Ada Calhoun

St. Marks Place in Manhattan's East Village was Ada Calhoun's childhood street, and St. Marks Is Dead, published in 2015, is its history building by building, from Dutch farmland through the beats and the punk years to the present. Her argument is that every generation announces the street has just been ruined, and every generation is wrong. Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis, from 2020, turns to Generation X women, drawing on interviews and data about debt, caregiving and stalled careers to ask why a cohort raised on the promise of everything reached forty worn out. Calhoun, born in 1976, is the daughter of the art critic Peter Schjeldahl and the actress Brooke Alderson, and adopted her middle name as a surname in 1998 to work clear of her father's. She studied at Stuyvesant High School and the University of Texas at Austin, and has collaborated on other people's books, including Britney Spears's memoir The Woman in Me.