Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me
Ada Calhoun
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me
Ada Calhoun
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
[A] grand slam.
... moving.
As Calhoun tracks down the people Schjeldahl interviewed fifty years earlier, the names, dates, and places run together. She immerses us in a parallel timeline of her interviews in 2020 interspersed with her father’s from the 1970s, excerpted in italics. It’s fascinating to hear all these voices directly but sometimes confusing to move back and forth between people and time periods, out of chronology. Who are these people, and what year are we in? Calhoun is an engaging guide and I was willing to wait and see where she led, but it was sometimes hard to follow.
Part biography, part memoir, it reflects the half-spoken belief that writing about the things and people we love is often a lot easier than living with them.
... breezy, whip-smart.
... if, like me and countless others, you’ve loved Schjeldahl’s art criticism — its acuity, its passion — and considered him (quoting a fan) 'the best art writer of our era … one of the best critics ever' — brace yourself. Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, Calhoun’s brave, blistering new memoir, may force you to — uh — revise your assumptions.
... dazzling.
An offbeat memoir in many ways, and not always sure what it’s trying to convey, it meanders through the challenges of writing a biography without the confidence of its subject’s estate. But it’s also a familiar enough design: a literary biography (here, wrapped up in a second biography) mashed up with confessional vignettes from the author’s own life, as successfully popularized over the past decade by writers such as Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson.
... a portrait of Schjeldahl that feels much clearer and intimate than any we might have gotten of O’Hara by way of overheard interviews. It’s a portrait informed by love and candor, threading together disparate chapters of a complicated man’s life into a thoughtful, cohesive whole..
Deeply moving and exceptionally well written, this offbeat memoir will please anyone interested in the NYC art scene from the 1950s on. Every father should have a daughter as loving, perceptive and honest as Calhoun..
Vexed but deceptively tender and cleverly conceived.
Fluidly morphing, magnetically candid.
Fearless.
Calhoun engages complex, fascinating dynamics of familial angst and artistic ambition.
If this were an O’Hara biography, it would, I believe, be necessary to recreate the heady, masculinist ambience of an arts scene predicated upon the enjoyment of women as sex objects and muses...If this were a biography of O’Hara, I would do it — I might even want to do it — but I’m glad not to have to.
A fascinating memoir.
A sweeping investigation of familial bonds in this mesmerizing work from journalist Calhoun.