Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm grateful you're here. All day long today, we'll be talking about one of our favorite things, books. We're spending two hours with people who've written their very first novels. Here's who's coming up. Erin Crosby Eckstine, author of Junie, Alejandro Heredia, author of Loca, and Maggie Su, author of Blob: A Love Story. We're very excited not only to talk about these books, but also to get to their backstories.

Now, that's the plan, so let's get this started with Ada Calhoun and Crush.

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Alison Stewart: In the debut novel from writer Ada Calhoun, a woman begins an affair via email. Well, is it really an affair if your husband knows about it? Our unnamed protagonist is surprised when her husband Paul suggests it would be okay if she started flirting with other men. He might even like it if she kissed them. Even though she thinks she's happy in her marriage, our protagonist agrees. What starts as innocent flirting takes a turn when she strikes up a pen pal relationship with an old acquaintance named David.

Soon, they are exchanging intimate emails every day. David confesses his love, and even though she wants to stay married, our protagonist can't seem to stay away. Although many of the details of the book are drawn from Ada's life, it is a work of fiction. It's titled Crush: A Novel. The book is out now, and Ada Calhoun joins me to discuss it as part of our debut day celebration. Welcome, Ada.

Ada Calhoun: Great to be here, Alison. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: What's so intoxicating about a crush?

Ada Calhoun: Gosh, crushes make everything more exciting and alive. I think they tell us also what we might be missing in our life.

Alison Stewart: How would our narrator describe her marriage when we first meet her?

Ada Calhoun: I think she's happy and she feels content. She's a Gen X woman who has done a lot of caregiving, really was raised thinking, I can do it all and have it all, and she has gotten it all, and she is rather tired, but she's kind of getting through middle age relatively happily, she thinks.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that reminds me of that-- What was that perfume? Enjoli.

Ada Calhoun: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: We were kids.

Ada Calhoun: Exactly. Yes. I think it was a brainwashing campaign. You can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan.

Alison Stewart: There you go.

Ada Calhoun: There we go. [inaudible 00:02:33] [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: Well, speaking of-- [crosstalk] Yes, right, [unintelligible 00:02:34]. Speaking of, part of the tension is that she's the breadwinner, right?

Ada Calhoun: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Tell us what that does to their marriage.

Ada Calhoun: Yes. It's interesting. I wrote a nonfiction book. I've always done nonfiction until this one. I wrote one called Why We Can't Sleep about Gen X women having these midlife crises, and it was interesting to me when I talked to them. A lot of women now are breadwinners in a way that their mothers and grandmothers weren't, and it often creates a little bit of tension. There's one study saying that women who make more money actually do more at home to kind of compensate for the ways in which maybe this is a little bit hard on their partner.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's so interesting. Just to prove they can be moms and be breadwinners?

Ada Calhoun: Yes, I think so. I do feel like that brainwashing again of, do it all, do it all perfectly. It's gotten a lot of women into a place of real exhaustion and frustration.

Alison Stewart: Why does the narrator's husband Paul suggest an open marriage?

Ada Calhoun: I think it's flirtatious. I think it starts off very innocently and fun, and I think that it seems like, what a sort of spicy, exciting thing to do in middle age to get a little bit more excitement back into life. Then, of course, it immediately goes awry, as one might suspect.

Alison Stewart: Has he really thought through the consequences or is this just something that he tossed off?

Ada Calhoun: I think it becomes pretty clear pretty fast that he has one thing in mind, and that is not what he gets.

Alison Stewart: What's the one thing?

Ada Calhoun: Well, he thinks it will be sexy, sexy and fun. Of course, love is very unruly and it tends to capture one in ways one does not expect. The wife in the book, she's not having this sexy, fun, flirtatious thing so much as this really all-consuming, life-transforming experience of connection.

Alison Stewart: There's a lot of discussion of polyamory lately.

Ada Calhoun: Yes.

Alison Stewart: When you were researching the book, what did you find about polyamory that surprised you?

Ada Calhoun: One thing I think is that the pandemic really leveled everything in this way, and a lot of couples, I think, are trying to build back better and try to experiment with different ways to be together-- [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: Because they were together so often?

