Ada Calhoun on Ghostwriting, Thornton Wilder, and the audacity of desire

Send us Fan Mail“Anything Ada Calhoun wants to write is well worth reading,” declared Kirkus in its review of her new novel, Crush, a sharp and seductive exploration of midlife desire and the unruly force of infatuation. Calhoun is the author of the acclaimed history St. Marks Is Dead; the memoir Also a Poet, which chronicles her attempt to finish an abandoned biography of Frank O’Hara begun by her father, the critic Peter Schjeldahl; the essay collection Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give; and the cultural study Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis. Alongside her own books, she has ghostwritten more than thirty titles, an apprenticeship that sharpened her instinct for voice, candor, and structure. “There are a lot of ways to tell a true story,” she has said. “I like looking for the most generous and interesting ones.”In this episode, Calhoun discusses her journey from ghostwriter to memoirist to novelist, and the writers who guide her: Thornton Wilder, whose The Bridge of San Luis Rey remains a touchstone nearly a century after its publication, and Audre Lorde, whose essay The Use of the Erotic reframes desire as a source of knowledge and power.