Five top books from the children of celebrities

Charley Burlock is the Associate Books Editor at Oprah Daily where she writes, edits, and assigns stories on all things literary. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from NYU, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. Her work has been featured in the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review, Agni, and on the Apple News Today podcast. She is currently completing an MFA in creative nonfiction at NYU and working on a book about the intersection of grief, landscape, and urban design.

At Oprah Daily Burlock tagged five "books that make us see our celebrity heroes—and their gilded lives—from a totally new perspective." One title on the list:

Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun

While the premise of this memoir— a daughter’s doomed quest to win her father’s attention by finishing his failed memoir of the legendary poet Frank O’Hara—may sound academic, the result is anything but: a hilarious and aching story about the impossibility of filling a parent’s oversized shoes, and the necessity of trying to walk a mile in them.

The name “Peter Schjeldahl” may not be the first one to pop into your mind when you think of A-listers, but the acclaimed poet and critic was undoubtedly a superstar in the circles of Manhattan’s literati—and in the wide eyes of his only daughter, who spent her childhood and adult writing career trying desperately and doomfully to impress him.. Writing is the beginning and end of Ada’s connection to her father: She is a workhorse journalist and dedicated mother; he is the tortured artist who unabashedly admits that writing is his first (and arguably, only) priority. But when Ada finds a collection of old interview tapes from her father’s attempt, in the 1970s, to write a biography of their mutual hero, Frank O’Hara she sees an opportunity: the book “seemed like a time when he’d failed at something that I was pretty sure I could have nailed.” If she indeed pulls it off, he might finally seem comprehensible to her, and she interesting to him. Spoiler alert: Ada does not get exactly what she wants from the process, but she gets what she needs—and we get immersed into the complexities of her father-daughter bond and into the hallucinatory haze of New York bohemia in the 1960s and 70s.

We recommend listening to the audiobook, which features the actual forty-year-old recordings from Schjeldahl’s interviews with artists like Willem de Kooning and Edward Gorey, as well as his bedtime banter with his then-toddler daughter. You won’t make it through with dry eyes.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue