“But the second I stopped trying to force the book to be something it just didn’t want to be, that was when the world kind of opened up.” “If I, I would’ve very happily been a good girl and done a good and beautiful biography,” she says. But as she found herself similarly stonewalled by Granville-Smith, she was faced with a Type A person’s worst nightmare: the need for a plan B. Sure that she could succeed where he could not, Calhoun set to work on it. A few years ago, Calhoun discovered that her father, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had once tried to write O’Hara’s biography - and failed, after falling out of favor with O’Hara’s younger sister and executor, Maureen Granville-Smith. It was also a case of history repeating itself.
For a while, writing what became Also A Poet “was horrifying,” Calhoun tells Bustle. But when she set out to write a biography of poet Frank O’Hara, her modes of production were tested. The author doesn’t procrastinate, can steadily write for 15 hours straight if uninterrupted, and loves a deadline.
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