Trying: A Memoir

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 candor, 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.

About the Author :
Chloé Caldwell is the author of Women, the memoir The Red Zone, and the essay collections I'll Tell You in Person and Legs Get Led Astray. Her essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Bon Appétit, The Cut, Autostraddle, Longreads, and Nylon.

Review :
Praise for Trying "This infertility memoir ends with rebirth: Caldwell's new, energized sense of herself. An intimate, engaging memoir."--Kirkus Reviews "Chloé Caldwell has the kind of natural storytelling ability that, in past centuries, would have marked her as the village's record-keeping elder or maybe as a witch."--Emily Gould, The Cut's "Dinner Party" newsletter "A focus on language runs like a gold thread through Trying, Caldwell's most condensed, structured, and technically interesting book."--Valerie Stivers, The Brooklyn Rail "Trying becomes more about surrendering to the truth of her marriage's implosion while embracing her own infinite potential outside of timeworn heterosexual norms. . . . Her writing slaps, and readers like it. . . . Certain to produce many more books, Caldwell shows readers how to endure catastrophe with aplomb; there can be no better recommendation for literature."--Kristen Millares Young, The Washington Post "[Trying] is simultaneously hilarious and vulnerable, offering readers an intimate exploration of the act of trying and how that shapes who we become."--Justine Payton, The Masters Review "[Caldwell's] husband's transgressions jolt the narrative off its axis, and Caldwell recounts the dizzying liberation of rediscovering her queerness after her divorce. . . . For readers grappling with similar questions about motherhood, sexuality, and the meaning of a life well-lived, it's a gift."--Publishers Weekly "The book's fragmentary style suits its aura of uncertainty about the future. . . . The open-ended conclusion suggests that loss can mean freedom; the choice is between novelty and surrender. Trying is a candid, intrepid memoir that documents shifting desires by interlacing infertility and queerness."--Foreword Reviews, starred review "Trying is a sticky, sprawling glimpse at a life impossible to slice up. Each vignette is connected through intuition, while Caldwell's colloquial voice captures the milieu of modern love and the agency needed to alter your narrative."--Hannah Burns, The Brooklyn Rail "With her characteristically wry and grounded prose, unnerving attention to detail, and emotional resonance, the author delivers a beautiful reclamation of desire and identity, one of trying, failing, and becoming once again. . . . Caldwell has achieved what many authors dedicate careers to accomplish: her wise and at times audacious snapshots fill holes in the marrow of our bones."--Tara Friedman, West Trade Review "In this sharply honest memoir, Women author Chloe Caldwell sets out to write about infertility--but ends up charting a far messier, more unexpected transformation. What begins as a chronicle of trying to conceive becomes a reckoning with betrayal, queer desire, and the question of what it actually means to build a life."--Michelle Hart, Electric Literature "Chloé Caldwell does what she wants--in life and on the page. This makes her writing deceptively casual: she is never precious and yet every word lands exactly as it's meant to. She is never dogmatic and yet her books are brilliant feminist critiques. In Trying, Caldwell shows--in the most hilarious, heartbreaking ways--how our culture drives women bat-shit crazy and then pretends this insanity is healthy adulthood. What a relief to watch a woman become truly sane: wild, free, spontaneous, slutty, unapologetic, fully alive. I came away from this book wondering what our lives could become if we stop trying so hard just to be okay."--Hannah Tennant-Moore, author of Wreck and Order "In Trying, Chloé 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 Chloé's language forever."--LA Warman, author of Dust and Whore Foods "Chloé Caldwell has written a fearless ode to unrequited desire. In Trying, she speaks, with precision and wit, about the struggle to get pregnant. But her deeper subject is the suffering that comes with yearning for anything with all your heart. A magic book that will make you feel less alone with your ache, whatever that might be."--Steve Almond, author of Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow "Like a life-changing pair of pants, Chloé Caldwell's Trying offered a grip at once intimate and transformative. This book is made of life but also totally made, whittled and sculpted with the keen eye of a craftsman, propulsively carried by the quicksilver pivots of feeling and noticing that are Caldwell's great gifts to her readers. 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 "Trying is Chloé Caldwell at her best. Heartachey, biting, laugh-out-loud funny--this book is the wisest of wise, full of compassion, and satisfies like the very best gossip. For any reader whose wants and desires feel larger than life, Trying will heal you; a true companion of a book."--T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls "I cracked Trying (marvelous) open while waiting for my Keurig to brew and then stood there forgetting my Keurig, continuing to read, delighted. I thought, 'Oh my god, we still have proper writers.' Chloé Caldwell is a blessing on all our houses. Thank God we have her."--Jacqueline Novak, author of How To Weep In Public: Feeble Offerings on Depression From One Who Knows "The book's fragmentary style suits its aura of uncertainty about the future. . . . The open-ended conclusion suggests that loss can mean freedom; the choice is between novelty and surrender. Trying is a candid, intrepid memoir that documents shifting desires by interlacing infertility and queerness."--Foreword Reviews, starred review "Chloé Caldwell's 2014 novella Women, about a woman falling in love with another woman for the first time, became a queer cult classic. In Trying, the writer again uses the fragmentary form, candor, and wit to study 'the brain of someone trying to get pregnant.'. . . When another form of grief suddenly bursts into her life, it ultimately signals a rebirth."--Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture "When I think of the great chroniclers of millennial womanhood, I think of Chloe Caldwell. . . . In Trying, Caldwell has written one of the best motherhood books since Sheila Heiti's Motherhood. The essence of motherhood is not task-based or ideological--it's this yearning, this longing, this wanting, not just for our children but for ourselves that Caldwell describes so well."--Katie Coleman, Zona Motel Praise for Chloe Caldwell "Her prose has a reckless beauty that feels to me like magic."--Cheryl Strayed "Shot through with sexuality and sass, her language will get up in you and turn you inside out in the best possible way."--Lidia Yuknavitch "Caldwell writes about her life with warmth, humor, and not a trace of apology."--Publishers Weekly