loving and self-destructive. She writes one of the most shocking and truthful lines in the book: “I had a happy childhood, and my parents were junkies. Both of these things are true.” It’s a sentence that captures the heart of the memoir: the idea that love and pain can exist at the same time.
Throughout the book, Dancyger reflects on what it means to lose someone before you truly know them. She feels robbed of the chance to have a normal father-daughter relationship, a life where he could have watched her grow up, go to college, and get married. His death stopped their story before it could reach its natural end.
Her longing for him turns into years of sadness and self-destruction. She writes, “There’s a reason children feel the deep need to inform stepparents they’re not their real parents as often as possible: it’s not just anger, it’s fear of abandoning the parent who’s not there by forming a new family without them.” That fear, that deep loyalty to the memory of her father, drives much of her pain and her writing.
By the end of Negative Space, Dancyger comes to a difficult but powerful understanding. She realizes that the person she has become exists only because of her father’s death. Or rather, the version of herself that exists now could only have been shaped by losing him so young. If he had lived a more normal life, her path would have been different.
Negative Space is not a simple story of addiction or a child’s love for her flawed father. It’s a story about how love can survive through pain and how grief can shape a life.
Buy the book at indie booksellers, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.
Review by Cetywa Powell