A book review by Kellyanne Fitzgerald
“When I was seven, I drew a princess and proudly presented it to my father. I’d spent a long time creating the finely detailed pattern on her big puffy skirt and the spikes on her crown were impressively tall, almost as tall as she was. She was undeniably regal. He studied the drawing for a moment, holding it away from his face and squinting one eye just like he did when he considered a piece of his own work before deciding whether it was finished. Looking back at me, he asked why I’d drawn the figure so small. “Use the whole page,” he said, before handing the drawing back. “Don’t forget about your negative space.” He was reminding me of an earlier lesson about how the paper you leave blank has its own shape, just like whatever you draw, and they define each other by their contrast. One can’t exist without the other, so the shape of the absence is just as important as the shape of the figure.” - Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger
Dancyger has a hugely interesting story— full of all that white-hot painful stuff that keeps your eyes glued to the page. Heroin addict parents, drug addiction in her teen years, dropping out of school, trotting across the country tracking down anecdotes about a father who died when she was a child. She pieces together a narrative quite literally from snips and scraps wherever she can find them. Her father was an artist and the pantheon of his work shapes the metaphors she uses throughout the book— metaphors she accepts as inheritance. Deer. Owls. The legend of Daphne escaping into a tree. Hunting and hunted. Roadkill and the vulgar — grinning masks made from found materials. His art was scattered across the country in the homes and minds of his friends and loved ones, and she assembles it into segments of meaning— messages to her. His art becomes a call and response, with her search for meaning becoming the response in and of itself in the body of her book.
The negative space is Dancyger’s father’s absence from her life, on the surface. The space of the father-daughter dance at her wedding. The choices she made that she suspects would have been different if her father had been alive to talk her out of dropping out of high school. For every path blazened in black —all the untaken paths in quiet, unexamined gray. The choices you make in your life towards something that are also choices away from something else. Choosing a green coat means you are choosing a not-red coat, a not-black coat, a not-zebra printed coat. I saw a Tiktok by a girl who studies behavioral science, about people watching as they make sartorial and navigation choices while shopping. “The things that you go for — do you go through every garment on the rack? Do you go for certain colors, certain shapes? What part of the store do you go to first? What part of the store do you avoid?”
For a few years I’ve avoided writing or talking about the obvious, white-hot pains that I wielded like a cudgel through my English degree. When I revisit the poetry I wrote in school, it’s like looking through the glass at a body on a surgery table. Why did I cut myself open so much? Where did I get the idea that this was the only way to make art? I took a memoir class and was happy that I had an interesting backstory — it gave me something to write about. I look back at the sad miasma of my work in college, and wish I had given myself permission to write more sweet things. I wrote one gentle, non-violent snippet of a poem in college, just one:
I am teaching myself to notice
the green of a friend’s newly dyed
hair, as we sit watching a show together, the dust
of cheerios lingers on my fingers as we
protest the non-elimination of a favorite; “I just want
to be in a spa being fed a chicken taco,” and dissolve
into laughter.
and I remember berating myself for it, for the lack of tension— the lack of stakes. I continued to open my skin and pull at painful things— trying to find where it hurt the most. There’s the piece: where the pain is. I don’t know where to lay the blame for this violence. I don’t think English professors love recieving piece after piece of 18-22 year old trauma, pain, break-ups and sexual assaults and the worst things in our lives. But then again, the books we were given as examples were bleak. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Educated by Tara Westover. For every Mary Oliver given as a class text— ten Sylvia Plaths.
Negative Space is not a nice, pain-free book. It is just as much a troubled coming-of-age as Walls and Westover. She sprinkles her father’s art and family wounds through the pages like confetti. It’s heart-wrenching and compelling, and I admired the writing and the mastery of the many moving parts. It’s not easy to create a narrative from a fractured set of memories from different players in a life that is absent. I see the craft on every page. I just don’t know how to approach writing about pain anymore. If I could ask Dancyger a question I might say “How did you figure out how to write about your own pain without destroying yourself?”
I am twenty-five now, and maybe if I dipped my toes in, I would no longer be wearing my wounds like writer one upmanship anymore. But after college and until now— maybe even farther— I can’t go near all that searing pain. It’s folded away like a quilt in a trunk. I beat myself up with it for so long that even thinking about dredging it up makes me flinch. Writers like Dancyger have learned to dart in and out of their own pain like birds at a bird feeder— watching for the cats in the window. Take what you need and leave, before the creature behind the glass breaks through.
I am not familiar with intense cold— with the paralyzing absence of heat, dulling senses and slowly turning people into statues. Cold might be the original negative space— I am not a science person so you would have to check on that. But I sometimes wonder how long things can stay frozen, and still thaw safely. Do crocuses shatter if they start to bloom too early? Where does the cold stop preserving— and start to kill?
I think about swans and sub zero mornings, and the responsibility I have to my past, even the pieces that are ugly grinning masks of heirloom. About looking for answers and not finding any, and worse, about finding negative spaces where I thought I would find meaning. Trying to build some sort of narrative out of what isn’t there— what wasn’t said, what might have happened, what I’m still fumbling through. A mother who doesn’t see the same truth as me— a set of players with unique wounds and stories to uphold. The curation of my own pastel image. The cottony blankets of positivity and insufficient metaphors for happiness, tied to fierce firebrands of belief in the importance of talking about pine trees. And I think about burying all darkness and depth beneath the snow. At least for one more winter— it sleeps.
Kellyanne Fitzgerald is a writer and artist based in the Chicago area. In her free time she enjoys language learning, fiber arts, and folk art illustration.
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