Also a Poet explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us when we seek their approval, yet mistrust it. The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s, and her own. This is not a book "about disability" but it will surprise anyone who has ever imagined that life with a severe disability is inherently worse than another kind of life.ĭownload Also a Poet Book in PDF, Epub and KindleĪ staggering memoir from New York Times-bestselling author Ada Calhoun tracing her fraught relationship with her father and their shared obsession with a great poet When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier. In between, we get the tales Johnson most enjoys telling from her own life. This unconventional memoir opens with a lyrical meditation on death and ends with a surprising sermon on pleasure. And along the way, she defies and debunks every popular assumption about disability. From the streets of Havana, where she covers an international disability rights conference, to the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to an auditorium at Princeton, where she defends her right to live against philosopher Peter Singer, she lives a life on her own terms. With help, however, she manages to take on the world. Due to a congenital neuromuscular disease, Johnson has never been able to walk, dress, or bathe without assistance. By the time she realized she wasn't a dying child, she was living a grown-up life, intensely engaged with people, politics, work, struggle, and community. In secret, she carried the knowledge of her mortality with her and tried to sort out what it meant.
Then as now, Johnson tended to draw her own conclusions.
The message came from a maudlin TV commercial for the Muscular Dystrophy Association that featured a boy who looked a lot like her. With a voice as disarmingly bold, funny, and unsentimental as its author, a thoroughly unconventional memoir that shatters the myth of the tragic disabled life Harriet McBryde Johnson isn't sure, but she thinks one of her earliest memories was learning that she will die. Download Too Late to Die Young Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle
0 kommentar(er)
