Ada Calhoun

Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis is a nonfiction book by Calhoun 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.

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 "Modern Love" column, and four for The New York Times Magazine's "Lives" column. The New York Times named her essay "The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give" its 41st most read story of 2015. In fall 2016, W.W. Norton announced that it would publish a collection of related essays in spring 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.

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 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."

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 was praised in pre-publication reviews. Publishers Weekly calls 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 have been mixed. The New York Times Book Review’s Curtis Sittenfeld called Calhoun "a funny, smart, compassionate narrator…taking women’s concerns seriously" but also "wished Calhoun had included fewer women’s stories but gone into those stories in greater detail." The Wall Street Journal's Emily Bobrow gave the book mixed reviews, finding "many of its grumbles reassuringly familiar" but calling the book "a little whiny" and stating that Calhoun is "not above cherry-picking statistics." The book had a 3.86/5 rating on Goodreads As of March 2020.

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give is a memoir by Calhoun about marriage. It was inspired by the success of her New York Times "Modern Love" column, "The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give," which the paper named one of its most-read stories of 2015. The book was released on May 16, 2017 by W. W. Norton & Company.

Reviews in the New York Times Book Review, 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."

Calhoun won the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Award gold medal in U.S. History, 2015 USC-Annenberg National Health Journalism Fellowship, 2014 Kiplinger fellowship, 2013 Council on Contemporary Families Media Award, and 2014 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship; one of her Patterson stories won the 2015 Croly Award.

Her book St. Marks Is Dead was published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2015. She wrote an op-ed that fall that explained her anti-nostalgic feelings about cities and change:

In 2004, Calhoun married Jerry Neal Medlin, who performs as Neal Medlyn and Champagne Jerry, whom she met when she was sent to interview him for an Austin Chronicle profile. They have one son together, Oliver. She is an advocate for libraries. She majored in Plan II Honors at the University of Texas at Austin, where for her senior thesis she translated part of the Sanskrit Atharvaveda.

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

Ada Calhoun (born Ada Calhoun Schjeldahl, March 17, 1976) is an American non-fiction author. 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, and of Why We Can't Sleep, a book about Generation X women and their struggles. She has also been a critic, serving as a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review; a co-author and ghostwriter, having collaborated on three books by Tim Gunn; and a freelance essayist and reporter. A Village Voice profile in 2015 said: "Her CV can seem as though it were cobbled together from the résumés of three ambitious journalists."