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 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.

'The queen of irreverence and confessionalism... Caldwell gives readers a wide-eyed look at her life in a time of great uncertainty. With tenderness, humility, curiosity and familiarity that readers have come to expect from Caldwell, her latest memoir is a touching and liberating look into identity, fertility and becoming' - Paste Magazine

'Caldwell's compact and wide-ranging musings are wry surprising and fresh' - Amy Fusselman, author of The Means

'In Trying, Caldwell shows – in the most hilarious, heartbreaking ways – how our culture drives women batshit 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' - Hannah Tennant-Moore, author of Wreck and Order

'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

'A fearless ode to unrequited desire' - Steve Almond, author of Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow

'An intimate, engaging memoir' - Kirkus Reviews

For fans of Kirsty Logan’s The Unfamiliar, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson and Untamed by Glennon Doyle.

© 2025 Verve Books (E-kirja): 9780857309372

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E-kirja: 13. marraskuuta 2025