PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)An offbeat memoir in many ways, and not always sure what it’s trying to convey, it meanders through the challenges of writing a biography without the confidence of its subject’s estate. But it’s also a familiar enough design: a literary biography (here, wrapped up in a second biography) mashed up with confessional vignettes from the author’s own life, as successfully popularized over the past decade by writers such as Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson ... As O’Hara’s life and poetry recedes into the distance, Also a Poet wryly reflects on the thorny resentments of literary and paternal inheritance, and what it means for someone to touch the lives of those that come after – even without knowing it ... What happens next is a sincere and expressive portrayal of a fraught but tender relationship between a daughter and her father, at once intimately relatable to any child of an absent parent, yet singularly an honest – and regularly hilarious – account of two obsessive writers struggling in their own ways to connect.
