She’s happy and settled and productive and content in her full life --- a child, a career, an admirable marriage, deep friendships, happy parents, and a spouse she still loves. But when her husband urges her to address what the narrow labels of “husband” and “wife” force them to edit out of their lives, the very best kind of hell breaks loose. Using Ada Calhoun’s personal experiences as a jumping-off point, CRUSH is about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, the havoc it can wreak, and, most of all, the clear sense of self one finds when the storm passes.

When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews that her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started 40 years earlier. As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun. But the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s…and her own. The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond.

When Ada Calhoun found herself in the throes of a midlife crisis, she thought that she had no right to complain. She was married with children and had a good career. So why did she feel miserable? And why did it seem that other Generation X women were miserable, too? Calhoun decided to find some answers. At every turn, she saw a pattern: sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials, Gen X women were facing new problems as they entered middle age, problems that were being largely overlooked. In WHY WE CAN’T SLEEP, Calhoun opens up the cultural and political contexts of Gen X’s predicament and offers solutions for how to pull oneself out of the abyss --- and keep the next generation of women from falling in.

We hear plenty about whether or not to get married, but much less about what it takes to stay married. Clichés around marriage --- eternal bliss, domestic harmony, soul mates --- leave out the real stuff. After marriage you may still want to sleep with other people. Sometimes your partner will bore the hell out of you. And when stuck paying for your spouse’s mistakes, you might miss being single. In WEDDING TOASTS I’LL NEVER GIVE, Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is.