About this item
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.
About the Author
Ada Calhoun is the author of New York City history St. Marks Is Dead, essay collection Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, and Generation X-defining New York Times bestseller and Indie Next pick Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis, named one of best nonfiction books of the year by the Amazon Editors. Her next book, Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me, comes out June 14, 2022.