“I started trying to write a memoir, but it made no sense,” Ada Calhoun tells me across the screen. The best-selling author and prolific ghostwriter began to chronicle a “grueling few years” of hers before realizing the characters were too messy, and storylines too scattered. The move into fiction was liberating: She could write about the chaos of life and marriage, rather than perpetuate it. That rumination will culminate in the release of her first novel, Crush, on Feb. 25.

Over the years, Calhoun has become an authority on navigating our most intricate relationships. In 2020’s Why We Can't Sleep, she dissected the idiosyncrasies of Gen X women’s midlife crises, while 2022’s Also a Poet slalomed through art-world cultural histories and father-daughter relationships, particularly Calhoun’s own with the renowned late critic Peter Schjeldahl. In Crush, she turns to a husband, wife, and the various partners they begin to invite into their marriage. As Calhoun notes in chapter one, “That is when the trouble started.”

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