by Ada Calhoun
First published 2023
When Ada Calhoun finds old cassette tapes in her father's belongings, she discovers interviews he conducted decades ago for an abandoned biography of poet Frank O'Hara. Her father, art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had walked away from the project forty years earlier. Calhoun decides to complete what he started. She expects the work to be straightforward, even enjoyable, given her own love of O'Hara's poetry and her childhood in the East Village among his artistic circle. Instead, the research forces her to confront difficult truths about the poet, her father, and herself. The memoir combines literary biography with personal reckoning, exploring the tensions between wanting to surpass our parents while fearing the cost of doing so. Calhoun examines her complicated relationship with her father as she uncovers new details about O'Hara's life and work. The book becomes both a tribute to an important American poet and an honest exploration of family dynamics, artistic inheritance, and the weight of unfinished business.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-legacy, unfinished-business
Setting: East Village
Period: Decades Ago
272 pages · Paperback · Grove Press