I interviewed Ada Calhoun on her work writing a new book that’s part memoir and part biography”: “Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, My father, and Me.” Calhoun wanted to write a biography of the poet Frank O’Hara after she found tapes of interviews he’d done with her father, who is the New Yorker’s art critic Peter Schjeldahl.  We talked about the exploration that happened when she couldn’t do what she originally intended—into her own fraught history with her celebrated father and the New York art world of the ’60s that she found in those tapes from her parents’ attic. Among other things, I asked her about what it means to her to do honor to her father without pulling punches. 

Go buy her book which is out now.

You can listen to our conversation here: