In Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove), Ada Calhoun entwines memoir, literary history, and biography into gorgeous narrative. In previous books, Calhoun has chronicled the East Village neighborhood of her childhood, considered women in the crisis of mid-life, and written about the institution of marriage.

Now Calhoun extends her capacious curiosity, journalistic acumen, and poetic sensibility to focus on poet Frank O’Hara and her father Peter Schjeldahl — venerated art critic for The New Yorker — and in the process, herself.

Schjeldahl once attempted to write a definitive biography of the poet who has been a favorite of both father and daughter. When Calhoun happened upon her father’s interview tapes with O’Hara in the basement where they had languished for forty years, she learned of his failed project and embarked on her own.

Weaving transcripts of Schjeldahl’s interviews with O’Hara into her own research, Calhoun shines a bright new light on the poet’s life and work while also gleaning a new understanding of herself. She comes to terms with growing up in her father’s shadow and comes to an understanding of how she shaped herself.

For The National Book Review, Kylie Gellatly spoke with Calhoun about her father and O’Hara, and how ultimately O’Hara brought father and daughter together.

Q: Also A Poet starts out as a book about Frank O’Hara and ends up being about you. How did you approach the idea of audience?

A: There’s a James Salter quote I think about a lot: “There are stories one must tell, and years when one must tell them.” This book, more than anything I’ve ever done, seemed to want to be a certain thing, and seemed to need to be written now. So I didn’t really think about audience. I just stopped trying to force the book to be a biography and let it be a memoir. I guess that may have writing given it a bigger audience because I think there might be more people with strained parental relationships than there are people who want to know about the New York School of poetry.

Q: You’ve written many personal essays and published a handful of nonfiction—but you’ve also been a ghostwriter on many projects. Can you talk about what it was like to discover that this Frank O’Hara biography was a memoir?

A: I started out as a journalist about twenty-five years ago. Writing about people who are not me is still most of what I do. Essays and memoir have just kind of demanded to be written a few times—essays for “Modern Love” and “Lives” for example, and then Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give and this book. Reporting and ghostwriting require more conscious effort than memoir and essays. For the nonfiction book Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis and the New York City history St. Marks Is Dead I interviewed something like two hundred people each and read dozens of books. It can be exhausting to write super personal stuff, too, but it’s a different kind of tired.

Q: Where did you turn for the confidence to overcome challenges of writing this book? Were there other books or writers that you looked to for permission?

A: In speaking about the drinking age on St. Marks Place, the street I grew up on, Adam Horovitz said that the drinking age wasn’t a number; it was “confidence.” I found that profound. If you have enough confidence, you can get away with so much. During the pandemic I read everything I could by Sigrid Nunez and Emmanuel Carrère. They have an ease and a surety about them that I find totally intoxicating. For this book, I kind of wrote it as I lived it and lived it as I wrote it.

Q: How has writing this book changed your relationship with, or to, your father?

A: While I was working on the book, I kept trying to give us a storybook ending—to have him be like fathers in movies, all good advice and playing catch—and he stubbornly resisted my efforts. But I think the truth, while being more complicated, is also more interesting. Then once the book was done, he surprised me by loving it, and honestly that was the best thing that’s ever happened to our relationship.

Q: How do you see Also A Poet continuing Frank O’Hara’s legacy today—considering both people who are new to his work and people who are long-time fans?

A: One of the best things about this book tour I’m on is that a lot of people are bringing Lunch Poems or Meditations in an Emergency up to the counter along with my book. O’Hara fans have told me that the book gave them new stories about him and reminded them why they loved him in the first place. That’s made me really happy.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from your book?

A: People are complicated. We have competing motivations. We want to be loved. We tell ourselves stories about who we are, who our parents are, who our heroes are, and about what our legacy will be—and those stories may or may not jibe with reality.

Q: Lastly, can you tell us about your writing practice? Do you have a daily routine? How many projects do you have on hand at a time?

A: No routine! Some weeks I go to the New York Public Library every day and work 10-5. Other weeks I kick around the house, have lunch with friends in the neighborhood, clean out closets. Some days I just go for super long walks around the city. If I get dedicated, extended time alone I usually work from the moment I wake up until I fall asleep at night. But that’s rare. At any given time, I usually have a book of my own, a ghost book, and some sort of article or something going. I find it’s helpful to have a few things so if I’m not in the mood for one I can switch to the other. That way I’m never bored.

Kylie Gellatly is a poet and the author of The Fever Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, DIAGRAM, Diode, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere, with reviews in Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, Pleiades, and Green Mountains Review. Kylie received Honorable Mention from the Academy of American Poets for the 2022 Gertrude Claytor Award of the Academy of American Poets and is a Frances Perkins Scholar at Mount Holyoke College. For more, visit www.kyliegellatly.com