Ada Calhoun, CRUSH: A Novel
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[0:45]Ada Calhoun is the author of Crush, a novel.
[0:48]She is also the author of, also a poet, named one of the best books of 2022 by The
[0:53]New York Times, NPR and The Washington Post, long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for
[0:57]Excellence in Nonfiction, and featured on the Today Show and PBS NewsHour for other
[1:02]books, including St. Mark's is dead, and The New York Times bestseller, Why We Can't
[1:06]Sleep.
[1:07]Welcome, Ada.
[1:08]Thank you so much for coming on to talk about Crush, a novel, a debut novel.
[1:12]Very exciting.
[1:13]Thank you, Cynthia.
[1:14]It's great to be here.
[1:15]Can you tell listeners what your book is about, please?
[1:18]Sure.
[1:19]It's about a woman who's happily married, and then she meets this other man, and they
[1:25]develop a super strong connection, and she tries to figure out a way, mostly through reading
[1:30]a lot of books to keep a man amazing.
[1:34]Can I start by reading this passage about devastation and love and loss and all of that that
[1:40]they just, okay, they say crying clears out the residue of what was there before when
[1:45]you're disoriented, crying is a proper response.
[1:48]But what about when you can't stop?
[1:49]What about when you dissolve into a puddle that needs to be mopped up by cheerful
[1:52]stalkers in Hawaiian shirts?
[1:55]I felt dead, only I felt like a grave side, more than two.
[1:59]I kept switching roles the way I had at times in a moment of orgasm, sexual situations
[2:03]flashing through my brain, only this version was depressing.
[2:06]Now I was the corpse and the doctor and the widow, the candy striper, who asks the grieving
[2:10]family if she can get them anything, and that we're losing her doctor nurse, the medical
[2:15]examiner, leaning against the morgue bay after a long day of autopsy's love, killed her.
[2:20]She says snapping off his gloves, oh, so good.
[2:25]The way you always write about, I mean, people have been writing about love forever.
[2:31]You think like how can people write about love in a new way and yet you can't and you
[2:35]did.
[2:36]Well, yeah, I mean, when I was trying to work on the book, I tried to read everything.
[2:41]I could go in way back and trying to find historical books and things from different
[2:45]cultures, talking about love, and it is kind of amazing to me how everybody has been
[2:51]trying to figure this out for a very long time, and it is so unruly, and it is so surprising
[2:57]to everyone of us individually and to every culture.
[2:59]Well, anything just because it happens to everybody doesn't mean that it makes it easier
[3:04]for it to happen to you.
[3:06]Right.
[3:07]You can learn and you can digest and we're just talking about like, you can know that
[3:12]it's happening to some of you and yet what it happens to you, it all feels personal.
[3:17]Because how else can you interpret anything like love and relationships?
[3:21]It's you.
[3:22]Right.
[3:23]And I think it's also true that we all keep thinking we have figured it out.
[3:28]We will solve it by rules, by marriage, by all these different strategies and boundaries,
[3:34]and it's just, it's infinitely surprising to me how there really is no fix, right?
[3:41]There is no one way to make sure that it never, it never gets us and never turns our
[3:45]life upside down.
[3:46]Yes.
[3:47]Although you do suggest impart some coping strategies at one point you said, I'd always
[3:53]liked books by drunk older male writers, and I finally realized why.
[3:57]By 830 in the morning, I'd fed my child and gotten him off to school, listened to the
[4:01]news down a load of laundry, answered a dozen emails, edited a stack of pages, and by 2 p.m.
[4:06]a hairy cruise character had drunk two beers and checked on his captured vertebrae.
[4:11]Who needed fantasy novels when there existed such exotic tales of dissipation?
[4:17]Well, it's been a wrote this book about generation X women a few years ago called Why
[4:22]We Can't Sleep.
[4:23]And I interviewed about 200 of them of us.
[4:27]And there was this consistency of effort, right, of like a working super hard of trying
[4:33]to be this good girl and all things to all people and pushing down desire and pushing
[4:40]down one's old, own needs in favor of other people's.
[4:44]And so what I tried to do in the novel was to make the narrator who is, you know, like
[4:49]me in many ways, but not me, be an embodiment of that.
[4:52]Not woman who suddenly thinks, wait a minute, what if I do what I want for the first time?
[4:58]So how is the narrator like and unlike you?
