Also A Poet by Ada Calhoun
“On our best days, that's what I think about my father. And I think that while we don't have very many things in common, we do have the best things - writing and books and Frank O'Hara.”
Many of you will know Ada Calhoun from her previous books, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give and Why We Can't Sleep. What you might not know is that she is the daughter of the well known art critic Peter Schjeldahl and she's lived in NYC her entire life. This book was born of her discovery that her father had begun a biography of the poet Frank O'Hara yet never finished it. Calhoun unexpectedly finds the audiotaped interviews he’d recorded as research, decades later, and she embarks on a journey to finish his project.
On my visit to see my daughter in NYC over the weekend we set out exploring as she was in search of this book. I had not heard of it but was intrigued as it checks off a lot of my boxes. I began reading it over the weekend and was fully absorbed in every layer - and there are many.
What began as Calhoun's desire to complete an unfinished project turns into a daughter's reckoning with her father. Also A Poet takes us into the bohemian art and literary world of the East Village in a bygone era. I knew next to nothing about O'Hara or Schjeldahl and discovering them via this very uniquely constructed memoir was like stepping back in time.
Calhoun explores her feelings about her father and her unconventional childhood as she unravels the story he never finished. It's unlike any memoir/biography I've ever read.
When I flew home I left the print copy with my daughter and finished via audio on the plane. The audio contains the actual tapes of the many interviews Calhoun's father compiled in order to write his book and it plays like an oral history. The sound quality is a bit problematic, but Calhoun narrates the rest of the book and her reading of her own writing makes up for it by far.
This is a niche book but contains so many things I love - NYC, the literary and art scene, and a great female voice. For the right reader, it’s bookish gold.
