Ada Calhoun & Maud Newton: A Conversation

Maud Newton has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Oxford American. She grew up in Miami and graduated from the University of Florida with degrees in English and law. Newton’s ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her grandfather from her mother’s side was said to have married 13 times and been shot by one of his wives. Mental illness and religious fanaticism went back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Maud’s father, an aerospace engineer turned lawyer, extolled the virtues of slavery and obsessed over the “purity” of his family bloodline, which he traced back to the Revolutionary War. Maud’s mother, given to feverish projects, had a church in the family’s living room and performed exorcisms. In Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation (Random House), Newton writes about her fear that she would replicate their damage. So she researched her genealogy, immersing herself in census archives while yearning for deeper truths. As she exposes the secrets and contradictions of those who came before her, she argues for the transformational possibilities that facing the legacy of our ancestors offers all of us.

Ada Calhoun is the New York Times bestselling author of St. Marks Is Dead, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, and Why We Can’t Sleep. She has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Washington Post. After stumbling upon old cassette tapes of interviews 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 he 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. Her memoir Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Press) weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond, and explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents yet fear what that might cost us.