Ada Calhoun: That's definitely part of it, but then also everything changed so radically. I think a lot of women I know are asking questions like, well, wait, if we don't have to go to the office necessarily anymore and this can change and that can change, is there something else that's available to us that can also make life better, more fulfilling. I think that might be part of why those conversations are happening now.

Alison Stewart: Your narrator, but she really believes in monogamy before this conversation starts.

Ada Calhoun: Yes, but then she starts having these feelings, and then I think the question becomes, because she is a typical Gen X good girl, is there a way to be good and also a little bit bad? Right. Is there a way to kind of do everything right and not lie and not cheat, but also to have this really exciting life-giving time in this moment where everything is rather hard otherwise?

Alison Stewart: My guest is author Ada Calhoun. We're speaking about her debut novel, Crush, which is about a married woman who decides to get a massive crush she has on her pen pal. It's part of our day-long celebration of debut novels. Okay, we're going to ask you to read a little bit from the book. This is especially about the COVID because we were just talking about that. Will you set this up and then read it for us?

Ada Calhoun: Yes, sure. Basically, she has this crush and she's ransacking the history of world literature with this crush trying to find ways to keep both her husband and this new friend. She doesn't really know what to do, but she's pretty overwhelmed by the intensity of it.

Alison Stewart: All right, let's take a listen.

Ada Calhoun: Covid had changed everything. If the world as we knew it was over, how did we want to construct the new world? Could I really have, without apology, a husband and also an openness to kissing other people, plus one unprecedented connection to a religious studies professor in another state? If anyone judged me for it, could I just not care? When Nate was in middle school and getting wrapped up in his friend's drama, every morning at drop off, I said as he went up the stairs, "I love you. Have fun. Care less." Maybe that was good advice.

My family life was enhanced, not diminished, by whatever was happening. I made Nate food and took long walks with him, helped him with his college applications without losing patience. I attended to my parents when they needed me and was able to enjoy their company without feeling overly involved. I knew from the time in London that if I wasn't around, the world didn't stop spinning. I had poker nights and a picnic club and attended readings. I had coffees and dinner and drinks with girlfriends who told me about their marriages and their projects and their children.

Letters from Tom Hanks continued to arrive. Paul and Nate continued to tease me about them, and David had become the best friendship I had in as long as I could remember. Somehow he'd become essential. I felt that I needed other languages to even get close to explaining it. I read a book about the Gaelic concept of anam kara, or soul friend, the person with whom you could share your deepest self and feel that you completely belonged. We didn't know quite what to do with each other except marvel. Our connection had begun to feel like a religious calling.

In our correspondence, I felt like I'd embarked on a pilgrimage, only with no clue where it led. In his presence, I began to feel more and more like myself, but for the first time. I also felt like I'd been hugging the world hard my whole life and now the world's arms were wrapping around me and squeezing back. What David and I had felt sacred. The word that kept coming to mind was important.

Alison Stewart: That's Ada Calhoun reading from her debut novel, Crush. Now, many of the protagonist's life details mirror some of your own, down to her relationship with her father as a ghostwriter, as a journalist. Why did you decide to use this information that you have in a novel rather than go ahead and write a memoir?

Ada Calhoun: Well, I had several very rough years. I was doing a lot of caregiving, had a divorce, my father died, there were all these things, and I did think about doing a nonfiction book. I'd done Why We Can't Sleep, I'd done a memoir about my father, Also a Poet, and I thought maybe this is going to be the next sequel to those things. Then, I thought, or I could just make a romance novel out of it, which would actually be much more fun and I could make up as much as I wanted to.

I could use the things that I had, but then also create an arc. I could create characters, I could create scenes. It felt so liberating to me as a journalist.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask you, in writing the fictional part, did that help you with any of the issues you already had?

Ada Calhoun: Oh, it was so freeing. When I was doing my memoir about my father, I was writing it while I was living it. I was doing this caregiving, and I would say I knew he was dying. I would say, okay, maybe there's a nice conversation we could have thinking this would be good for the book, if you would just say something really nice to me right now, and he wouldn't cooperate. He just insisted on being himself, which that's what it is. Character is fate. In a novel, I was able to make everybody do whatever I wanted them to do and make the arcs and the timelines however I wanted, and it felt great.

Alison Stewart: How do you feel about the term autofiction?

Ada Calhoun: I think it makes sense. I mean, especially because I have friends who are novelists who do so much work world building, and I think it can feel like a shortcut to use a lot of your own life too. I think most novelists use what they have in different ways in different percentages. Yes, I think it's still a novel, even if it's connected in some ways to one's life.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Ada Calhoun. The name of her novel is Crush. We learn a bit about the protagonist's parents who've been married for decades. Her mother gave up her career to stay at home. Her father is kind of chilly and distant. How do you think her parents' marriage affected the protagonist's feelings about marriage?

Ada Calhoun: Yes, so her mother has told her many times over the years, the way you stay married is you don't get divorced, and this was held up as a real value. She's internalized this and thinks, okay, well, divorce is a terrible thing and it is completely inconsistent with being this dutiful daughter, wife, mother, person, and then this crush really explodes that idea. She thinks, well, is it noble to turn your back on something as powerful as this kind of love?

Alison Stewart: In reading the book, it's interesting. There's lots of references and quotes from C.S. Lewis to Lucinda Williams. First of all, why did you want to include that many quotes, that many references?

Ada Calhoun: Because that is my go-to strategy for all problems. Yes, I do share that with my narrator. Just if you have a library card, you can solve any problems. That is how I've operated. I thought this was part of what the character was missing. She felt like this connection was giving her this real intellectual fever and they were just exchanging all these ideas and thoughts and page after page after page of all these books together. It was very sexy for book nerds.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] Speaking of book nerds, let's talk about David. How would you describe David?

Ada Calhoun: He is a religious studies professor. This is somebody that the narrator knew back at a different point in her life. She always thought he was hot and interesting, and then she reconnects with him and it immediately catches fire. He is seemingly just waiting around for her to show up and read a lot of books with him, which for me is a very sexy ideal. A guy's just like, yes, I can't wait to just devour all these books with you.

Alison Stewart: How does being desired by another person, by this book nerd David, what impact does that have on her husband, Paul?

Ada Calhoun: Well, he initially thinks, "Okay, this is exciting, you're so alive, you're so fun, and you feel so much more yourself," but then it becomes threatening increasingly, as these things do in a love triangle.

Alison Stewart: How does it make her feel? That's more important.

Ada Calhoun: Well, I think it throws her into a crisis of trying to stay married and also trying not to turn her back on this thing that feels important.

Alison Stewart: Why does she decide it's a crisis? Why doesn't she decide, I think I love this other person?

Ada Calhoun: Yes, no, I think she tries that too. There's not a ton of solutions for how you fix these things, but I think it does raise a lot of questions about what some connections can make room for in terms of other connections and what they can't.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because David and the protagonist, they seem determined to make a study out of what they do. They decide to possibly even write a book. Why are they so determined to make a study out of their relationship?

Ada Calhoun: Well, I think that is the go-to for a book nerd, is like, wait, can we turn this into a project and will that somehow be safer than an affair?

Alison Stewart: Say more about that.

Ada Calhoun: [laughs] If regular people have affairs, then I think they think maybe they can outsmart it. Instead of just running off together and abandoning this marriage, which is really not a bad marriage, if they read enough books, can they solve this crisis of what do we do with each other without destroying everything else? Then, they work very, very hard and read a lot of books trying to figure out that question.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting though, you said crisis, that they have decided it's a crisis.

Ada Calhoun: Yes, I think it becomes one in the course of the book because the marriage starts to fray as a result, and so it does become this question of can you hold onto these two things or are they mutually incompatible?

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ada Calhoun. We're speaking about her debut novel, Crush. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Ada Calhoun. We're speaking about her debut novel, Crush, which is about a married woman who develops a massive crush on a pen pal. It's part of our day-long celebration of debut novels. We should point out these two, they don't meet. Yes?

Ada Calhoun: Not for a long time.

Alison Stewart: Okay. Why does it take so long?

Ada Calhoun: [chuckles] Well, because I think they're trying to sublimate these feelings they have, which of course often doesn't make the feelings go away or lessen them. In fact, in this case, it builds and builds and builds.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting because they just email, they don't text necessarily, they don't call. Why did they continue to go on with the email?

Ada Calhoun: Well, I think it becomes this epistolary relationship. It becomes this very literary friendship where they are trying to impress each other and charm each other and court each other in this way, both romantically and intellectually.

