“I started trying to write a memoir, but it made no sense,” Ada Calhoun tells me across the screen. The best-selling author and prolific ghostwriter began to chronicle a “grueling few years” of hers before realizing the characters were too messy, and storylines too scattered. The move into fiction was liberating: She could write about the chaos of life and marriage, rather than perpetuate it. That rumination will culminate in the release of her first novel, Crush, on Feb. 25.
Over the years, Calhoun has become an authority on navigating our most intricate relationships. In 2020’s Why We Can't Sleep, she dissected the idiosyncrasies of Gen X women’s midlife crises, while 2022’s Also a Poet slalomed through art-world cultural histories and father-daughter relationships, particularly Calhoun’s own with the renowned late critic Peter Schjeldahl. In Crush, she turns to a husband, wife, and the various partners they begin to invite into their marriage. As Calhoun notes in chapter one, “That is when the trouble started.”
CULTURED: This is your first novel. Can you tell me a little bit about that shift?
Ada Calhoun: I realized I could do something different where I could make things up, which was a total revelation that everybody else had already figured out. I was very late to the party. It feels a little like, Do you know about this amazing TV show, The Sopranos? You can just make things up and you don't have to get direct quotes and source them. It's wild. I invented scenes and characters and made actual arcs, love interests, and did all these things that let me ask these questions that the messiness of my own life did not allow for.
CULTURED: I did want to talk to you about that strange process of taking your life and turning it around and making it into the story that you want to tell.
Calhoun: None of the people in the book have a direct corollary, including the narrator, even though she has a lot in common with me. I tried to leave it a little vague, just a little like a fairy tale. I don't even give the narrator a name. I like the idea of it being something you could project into a little bit, the way that a lot of novels that I like are, where I just feel sucked into the person's life and I feel like I can be along for the ride.
I was talking to Isaac Fitzgerald and he was like, “Novels are the way to go because with Fifty Shades of Grey, if that was a memoir, you'd be like, ‘Oh, no. Are you okay? It's so scary. But then if it's a novel, it's just fun.’”
CULTURED: Polyamory: is it something that you feel like more friends are trying, or a topic that's on a lot of people's minds?
Calhoun: Anecdotally, the pandemic blew everything up for people. It put a lot of pressure on marriages. Everybody was saying these things, like, “There has got to be a breaking point. I'm doing everything for everybody. I'm completely overwhelmed and exhausted. And I just wish I could blow everything up and start over.” I feel like there was this huge reckoning where everybody was like, “Wait a minute, everything did blow up.” So, we can just sort of hit reset and figure out what we wanted. And what is that? Is it the way we've been doing it, which has been exhausting, or is it some innovation?
I just saw people trying a lot of different things in a lot of areas—in their work, and then also in their personal relationships. In some people's cases that led them to ask, “What is marriage? What does it mean to leave the house? What does it mean to be faithful?” Those are really good questions to ask. When you actually ask, “Why am I doing everything? And what do I want?” I think things start to change sometimes.
CULTURED: What sort of feedback do you get from readers? This novel feels like something that someone would read and take as permission to explore different facets of their life. Hearing about people go through it does make you feel like, I can go through it.
Calhoun: [It] was really important to make this more about ideas. It's not pro any form of relationship, I don't think. I have heard that women, especially good girls who have put other people's needs first for a really long time, have found in the book some kind of permission to actually question their own desires. I'm really happy about that. I think that that's wonderful.
In some cases, it takes the form of like, Do I want to be in this marriage? Or do I want to be in this relationship? Or what do I want relationships to look like? But a lot of times it's much broader than that. It's like, How do I want to live? Who do I want to be in the world? What does it mean to be a good person and to be loving and to let myself be loved? It is about actually asking what you want and actually taking that seriously in a way that we, especially at this older age, might have been conditioned out of.
I will say also that the first few men who read it thought the book was very sad. Then the first women who read it said things like “This book just saved my life,” or, “This totally made me so happy and excited. It's so joyful.”
CULTURED: What were you reading while putting this together? So much of the book is like looking inside someone's brain, with this amalgamation of different references.
Calhoun: I have this room at the New York Public Library, which is a total miracle. I have taken many people to get their library cards, I'm very pro-library. They have this room when you want to write a book—they're called study rooms. You get a key card and you can go into this special room upstairs at the main branch, the one with the lions, and you can call in as many books as you want to every day, and library elves come and they put them in your room for you.
I just called in everything about epistolaries, because I was really interested in that form of writing. Then I was like, No, it doesn’t really work. So then I called in every book that had “love” in the title, which is a lot of books and things about different kinds of relationships and friendships. [I was] calling in things from Stendhal and Montaigne and things like that, and then also new studies. I just tried to pull everything that I thought was really interesting and give it to the characters to talk about.
CULTURED: The dedication for the book is “For the love of my life.” When I started reading the book, I was like, Maybe she's talking about marriage and partners. When I got to the end of the book, I was like, Maybe she's talking about herself or her kids. How did that little tidbit come together?
Calhoun: The one that I see on Instagram a lot was my one for Why We Can't Sleep, because it was to the women of America, “You're not imagining it. It's not just you.” For this one, the book is about love and all these different forms love takes. I do have a lot of love in my life, more than I ever have personally. I'm very lucky. So I wanted to acknowledge that and then also not be too specific.
The point of the book is not about how one person ultimately fulfills you. It’s about you finding that you love people and letting love in. One of my best friends said, “This isn't a book about finding somebody who wants you. It's about actually realizing that you're desirable.”
