Books
Calhoun and O’Hara give us hope that art will still be a life force
New memoir ‘Also a Poet’ will inspire readers
‘Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me’
By Ada Calhoun
c.2022, Grove Press
$27/259 pages
Families. Especially if your parents are acclaimed writers and artists, they can get under your skin. They love you, but sometimes withhold praise and suck the air out of the room. You wonder if you’ll end up as a second-string imitation of your famous folks.
That was what growing up was like for writer Ada Calhoun, author of the new memoir “Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father and Me.”
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Tolstoy wrote in “Anna Karenina.”
If you’re queer, you know not only how right Tolstoy was, but that family tension makes for riveting reading.
Calhoun, a lifelong New Yorker who grew up in the East Village, doesn’t disappoint.
Her parents are creative and talented. Her mother Brooke Alderson started out performing stand-up comedy in lesbian bars. Later, she was an actress whose most well-known roles were in “Urban Cowboy” and “Family Ties.”
Her father Peter Schjeldahl, born in 1942, is a poet and The New Yorker art critic.
Schjeldahl is far from a pompous gasbag. As The New York Times book critic Molly Young said recently, in his book “Hot, Cold, Heavy, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018,” Schjeldahl received, perhaps, the most awesome blurb ever. “Bruce is no longer the Boss; Schjeldahl is!” Steve Martin said of the volume.
Not surprisingly, Calhoun didn’t have a typical childhood.
Gay writer Christopher Isherwood, author of “The Berlin Stories,” was among those who Calhoun’s parents hung out with. “One of the most agreeable children imaginable,” Isherwood said of Calhoun when she was a child, “neither sulky nor sly nor pushy nor ugly, with a charming trustful smile for all of us.”
Most of us as kids see “The Nutcracker” with an aunt or grandma. Calhoun saw the holiday classic with a “dreamboat” poet. An artist posing topless so other painters could paint her wasn’t shocking to the young Calhoun.
While Calhoun’s Mom makes several memorable appearances, “Also a Poet” is focused on Calhoun’s relationship with her father.
Relationships between daughters and fathers can be difficult. But they’re often more fraught when the dad is a renowned writer. Especially when Calhoun, born in 1976, was growing up.
Then (thankfully, to a lesser extent, now) if you were a male writer, life in your household centered around you. You didn’t help with housework or pay much attention to your spouse and kids.
Though Calhoun was raised in the sophisticated East Village, life with her father fit this pattern. One day, Schjeldahl let her go alone, with no directions, at age eight on a bus to a friend’s birthday party.
When she was young, Calhoun wanted to escape the Village literary life. “My typical answer was farmer because that was the most tangible, least cosmopolitan option I could think of,” Calhoun writes, when as a kid, people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up.
But Calhoun couldn’t evade the clutches of the writing bug. From early on, she wanted to get away from her father’s shadow. So her work could be judged on its own merit. She changed her last name from Schjeldahl to her middle name Calhoun.
Despite their difficulties, one thing bonded Calhoun with her dad: their love of Frank O’Hara, the openly queer poet and Museum of Modern Art curator, who died at 40 in a Jeep accident on Fire Island in 1966.
In the 1970s, Schjeldahl, who like so many poets, writers and artists then and now, idolized O’Hara, tried to write a biography of the beloved poet. But O’Hara’s sister and executor Maureen Granville-Smith derailed his attempt to write the bio.
But all wasn’t lost. Decades later, Calhoun discovered the tapes of the people (from Larry Rivers to Willem de Kooning) who Schjeldalhl had interviewed for the project in the basement of her parents’ building.
In a magnificent Rubik’s Cube of literary history and memory, Calhoun weaves a tale of family and of making art.
The memoir will inspire you to read O’Hara. O’Hara wrote funny and moving poems out of the pop culture and sadness of his time (from the “The Day Lady Died” on the death of Billie Holiday to the hilarious “Poem” – with the line “Lana Turner has collapsed!” to “Personal Poem” about Miles Davis being beaten by cops).
