Ada Calhoun, CRUSH: A Novel
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.4 • 602 Ratings
🗓️ 7 March 2025
⏱️ 21 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
New York Times bestselling author Ada Calhoun joins Zibby to discuss CRUSH, a visceral, intelligent, revolutionary romance about the dissolution of a marriage and a new midlife romance—inspired by the author’s personal experiences. Ada talks about her novel’s exploration of love, desire, and (open) marriage. She and Zibby delve into the unruliness of love, how people try (and often fail) to control it, and the myths surrounding relationships—especially the idea that they can be managed with rules and structures. Ultimately, Ada reflects on the freedom of writing fiction after years of nonfiction.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive |
| 0:24.0 | look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't |
| 0:29.3 | have to. |
| 0:30.3 | Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. |
| 0:36.2 | For more information, go to zibbmedia.com and follow me on Instagram |
| 0:40.2 | at Zibby Owens. Ada Calhoun is the author of Crush, a novel. She is also the author of Also |
| 0:50.3 | a Poet, named one of the best books of 2022 by the New York Times, NPR and the Washington Post, |
| 0:55.8 | long listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and featured on the Today Show and PBS News Hour. |
| 1:01.8 | Her other books include St. Marks's Dead and the New York Times bestseller Why We Can't Sleep. |
| 1:06.7 | Welcome, Ada. Thank you so much for coming on to talk about Crush, a novel, debut novel. Very exciting. |
| 1:13.3 | Thank you, Zibbi. It's great to be here. Can you tell listeners what your book is about, please? |
| 1:18.1 | Sure. It's about a woman who's happily married, and then she meets this other man, and they develop this super strong strong connection and she tries to figure out a way |
| 1:28.3 | mostly through reading a lot of books to keep both men. Amazing. Can I start by reading this |
| 1:35.3 | passage about devastation and love and loss and all of that? They say crying clears out the |
| 1:43.5 | residue of what was there before. When you're |
| 1:45.5 | disoriented, crying is a proper response. But what about when you can't stop? What about when you |
| 1:50.3 | dissolve into a puddle that needs to be mopped up by cheerful stalkers in Hawaiian shirts? I felt |
| 1:56.2 | dead, only I felt like a graveside mourner too. I kept switching roles the way I had at times in a moment of orgasm, |
| 2:02.6 | sexual situations flashing through my brain. Only this version was depressing. Now I was the corpse |
| 2:07.7 | and the doctor and the widow, the candy striper who asks the grieving family if she can get them |
| 2:11.9 | anything and the we're losing her doctor nurse, the medical examiner leaning against the morgue bay |
| 2:17.3 | after a long day |
... |
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