[5:00]Well, I mean, as somebody who's done fiction and nonfiction, I'm sure you know, there's
[5:05]something kind of magical about being able to make things up whenever you want to.
[5:09]So I think the voice is a lot like a lot like my voice and then some of the things that
[5:14]happened are are also similar to things that have happened to me.
[5:18]But you know, like when I tried to do a memoir about the last few years of my life and
[5:22]it just was not working.
[5:24]And so this was this way to actually talk about these ideas I had and not have to stick
[5:30]to the fact that, so one of the topics, of course, of the book is open marriage.
[5:36]Does it work?
[5:37]Does it work for every party involved?
[5:40]What do we think about it?
[5:41]Talk a little bit about that.
[5:43]Yeah.
[5:44]So I think that in in trying to figure out how to have all the things that she wants,
[5:49]the narrator thinks like, okay, maybe this, maybe this will work, right?
[5:53]There is some way to, there is, okay, there's a framework and you know, you have your
[5:57]spouse and then you also are allowed to have this other person.
[6:00]France, France does it, right?
[6:02]Like there's this and there are maybe there's models.
[6:04]And what I think she finds is that the, the boundaries are very hard hard for her to
[6:10]maintain the rules.
[6:12]It's just, it's very difficult because love is so, it's just so unruly.
[6:16]And in her case, it just runs rush out of her every attempt that she makes to keep an
[6:21]under control yet.
[6:22]It's definitely not like a, a pro or anti polyamory book.
[6:26]I think there are, there are a lot of both of those out there right now, which is, which
[6:29]is great.
[6:30]People who are exploring different ways to, to think about relationships.
[6:33]But yeah, this is really just one, one woman's quest to have all the things she wants.
[6:40]And what about passion sort of in midlife?
[6:43]I know that's a broad question, but where does that fit in?
[6:47]Does it fit in?
[6:48]What do we think about how people talk about it in general versus reality?
[6:52]Yeah.
[6:54]Well, I mean, I think, I think things have changed quite a bit, right?
[6:58]I think, and that was one thing one of us doing that.
[7:00]The book about Gen X was our mothers and grandmothers, you know, would hit midlife.
[7:05]And they were probably empty nesters.
[7:08]And, you know, if, if they worked, it was like a nine to five job and the phone hung
[7:12]on the wall.
[7:13]And there were all of these different things that made their lives not necessarily easier
[7:17]or better or worse or harder, but just different, right?
[7:21]And I think that right now, women in midlife often are working, you know, a lot more
[7:25]than nine to five, and also might have little kids or no families or just any kind of
[7:31]permutation of a very full and complicated life.
[7:37]So I think finding, finding passion can be maybe more jarring in that state where suddenly
[7:45]you have on top of everything else, you have these feelings or, or cravings that can
[7:50]be confusing.
[7:51]True.
[7:52]In the beginning of the book, you talk about literary birding when you see books by friends
[7:58]out in the wild.
[7:59]And I love that expression.
[8:01]I love applying that birding.
[8:03]I just thought that was hilarious because I'm always like walking to bookstores and being
[8:06]like, oh, hi.
[8:07]Yes, look, was here.
[8:08]I've had a new place, but no, I don't feel like I'm in a new place because I have my
[8:11]friends here.
[8:12]It's a good, right?
[8:14]And I think, I don't know about your friends, but when I send my friends, like, their
[8:18]books, it's like, it's always joyful, right?
[8:20]It's always like, oh my gosh, like, here you are in the wild airport, of course.
[8:23]You have to check in with your friends that way, and it's just, it's a, it's a real, it's
[8:27]a real plus of being an author and, and having friends who are authors, it's amazing.
[8:33]So start at the beginning a little bit about how you became a writer and how we got to
[8:37]these books that you've written lately.
[8:40]I'm sure.
[8:41]So I grew up in East Village in Manhattan, and I started working as like 13.
[8:46]I went to the farmers market and, and I mostly babysat.
[8:50]So I babysat for all these people in the neighborhood, and some of the more editors,
[8:54]there's one who's an editor at Spin Magazine and one who's an editor at Square Magazine,
[8:58]and they would say, okay, when you're done with the children, go into my office and transcribe
[9:03]this thing for me or do this research and so I started working when I was 16 at magazines
[9:08]and then kind of correlate them into jobs in some, in some ways.
