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Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me
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About This Book
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.
Reviews
"But it's not the end of Calhoun and Schjeldahl's relationship, which the gifted memoirist gives us room to hope has more, brighter chapters to come."
"At times the saga of Schjeldahl's neglect (instance after instance) combined with Calhoun's repeated efforts to gain his care and esteem, nearly obliterate O'Hara's story — making it more a satellite against which embattled father-daughter energies bounce."
"With Also a Poet, Calhoun seems to have created a new nonfiction genre: the biographical profile within a biographical profile within a memoir."
"Calhoun is a savvy enough writer to make good use of the situation she finds herself in ..."
"What happens next is a sincere and expressive portrayal of a fraught but tender relationship between a daughter and her father, at once intimately relatable to any child of an absent parent, yet singularly an honest – and regularly hilarious – account of two obsessive writers struggling in their own ways to connect."
"Calhoun's honesty and willingness to push beyond her own resentments make Also a Poet a potent account of a daughter reaching out to a perhaps unreachable father before it's too late."
"Ultimately, Calhoun offers an arresting and provocative carousel of family dynamics, creative paradoxes, literary history, unnerving dilemmas, thorny questions of inheritance and legacy, wry humor, and love."
"And it is the glorious messiness of O'Hara's life (and of Ada Calhoun's own) that this little book captures elegantly and transparently without ever aspiring to capture something as fragile and pointless as 'literary greatness.'"
"shares a propulsive energy with such vivid oral histories as Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil's trippy Please Kill Me and Jean Stein's stylish Edie."
"Deeply moving and exceptionally well written, this offbeat memoir will please anyone interested in the NYC art scene from the 1950s on."
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