“His life force was on the page,” Grace Cavalieri, Maryland’s poet laureate and the producer/host of the radio show “The Poet and the Poem, said of O’Hara in an email to the Blade.
In this “Don’t Say Gay” era, Calhoun and O’Hara give us hope that art will still be a life force.
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You’re all geared up.
You’ve got your best parade-walking shoes, your coolest tee, your most-comfortable shorts, and a rainbow flag to carry. You’re set for Pride, but before you go, try one of these great new books about LGBTQ life and history.
After the parade, where will you end up? A place to talk your experience over, to re-hash things for the next parade? Then you may need “The Lesbian Bar Chronicles: The Living History and Hopeful Future of America’s Dyke Dives and Sapphic Spaces” by Rachel Karp (Beacon Press, $29.95).
Lesbian bars, says Karp, are more than just places to drink. They’re also places to find community, and to organize. For many, she says, they are “sanctuaries,” as they have been for at least a century, and this book introduces you to some of the people who run the establishments, the things they do to support their patrons, and the 100-year-plus bravery that it took to own, run, and enter a lesbian bar.
If you had to name a gay icon, there are probably quite a few who come to mind. So read “Without Prejudice: My Life as a Gay Judge” by Harvey Brownstone (ECW Press, $21.95) and add another name to your list.
This memoir, written by Canada’s first openly gay judge, takes readers from Brownstone’s childhood to his life as a lawyer, then to his work within the justice system in Ontario, and beyond, to his current career. This is a surprising, informative book that gives you an idea what gay life is like, north of our uppermost borders, then and now.
Pride is a celebration, an event, but it also demands a peek backwards, and in “The LGBTQ Almanac: 500 Years of Queer Culture in American History” by Deborah G. Felder (Visible Ink Press, $39.95), you’ll get a wide look at the pioneers, allies, policy, and gay life over the course of the last five centuries. Want to know more about religion in the gay community? It’s in here, along with celebrities, presidents, science, business, and more. This is the kind of book that settles bets. It’s one you want to have in any room of your home because it’s comprehensive and perfectly browse-able for all of its 600-plus pages.
And finally, here’s a book to read and think about: “No Fats No Fems: A Guide to Queer Empathy and Unpacking Prejudice” by Max Hovey (HarperOne, $19.99). How do you eliminate hateful, hurtful words, aimed at gay people – by gay people? What kind of stereotypes do we carry, unintentionally? This book takes those things out into the daylight by talking honestly and thoughtfully about them, as well as other issues. It’s a book to have when doubts creep in, when you need a new way of thinking or a different direction, or when you just want something different to read.
And if these great books aren’t enough, head to your favorite bookstore or library and ask for books that you can read before Pride or after. And happy Pride!
Books
New books reveal style trends for a more enlightened century
Guidelines that hint about gendering clothing are out
Books about Fashion and Style
By various authors
c.2026, various publishers
$19.95 – $29.95
Don’t look now, but your legs are showing.
It’s OK, it’s almost summertime and you want to show both skin and style. So how about a few hints for looking your best? Check out these great books and get stylin’.
Who says there are rules about fashion? Wearing white before Memorial Day is OK; socks with sandals not so much? Fine, but in “Bending the Rules: Fashion Beyond the Binary” by Camille Benda with Gwyn Conaway (Princeton Architectural Press, $29.95), you’ll see that any guidelines that hint about gendering clothing are oh-so-last century.
Along with lively, fun narrative, there are lots of photos in this book, ads for how clothing used to be worn along male-female lines, and short biographies of some of today’s best designers. Here, you can check out prom dresses from the 1950s and new haute couture gowns practically right off the runway – and see how one parallels with the other. The timeline reaches back centuries, so you get a nice idea of where certain kinds of clothing originated and how it’s relevant today – making what’s inside here perfect for browsing.
Pick up this book, in fact, and you might also pick up some ideas for filling your closet and creating your very own style.