[9:12]So I was working at Spin in the early 90s of the, the music editors was assistant, and
[9:17]then I was like, I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to work in magazines and I went
[9:21]to college and tried to become a Sanskrit translator to five years of, of Sanskrit, and,
[9:27]but then, you know, I couldn't find a job job that was Sanskrit, so I wanted to work
[9:32]me at the local paper, the Austin Chronicle, when I was in, at school, at Austin, and
[9:38]that was so fun, right?
[9:39]Like, every day was different being a reporter, and I just thought that was so great
[9:43]and I came back over to Boog, I was in your magazine, and then eventually I was able
[9:48]to go freelance.
[9:49]Wow.
[9:50]And talk about why you started, why we sleep?
[9:53]Yes.
[9:54]So I had a very bad summer, like a huge, little, terrible summer, I was super broke and
[9:59]and let's try to crash.
[10:00]that I was fighting with my husband.
[10:03]I was just like miserable, I had always jobs
[10:05]that had fallen through.
[10:06]And it was just, it was so rough.
[10:08]And that was the exact moment when this editor at Oprah.com
[10:11]called me and said, would you be willing to do a story
[10:14]about how generation acts women are sad?
[10:17]And I thought, yes, indeed, I would love to do that right now.
[10:20]Your timing could not be better.
[10:22]And so what I did was I looked all the things
[10:24]that were different for our generation
[10:25]and the ways in which we had kind of come
[10:30]of age in a time that was uniquely unlucky
[10:35]for various reasons, and especially for women.
[10:37]And we were getting this message, no, you can be anything.
[10:40]You can do it all.
[10:41]And aren't too lucky.
[10:42]And it really meant we're able to do everything
[10:46]for everybody and become exhausted.
[10:49]And when was very little help?
[10:51]So that became an article like if it was 8,000 words
[10:55]or something, and it was went super viral.
[10:57]And then it led to this book where I expanded it.
[11:00]And that came out in 20, 20, 20 in January.
[11:02]Great timing.
[11:04]Well, I was on book tour, and it was this amazing tour, right?
[11:08]Where like, I'm in these rooms with all these women
[11:11]who are close to my age and so many of them
[11:14]were basically standing up and giving testimonials
[11:17]about their experience and how they connected with the book
[11:20]and what it meant to them and just this sense of, wait a minute,
[11:23]we're not crazy.
[11:25]There's something going on.
[11:26]There are some factors beyond our control
[11:29]that relate to how we're feeling or where we are in life
[11:33]that we didn't think we would be.
[11:35]And it was just this magical experience this tour.
[11:38]And I was on it for a few weeks.
[11:39]And then it shut down, obviously, for COVID.
[11:42]And a lot of it went online.
[11:44]And then every night, I was looking at these screens
[11:47]of like hundreds of squares of crying women.
[11:51]Like, I mean, they came to think
[11:53]incredibly sad, mournful kind of experience.
[11:58]So I'm hoping, I'm hoping this tour can be more the,
[12:01]more the first one left with like a month.
[12:03]Yes.
[12:03]And what are your plans for the tour
[12:06]and everything coming forward?
[12:08]Coming ahead.
[12:09]So I think it's like 15 events or so.
[12:11]There's a couple of New York and then I'm going all over.
[12:14]I'm going to like books and books in Miami,
[12:16]which I love so much, those guys are so great.
[12:19]I'm print up in Maine and left bank on St. Louis.
[12:23]Just like a lot of my favorite indie book stores
[12:26]invited me and so I'm going to do some road tripping
[12:28]off some friends come with me.
[12:30]It'll be really fun.
[12:31]Amazing.
[12:31]Oh my gosh.
[12:32]Well, the book is so great.
[12:34]I, you're the way you just write about everything
[12:38]from the everyday things to deep thoughts about love.
[12:43]And it's just great.
[12:44]It's like you can't put it down.
[12:46]It's really, I love the way you write.
[12:48]So I'm so glad.
[12:49]Well, thank you.
[12:49]Thank you so much.
[12:50]Was it harder to write fiction?
[12:52]I know you said the memoir wasn't really working,
[12:54]but when you went to write this as a novel,
[12:56]did you start from scratch?
[12:58]Like what was the whole thing like?
[13:00]I mean, I feel like I'm like so late.
[13:04]I'm so late to the party, right?
[13:05]And just like, you guys, you can just make stuff up.
