RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIf this were an O’Hara biography, it would, I believe, be necessary to recreate the heady, masculinist ambience of an arts scene predicated upon the enjoyment of women as sex objects and muses...If this were a biography of O’Hara, I would do it — I might even want to do it — but I’m glad not to have to ... may not be a conventional biography, but that is because it is as much a primary as a secondary source. By excerpting her father’s interviews, Calhoun offers us a glimpse into her father’s very substantial archive, \'vital to literary history,\' and smuggles into print invaluable biographical sources that will, without intervention, \'ro[t], unheard, in an East Village basement.\' After Granville-Smith’s prohibition, we can appreciate this as the principled act that it is ... I am astonished by Calhoun’s decision to include the entirety of this damning exchange verbatim. The decision is an act of defiance. I don’t know if I would have done it myself, but I appreciate it all the same. But then again, why not? Calhoun is hardly sharing private information; she’s providing an explanation, disclosing the logic behind \'decades of estate management\' that have affected the preservation of O’Hara’s legacy and the accessibility of his works. It feels like a violation; it feels like justice. Either way, it’s radical. Why shouldn’t Granville-Smith’s executorial ethos appear before the court of public opinion? ... traverses many genres, but Chapter 20, which contains Calhoun’s transcribed phone call, is one for the O’Hara archive, bibliographies, and reference books; it is a priceless artifact of literary history ... one of many hybrid memoir-biographies that have been published in the last five years, but what distinguishes it from likeminded projects is its explicit provocation for the future of the form: memoir-biography is a genre that may very well allow us to smuggle biographical reckoning under the copyright radar — and to make the conditions of literary history’s adjudication more transparent in the process.
