This includes Calhoun’s bond with her father, her father’s connection with the downtown art circle centered around Frank O’Hara, and last but not least, her ambivalence towards the art world. Going through these materials, Calhoun decided to pick up where her father left off-a decision that led her to reassess the relationships in her life and work. This project was aborted after her father lost the permission to use O’Hara’s materials.

What prompted Calhoun’s project was her discovery of some taped recordings of interviews conducted by her father when he was doing research for a Frank O’Hara biography. More specifically, it is a meditation on how to simultaneously develop a deep curiosity about cultural icons and maintain a critical distance from them. One might argue that the memoir as a whole is a meditation on attachment. She has a way of sustaining readerly interest and attachment. Still, these differences didn’t stop me from developing a parasocial connection with Calhoun. Marks in a time of gentrification, when hippies had been replaced by hipsters. Marks when it was cool and edgy, whereas I moved to St. By contrast, my parents don’t speak English well enough to understand what I write most of the time. Calhoun’s father is the famous art critic (and, as the title suggests, also a poet) Peter Schjeldahl. We are worlds apart, not only in age but also in terms of our backgrounds. We could have hung out at CBGB or grabbed lunch at Odessa together.īut we couldn’t have.

Calhoun and I could have been friends, I thought. She had an immensely talented but self-absorbed father who preferred his art-world friends to his family I have a presumably loving but flawed father who never remembered any of my friends’ names and on occasion forgot to drop me off at school. Marks Place in New York City I once lived in an apartment on St. She loves poet Frank O’Hara I, too, adore Frank O’Hara. What initially drew me to Ada Calhoun’s memoir were the uncanny parallels between her life and mine.

Also a poet ada calhoun