Ada Calhoun

"When I asked nostalgic people to name the street’s golden era, they cited a range of years—often falling between 1960 and 1982, but sometimes 1945, or 1958, or 2012. A Vassar student told me that St. Marks Place died with the fairly recent closing of the Starbucks at Cooper Union. 'I came back from break,' he said, 'and it was gone. We used to hang out there and get cups and fill them with strawberry champagne and feel glamorous. There’s no room for life to be lived there now.' I began to notice a pattern: The years people said the city was at its best almost always coincided with when they themselves were at their hottest."

St. Marks Is Dead was a New York Times Editors’ Pick, Amazon Book of the Month, and named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus Reviews, The Boston Globe, Orlando Weekly, the New York Post.

The Atlantic wrote: "Timely, provocative, and stylishly written …Calhoun’s book serves as a welcome corrective to that rallying cry [that gentrification is bad], and to the tendency to romanticize New York City in the 1970s, when the city was far more riotous and permissive than it is now. … Her aplomb, in fact, is precisely what the discussion needs. Her portrait of neighborhood resilience might suggest more temperate proposals for an increasingly polarized debate."

The New York Times Book Review said, "Calhoun, who grew up on St. Mark’s Place, is careful not to romanticize any one era of the East Village (which serves as a suitable proxy for much of New York City during the past century). St. Marks Is Dead is an ecstatic roll call."

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give is a memoir about marriage.

Ada Calhoun (born Ada Calhoun Schjeldahl; March 17, 1976) is an American nonfiction writer.

She is the author of St. Marks Is Dead, a history of St. Mark's Place in East Village, Manhattan, New York; Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, a book of essays about marriage; Why We Can't Sleep, a book about Generation X women and their struggles, and Also a Poet, a memoir about her father and the poet Frank O’Hara.

She has also been a critic, frequently contributing to The New York Times Book Review; a co-author and ghostwriter, the New York Times having reported that she collaborated on the 2023 Britney Spears memoir The Woman in Me; and a freelance essayist and reporter.

She changed her name in 1998 to avoid comparison to her father.

As a reporter, she has written about imprisoned women in Alabama, the rap star Bobby Shmurda, and the rise of DIY abortions.

She has also written personal essays, including three for The New York Times 's "Modern Love" column, and four for The New York Times Magazine 's "Lives" column.

A Village Voice profile in 2015 said: "Her CV can seem as though it were cobbled together from the résumés of three ambitious journalists."

Calhoun grew up on St. Marks Place in East Village, Manhattan.

She is the only child of art critic Peter Schjeldahl and actress Brooke Alderson.

They appear as characters in her book St. Marks Is Dead, which she dedicated to them.

She has written in The New York Times Magazine about a childhood fascination with the suburbs.

As a teenager, she traveled through India and met Mother Teresa.

The New York Times named her essay "The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give" its 41st-most-read story of 2015.

St. Marks Is Dead was published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2015.

Calhoun wrote an op-ed that fall that explained her anti-nostalgic feelings about cities and change:

The Village Voice called it "The Best Nonfiction Book About New York, 2015," and said, "With St. Marks Is Dead, Ada Calhoun just became the most important new voice on old New York."

It was inspired by the success of her "Modern Love" column in The New York Times, "The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give," which the paper named one of its most-read stories of 2015.

In 2016, W.W. Norton announced that it would publish a collection of related essays in 2017, called Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give.

In October 2017, Oprah.com published her article "The New Midlife Crisis."

Chartbeat named the article the internet's 55th-most-read story of 2017.

The book was released on May 16, 2017, by W. W. Norton & Company.

In the book, Calhoun presents seven personal essays, framed as "toasts", that discuss topics such as infidelity, existential anxiety, fighting in rental cars, and the "soulmates" ideal.

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give was praised in pre-publication reviews.

Publishers Weekly called it "A humorous, realistic, and loving look at marriage....Each essay mixes components of memoir and self-help, drawing on insight from Calhoun’s own marriage as well as the wise thoughts of clergymen and lessons learned from long-married couples."

Library Journal said, "Alternating between hilarious personal anecdote and sobering professional insight, this memoir conveys perhaps the simplest lesson ever given about learning to make a marriage last: just don’t get divorced. Her other great contribution to the literature on marital happiness might be her explanation of why fights in cars are the worst: you cannot storm off."

The book received blurbs from Molly Ringwald, Susannah Cahalan, Karen Abbott, Phillip Lopate, Carlene Bauer, Davy Rothbart, Leah Carroll, Kathryn Hahn, Gretchen Rubin, Emma Straub, and Rebecca Traister.

Reviews in the New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, were overall positive.

The New York Times "Modern Love" column published the first serial excerpt on April 23, 2017, as "To Stay Married, Embrace Change."

The book was featured on Today.

In the "By the Book" column of The New York Times Book Review, Tom Hanks replied to the question "What was the last book that made you laugh?"

with: "Ada Calhoun’s Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give. I mean, underlining and yellow marker bust-out laughs."

Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis is about Generation X women and their struggles, sometimes leading to a midlife crisis, including divorce, debt, unstable housing, and career development.

It builds upon her popular essay for O, The Oprah Magazine, "The New Midlife Crisis for Women".

Calhoun interviewed more than 200 women across America about their experiences and was fascinated how Gen-X women responded and coped with these struggles physically and mentally, inspiring her to understand why with research from the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Harvard’s Equality of Opportunity Project.

The book was released on January 7, 2020, by Grove Atlantic.