Ada Calhoun - "Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give" - Jo Brill

Ada Calhoun discusses Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give. She will be joined in conversation by Jo Brill.

At 57th Street Books

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About the book: Inspired by her viral New York Times Modern Love essay The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give, Ada Calhoun’s memoir is a witty, poignant exploration of the beautiful complexity of marriage. We hear plenty about whether or not to get married, but much less about what it takes to stay married. Clichés around marriage—eternal bliss, domestic harmony, soul mates—leave out the real stuff. After marriage you may still want to sleep with other people. Sometimes your partner will bore the hell out of you. And when stuck paying for your spouse’s mistakes, you might miss being single. In Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is: not the happy ending of a love story or a relic doomed by high divorce rates, but the beginning of a challenging new chapter of which “the first twenty years are the hardest.” Calhoun’s funny, poignant personal essays explore the bedrooms of modern coupledom for a nuanced discussion of infidelity, existential anxiety, and the many other obstacles to staying together. Both realistic and openhearted, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give offers a refreshing new way to think about marriage as a brave, tough, creative decision to stay with another person for the rest of your life. “What a burden,” Calhoun calls marriage, “and what a gift.”

About the author: Journalist Ada Calhoun is the author of two books published by W.W. Norton & Co.: the New York history St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street (2015) and the essay collection Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give (2017). Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give is an unflinching but also loving portrait of her marriage prompted by her popular 2015 Modern Love essay, one of the most-read stories in the New York Times that year. Reviews have called it “realistic, loving, laugh-out-loud funny” (Publishers Weekly); “graceful, hilarious” (Library Journal); “engaging, wise, lovely” (Kirkus); “original, engrossing” (New York Times Book Review); and “warm-hearted, Ephron-esque” (Washington Post). She lives in New York City with her husband and son.

About the interlocutor: Jo Brill is a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Chicago, where she studies the traditional theory of Sanskrit grammar. When she was young, she studied mathematics and economics. Her middle age was whiled away raising three wonderful sons and working in the civic, political, and nonprofit sectors on good government, fair budgeting, and other public-interest issues.