[13:07]It's wild because if it doesn't spread so long
[13:10]and you have to work so hard to do the interviews
[13:13]and do the research and then with fiction,
[13:14]you can just do whatever you want.
[13:16]It's kind of incredible.
[13:17]So no, it was just, it was just pleasurable.
[13:20]It was just a joy and I felt really lucky.
[13:23]It was, because I also, like when I was doing,
[13:25]the last book was a memoir of also a poet
[13:27]and it's not my father and a public figure, Hera.
[13:30]And I was writing it while I was living it
[13:33]and I kept trying to make everyone do things
[13:35]that would be good for the book, right?
[13:36]I'd be like, okay, now you're really nice to me.
[13:39]And then I have happy scene to end the book with
[13:41]where you just like say lovely things
[13:43]and then it's over.
[13:45]I know what you would do it, right?
[13:46]Like nobody would act how I wanted them to act.
[13:48]And then doing fiction, right?
[13:50]You can just, you can make everybody do what you want.
[13:52]It's just magical.
[13:54]Yeah, and we talk more about that book as well.
[13:57]Oh, sure.
[13:58]So that book, which came out in 2022,
[14:02]it basically would happen was I found all these cassette tapes
[14:05]that my father had made.
[14:07]They were interviews with the poet, Franco Hera's friends
[14:11]who he, so he died in 1966, Franco Hera
[14:14]and then in 1976 when I was a baby,
[14:17]my father was supposed to be the biographer.
[14:19]And so we've made all these tapes of these interviews
[14:22]and then he hadn't finished the book.
[14:24]And I couldn't believe it.
[14:25]I mean, he had like 40 hours of material
[14:27]and so my day job was like, go straight.
[14:30]And a lot of times you get like a dozen hours Navy, right?
[14:32]And sometimes a lot left to write a whole book.
[14:35]And I was like, how did you not finish this?
[14:36]It's crazy.
[14:37]And I was like, I will finish it for you.
[14:39]I will magnanimously show up with all my skills
[14:42]and I will do this for you.
[14:43]And he was like, okay, whatever.
[14:45]And I thought I was gonna like knock it out
[14:47]and it would be such a great relationship builder for us
[14:51]cause we'd always had a sort of strange relationship
[14:53]and it would be so good.
[14:54]And then it wound up being really, really hard
[14:56]on all kinds of levels.
[14:58]And then it became like a memoir about my dad and me.
[15:01]Oh, I have to go back and read that.
[15:03]I have not read that one.
[15:04]But I had a to cart.
[15:09]So that's a lot.
[15:10]I mean, you've been non-stop writing
[15:13]to get three books out so fast.
[15:14]That's a lot.
[15:16]And do you have more coming up?
[15:17]Like, have you already written another one?
[15:19]I have a draft of another one.
[15:21]And so nothing has been very strategic
[15:25]and everything has been in a different part
[15:27]of the bookstore, right?
[15:29]And so like, you know, memoir and essays
[15:31]and then like women's studies
[15:33]and my first book was Cold St. Mark's was dead
[15:36]the many lives of the Americas hit this street,
[15:38]which is like a 400 year history
[15:40]of the street I grew up on in the spillage.
[15:43]And so yeah, they've all been different.
[15:45]And so I'm always working on at least one or two things.
[15:48]And I think that it might be a novel,
[15:50]but I don't know.
[15:51]I'm trying to still trying to figure it out.
[15:53]It's exciting.
[15:56]And where do you like to write?
[15:57]So this is in my office right now.
[15:59]So I'm here maybe half the time
[16:01]and then half the time at the New York Public Library,
[16:03]which is so good to me.
[16:05]I love librarians and libraries so much
[16:08]and eternally in their debt.
[16:10]Oh, I love that.
[16:11]That's amazing.
[16:12]Are there any genres you particularly like to read?
[16:14]I know you write all kinds,
[16:16]but do you love, are there any authors you're obsessed with
[16:21]or just books that I don't know have met a lot to you?
[16:25]So it's super genius.
[16:26]I just, I think she's brilliant.
[16:28]And in manual career, I'm reading B13 now.
[16:30]I've eaten this one.
[16:31]I haven't.
[16:32]I just think he's a genius.
[16:34]I've been reading Annie Baker plays.
[16:36]Do you know her?
[16:37]I used to be a theater listing editor at New York Magazine
[16:42]and one of my good friends is the Times Arts writer.