Alison Stewart: Does the husband read the email?

Ada Calhoun: No. He's aware. She's very open about what she's doing, and he goes back and forth about how he feels about it, whether or not it's okay. The boundaries kind of keep shifting.

Alison Stewart: I'm interested in their son. Where does their son factor into all of this?

Ada Calhoun: Well, I think he's about to leave home. I think that's something that for a lot of women in midlife, you do all this caregiving for parents and children and then they're on their own or they're gone, and suddenly you look around and you're like, wait a minute, who am I again if I'm not caring for everybody else? She is at that moment in her life.

Alison Stewart: I'm trying to find a place in the book and I can't find it right now, but I'll try to remember what it is where they're making all these lists that mom has all these boyfriends, and the son says it and you write it, he says it with a certain tone in his voice, like he's not so sure about this. Could you explain that a little bit?

Ada Calhoun: Yes. There's a moment where they pull into a mechanic's and the husband says, "Which one's your boyfriend? Is it this one who's going to fix the car? That one who's going to fix the car?" I'm like, "No, no, no, it's this person." Then, the child is like, wait a minute, I thought this person was. Yes, she's got a lot of flirtations going and the husband and the son like to tease her about it.

Alison Stewart: How does she feel about that?

Ada Calhoun: She's a little embarrassed, but maybe also a little proud.

Alison Stewart: At what point, without giving too much away, does she actually start to feel like this correspondence, which her husband agreed to, really might be a betrayal of her husband?

Ada Calhoun: Well, I think there's some point at which it shifts, and I think she starts to give herself permission to really indulge it more than he is comfortable with. I think it's this moment of asserting her own desires and her own passion over the good of the family, over the comfort of the people around her.

Alison Stewart: What did you want to capture about love? We started talking about crush, but what about love?

Ada Calhoun: Yes. When I was interviewing all these women for my midlife crisis book, I felt like so many of them were doing all these things for other people, and they really weren't asking themselves a lot of questions about, like, wait, what do I actually want? Who am I? What do I care about? They weren't making a ton of room for love, for love of themselves, for love of these other people who came into their life. I think the book really is about maybe just asking questions about what else could be possible for us, especially in midlife.

Alison Stewart: Let's ask you a couple of practical questions. When did you write this?

Ada Calhoun: Starting about 2022. I was coming out of a lot of caregiving and kind of a rough time.

Alison Stewart: You decided to write a novel because?

Ada Calhoun: Because it's so much more fun. I thought about doing Why We Can't Sleep, the sequel, now more of a bummer, and I thought, what about just something that's frothy and exciting and exhilarating, and this is what I came up with.

Alison Stewart: How do you write? Do you sit down and allot a certain amount of hours a day? Do you write when you feel like it? Do you write on napkins?

Ada Calhoun: I keep journals. Anytime I wake up in the middle of the night and have an idea, I write it down, and on the subway. Also, I do a lot of writing at the New York Public Library. I've written a lot of my last five books there. They have these amazing study rooms at the main branch of the library at Bryant Park, and I'm lucky enough to have one of those.

Alison Stewart: When you're writing a novel, this is your first novel, what was different about writing it versus your other books?

Ada Calhoun: It was just so freeing. I feel like I have novelist friends who I'm telling them this. I'm like, "Can you believe it? You can make stuff up. It feels like, do you know about the show, The Sopranos?" Everybody's like, yes, we know you can make stuff up. It's exciting. Yes, no, I couldn't get over it. I was able to just start from a jumping-off point of something that had happened, a scene that happened to me, a conversation, and then I could do whatever I wanted with it. It felt great and really exciting.

Alison Stewart: What advice would you give to someone who is listening to the show who has a novel in them?

Ada Calhoun: I think a lot of people do, right?

Alison Stewart: They do.

Ada Calhoun: Yes. I mean, I always think if you're writing, you're a writer. I think friends or people come up to me and say, like, oh, I'm a wannabe writer, or I wish I could be a writer, and as long as you're doing it, I think you're in the game. Whether you're published or not isn't a determinant of what you're doing. Writing is the thing. Just, yes, write the book.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Crush: A Novel by Ada Calhoun. Thanks for being with us.

Ada Calhoun: Thanks, Alison. Great to be here.