Join us in person to welcome Ada Calhoun discussing her new memoir Also a Poet! This is an in-store, in person event free and open for all to attend but seating is limited please RSVP here
A staggering memoir from New York Times-bestselling author Ada Calhoun tracing her fraught relationship with her father and their shared obsession with a great poet
When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier.
As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s, and her own.
The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. Also a Poet explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us; when we seek their approval, yet mistrust it.
In reckoning with her unique heritage, as well as providing new insights into the life of one of our most important poets, Calhoun offers a brave and hopeful meditation on parents and children, artistic ambition, and the complexities of what we leave behind.
About the Author:
Ada Calhoun is the author of St. Marks Is Dead, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, and Why We Can’t Sleep. She has written for the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Washington Post.
About the Moderator:
Carlene Bauer is the author of the memoir Not That Kind of Girl and the novel Frances and Bernard. Her work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, The New York Times Book Review, Elle, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn. Her new novel, Girls They Write Songs About, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 21, 2022.