Generation X has at times been dismissed as the “forgotten generation” — but author Ada Calhoun is certainly giving them a voice.
In “The New Midlife Crisis,” a personal essay for Oprah.com, Calhoun chronicled the struggles she and her friends were experiencing — from one of her friends hiring a babysitter so she could cry at the movies, to another woman smashing her child’s iPad when he refused to get up and help pack for a trip.
“We were raised to believe that the American Dream was real, that every generation so far had done better than their parent’s generation,” Calhoun told Lit Hub. “Of course, why wouldn’t that be true for us, right, because women now have all these opportunities that our mothers and grandmothers didn’t have? That has not been the case.”
At 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater, Calhoun joins Michael I. Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts and Inaugural Writer-in-Residence Kwame Alexander for Chautauqua Lecture Series’ Week Seven theme “Kwame Alexander and Friends: The Power of One.”
The response to Calhoun’s essay was immediate. Women felt that Calhoun was voicing what they were feeling: the pressure to succeed but feeling like they were failing and a general sense of rage floating around them.
In 2020, Calhoun expanded this essay into her book Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis. Using statistics and anecdotes, Calhoun wrote why Gen X women feel the pressure to “have it all” but felt that “all” was just out of reach.
After Calhoun published her bestseller Why We Can’t Sleep, she went on to publish two more books: Also A Poet, a biography of poet Frank O’Hara that her father, renowned art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had begun, intertwined with her and her father’s relationship; and her debut fiction novel Crush, which follows an unnamed protagonist as she grapples with her newly open marriage.
Calhoun has made her living as a nonfiction writer, even ghostwriting New York Times bestselling nonfiction books, so when she began penning Crush, she thought it would be in that same vein.
“I started trying to write a memoir, but it made no sense,” Calhoun told Cultured in 2025.
Having spent her career endlessly fact-checking and interviewing, Calhoun found freedom in fiction, likening her realization of the medium to asking if someone had heard of the TV show “The Sopranos.”
While polyamory is hardly a 21st-century phenomenon, recently discussions of women’s agency in open marriages and relationships have exploded onto the literary and cultural scene. In 2022, Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute published “Polyamory and Consensual Non-monogamy in the US,” and in it, sex researcher Amy Moors said that “the number of people in American who have already been involved in a polyamorous relationship is 1 in 9.” In 2024, Molly Roden Winter, who lives with her family in Brooklyn, published the New York Times bestseller More: A Memoir of Open Marriage in which she details how she and her husband opened their marriage and how she juggled her romantic relationships while also being a mother.
With open marriages in the zeitgeist, Calhoun sees the COVID-19 pandemic as a time when people were questioning not only their relationship structures but larger systems.
“There’s something about it now that I think is coming out of the pandemic. It dismantled all of these systems: Suddenly the rules are not the rules. You don’t go to the office every day, you don’t send your kids to school all the time. These things that we thought were the way things were, that were unchangeable, were suddenly very changeable,” Calhoun told Jezebel in 2025.
Calhoun doesn’t shy away from difficult topics, whether that be polyamory or her complicated relationship with her father Schjeldahl. In Also A Poet, Calhoun writes candidly about her father.
“My father has always loved me. I know it for a fact. He’s told me. He’s told other people,” she wrote. “But he’s never been particularly interested in me.”
She recognizes that part of the distance between her and her father during her childhood is due to the time period she was raised in. Schjeldahl had said that before he got sober, the worst time during the day was from 3 to 5 p.m., the time between when he would stop writing and before he would start drinking. Calhoun returned home from school around 3 p.m.
“In those hours, I can’t remember him once asking about my day, making me a snack, or helping me with my homework,” she wrote. “Most men of that generation didn’t do such things, of course, whether they were in the East Village or the suburbs. And why would he? The world has rewarded his single-minded focus on work.”
Also A Poet was released just months before Schjeldahl passed in late 2022. Calhoun appreciates that he was able to read the book and see its success, even though he seemed a little baffled by it and her press tour.
In “Walk It Off,” writer Isaac Fitzgerald’s substack, she tells Fitzgerald that she was grateful to have had those uncomfortable conversations with him.
“The truth is always better. … You don’t want to live in lies or delusions. It’s always better to know reality,” she said. “Because, if you’re honest with yourself, you know the truth anyway. Even if you don’t say it out loud, you know it in your body. So I knew that. I knew my father didn’t think that much about me. Was having him say it aloud — to hear that — was it tough? Of course. But then having it out in the open, there’s something important about that, as well.”