[16:46]And so we go see a lot of plays.
[16:47]And he's taken me every time there's an Annie Baker play,
[16:49]he has to take me.
[16:51]So yeah, I don't know.
[16:52]I blur a lot.
[16:53]So I have a lot of like books coming out.
[16:56]There's this memoir, destroy this house.
[16:58]I really enjoyed Middle School and it's a Viking book.
[17:01]Anyway, I just, yeah, I piles of everything.
[17:05]I like philosophy and religion and fiction and memoir
[17:08]and yeah, histories.
[17:10]And how did you get drawn to Sanskrit?
[17:13]So I had a little bone when I was 18 for like three months
[17:17]through India and it was kind of a random.
[17:20]I just, I got this sort of volunteer program thing
[17:23]and Bangladesh and then I was like, well,
[17:24]I'm already over here.
[17:25]I might as well travel for a while
[17:27]and I went up working at Mother Teresa's mission
[17:29]and Calcutta.
[17:31]And then I just was like, well on the road
[17:32]and took trains and ran around.
[17:34]And while I was there, I was like,
[17:36]really in your panichos and I was like,
[17:37]this is the best book that's ever been written
[17:39]in the history of the world.
[17:40]And I was like, wouldn't it be incredible
[17:42]to read it in the original?
[17:44]And then when I went to college,
[17:45]I first went to McGill and Montreal
[17:47]and they had this incredible Sanskrit program.
[17:50]And so I just took it and it was such a revelation.
[17:53]I've done a lot of languages before
[17:55]but it has more grammar than any other language.
[17:59]And it's so sophisticated the way the grammar works
[18:02]and all the things you can do with that language
[18:04]that you can't do on other languages.
[18:06]So I just, and I just do it for five years.
[18:08]I loved it so much.
[18:09]And I've taken it like again,
[18:11]I've tried to like refresh where I went to the Indian
[18:15]consulate for a while and took classes there.
[18:19]But it's really hard if you're not doing it all the time
[18:21]to keep it up, I'm fortunate.
[18:23]I mean, I would imagine Sanskrit is hard
[18:26]even if you're keeping it.
[18:28]I mean, even if you're keeping it at met.
[18:30]But it's really pleasurable.
[18:31]And during the pandemic, one of my friends,
[18:34]who's the fan, who's this, I have a few Sanskritist friends
[18:37]still, and one of them, she and I did.
[18:39]We took the hymn and off from the betas
[18:42]and we did like a line every week.
[18:45]Like it would take us a whole week to do like a line
[18:47]and talk through it.
[18:48]It was a really fun, fun way to pass the time.
[18:51]Oh, I love that.
[18:52]Wow.
[18:53]I mean, here's to creative interests, right?
[18:55]That's amazing.
[18:57]Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
[18:59]Yeah, I mean, I was having so many breakfast with young writers
[19:06]because I'm always happy that people
[19:08]want to write.
[19:10]And I love hearing what they want to do
[19:11]and trying to think of ways to make it better.
[19:14]And so I wanted to start this women's journalists
[19:18]night, journalists women.
[19:20]Anyway, we started this thing called Sops.
[19:22]There's a couple of friends of mine and I
[19:24]where we have women who are starting out as writers
[19:28]and then some who'd like one of a bunch of Pulitzer's
[19:30]and we all get together in a room
[19:32]and just support each other and help each other
[19:35]and talk through, talk through issues, talk through things
[19:38]we're excited about.
[19:39]And it's so I think like finding a community like that
[19:42]for whatever kind of writing you're doing,
[19:44]whether it's fiction or poetry or history
[19:47]and just getting people in an actual room together.
[19:49]It makes such a difference just to be around other people
[19:52]who know what you're doing or trying to do.
[19:55]Because it's hard, right?
[19:56]It's like hard to do these things.
[19:57]And so it's good to be reminded that other people are trying
[20:00]do it too. Amazing. Ada, thank you so much. Thank you for this fabulous book,
[20:05]Crush, and all your other work, of course, and for uplifting genetics women my age. Exactly.
[20:12]Thank you for all of it. I appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for having me on the reading
[20:17]the book and also for everything you're doing for writers and for books in the world. Yeah, my pleasure.
[20:22]All right. Thank you. Thank you for having me on the reference here. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Thanks again.
[20:31]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi, formerly momstone have time to read books.
[20:36]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens,
[20:42]and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and bye the books.