I feel a little conflicted about this one. I picked it up randomly when browsing at my local bookshop. I had read some of O'Hara's work and was loosely familiar with the New York school of poets and artists, but I didn't know all that much and thought this might be a neat way into learning more. Going in, I knew it'd be more than a book about O'Hara, that it'd also be a personal memoir. As you get deeper into the book, you learn why it leaned more heavily toward the latter.

The book is well written and by and large enjoyable, but I found Calhoun's persona in the book to be pretty name-droppy (unavoidable to an extent given the nature of the thing, but often I felt like I sensed a smugness about it) and honestly sort of bratty. This develops some over the course of the book, and I take it all to be by design, a show of self-development and so forth. But some of the self-righteousness and indignation that arises especially as Calhoun has a climactic phone call and aftermath in the latter third of the book was really off-putting. Like, I found the persona's attitude to be awful and unself-aware about it, and it was just a real turn-off for me.

That's about a persona/character in the book (maybe a bit of creative nonfiction at play here?) and not about the book overall, though. It's not essential that I like a persona, and I did value what Calhoun shared here about O'Hara and her own father (who is a titan I had never heard of), and the sort of rickety bridge O'Hara posthumously built between father and daughter. I'd recommend it to anybody interested in this period in arts and letters (the bibliography alone may be worth the price of the book).