PositiveBrooklyn Rail... part-memoir, part-art criticism debut in which a bildungsroman-esque narrative of the author’s journey from \'a fatherless girl\' to \'a fatherless woman\' is braided with an investigation into her deceased father’s art, as well as his past ... Fearing the memory of her father—visual artist Joe Schactman, who participated in the East Village art scene in the 1980s and struggled for years with a heroin addiction—would collapse, Dancyger begins an exploration into his life ... by reaching into the murky depths of memory, dragging something that resembles truth to the surface, she realizes that this reconstructed \'reality\' wouldn’t or couldn’t hold more weight than the memory of their relationship ... It is in this reckoning that she finds room to explore her own blossoming as a writer and a person in the world ... Chronicling a somewhat lawless adolescence to an adulthood burgeoning with creativity, academia, and insight, Dancyger reveals a vibrant, gritty world, one which feels all too familiar ... a penetrating, heartfelt story, one which plunges into the rippling depths of grief and remembrance only to change us for the better.
