Trying

If you're writing about your life in real time, are you inherently fucked?

Over the years that Chloé Caldwell had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she'd read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected her experience; for one thing, most stories ended with in vitro fertilization, a baby or both. She wanted to offer something different.

Caldwell began a book. She imagined a selective journal about her experience coping with stasis and uncertainty. Is it time to quit coffee, find a new acupuncturist, get another blood test? Her questions extended to her job at a clothing boutique and to her teaching and writing practice. Why do people love equating publishing books with giving birth? What is the right amount of money to spend on pants or fertility treatments? How much trying is enough? She ignored the sense that something else in her life was wrong that was not on the page... until she extracted a confession from her husband.

Broken by betrayal but freed from domesticity, Caldwell felt reawakened, to long-buried desires, to her queer identity, to pleasure and possibility. She kept writing, making sense of her new reality as it took shape. With the candour, irreverence, and heart that have made Caldwell's work beloved, Trying intimately captures a self in a continuous process of becoming - and the mysterious ways that writing informs that process.

Trying moved me and consumed me; it's a great gutting swirl of grief and freedom and vitality. A searing whispered vision. I am grateful for it -- Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
Caldwell describes desire like no one else... Every sentence is intimate and stunning, and it will take you weeks from when you arrive at the end of this book to extricate yourself from Caldwell's brain, to separate your thoughts from hers, to even want to... In Trying, Caldwell exposes the messiness of growth, forgiveness, and moving on -- Jill Louise Busby, author of Unfollow Me: Essays on Complicity
In Trying, Caldwell begins and ends alone. A process of creation is thwarted. She repeats the cycle over and over until a rupture ensures it cannot be repeated again. When I finished reading the book, I began it again. I found pleasure in the limbo, in the between. I wanted to be in Caldwell's language forever -- LA Warman, author of Dust and Whore Foods
Caldwell's compact and wide-ranging musings are wry, surprising, and fresh -- Amy Fusselman, author of The Means
A sly memoir of self-discovery and loss. It is an ode to the countless ways that we try: to love, to forgive, to heal, to parent, to grieve, to rebuild a life. What a humane and vulnerable book -- Isle McElroy, author of People Collide

Chloé Caldwell is the author of Women (Fourth Estate reissue, 2024), the memoir The Red Zone (Soft Skull, 2022), and the essay collections I’ll Tell You in Person (Emily Books/Coffee House Press, 2016) and Legs Get Led Astray (Short Flight/Long Drive reissue, 2017). Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Bon Appétit, the Cut, Autostraddle, Longreads, and Nylon.

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