In the warren of their building’s basement, my parents stored papers, books, and bubble-wrapped appliances-not antique so much as just old and unused. In the fall of 2018, I popped by to look for a toy to give my baby goddaughter. But my parents remained in their East Village apartment, decade after decade.

By the time I was born, most of the bohemians belonging to my parents’ downtown scene had decamped to suburbs or college towns-or at least to elevator buildings on the Upper West Side. My childhood home was a top-floor walk-up apartment in Lower Manhattan. 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. 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. 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. 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.Īs 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. 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

Also a poet by ada calhoun