The fashion you wear on your body isn’t all you’ll find in “Pretend to Be Fancy: A Field Guide to Style and Sophistication” by Whitney Marston Pierce (Chronicle Books, $19.95). You’ll also read about other nice things you can have.
So you’re not a pinky-in-the-air kind of person, whatever. You can easily hang with those who are, once you read and absorb this book.
Tongue-tied at fancy soirees? Not anymore, there are tips for talking here. What do you know about canapes, hors d’oeuvres, and the kind of foods you don’t get at the corner c-store? How do you make a charcuterie that everyone will Ooooooh over? And how do you give a gift for the person whose taste seems scads better than yours? That’s all in here, along with what to drink, how to dress, and how to make every corner of your home look like something right out of a high-end magazine.
Will this book make you chic? Possibly, yes. Will it help you get invited to all the best parties? Maybe, but for sure, it’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you feel fabulous, look fabulous, and live your best life with the surroundings you deserve. Out May 5, so put it on your list.
But let’s say you need more ideas. You have questions or thorny issues with fashion that you really need answering. That’s when you ask for a talented fashionista at your local bookstore or library, that knowledgeable someone knows books and knows how to get what you need to be your most dazzling, best-dressed, finest-appointed self in a home you can be proud of, with comfortable furniture that will be the envy of everyone who sees it.
In the meantime, grab the above titles, because these books got legs.
‘La Lucci’
By Susan Lucci with Laura Morton
c.2026, Blackstone Publishing
$29.99/196 pages
They’re among the world’s greatest love stories.
You know them well: Marc Antony and Cleopatra. Abelard and Heloise. Phoebe and Langley. Cliff and Nina. Jesse and Angie, Opal and Palmer, Palmer and Daisy, Tad and Dixie. Now read “La Lucci” by Susan Lucci, with Laura Morton, and you might also think of Susan and Helmut.
When she was a very small girl, Susan Lucci loved to perform. Also when she was young, she learned that words have power. She vowed to use them for good for the rest of her life.
Her parents, she says, were supportive and her family, loving. Because of her Italian heritage, she was “ethnic looking” but Lucci’s mother was careful to point out dark-haired beauties on TV and elsewhere, giving Lucci a foundation of confidence.
That’s just one of the things for which Lucci says she’s grateful. In fact, she says, “Prayers of gratitude are how I begin and end each day.”
She is particularly grateful for becoming a mother to her two adult children, and to the doctors who saved her son’s life when he was a newborn.
Lucci writes about gratitude for her long career. She was a keystone character on TV’s “All My Children,” and she learned a lot from older actors on the show, and from Agnes Nixon, the creator of it. She says she still keeps in touch with many of her former costars.
She is thankful for her mother’s caretakers, who stepped in when dementia struck. Grateful for more doctors, who did heart-saving work when Lucci had a clogged artery. Grateful for friends, opportunities, life, grandchildren, and a career that continues.
And she’s grateful for the love she shared with her husband, Helmut Huber, who died nearly four years ago. Grateful for the chance to grieve, to heal, and to continue.
And yet, she says of her husband: “He was never timid, but I know he was afraid at the end, and that kills me down to my soul.”
“It’s been 15 years since Erica Kane and I parted ways,” says author Susan Lucci (with Laura Morton), and she says that people still approach her to confirm or deny rumors of the show’s resurrection. There’s still no answer to that here (sorry, fans), but what you’ll find inside “La Lucci” is still exceptionally generous.
If this book were just filled with stories, you’d like it just fine. If it was only about Lucci’s faith and her gratitude – words that happen to appear very frequently here – you’d still like reading it. But Lucci tells her stories of family, children and “All My Children,” while also offering help to couples who’ve endured miscarriage, women who’ve had heart problems, and widow(ers) who are spinning and need the kindness of someone who’s lived loss, too.
These are the other things you’ll find in “La Lucci,” in a voice you’ll hear in your head, if you spent your lunch hours glued to the TV back in the day. It’s a comfortable, fun read for fans. It’s a story you’ll love.
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