Trying: A Memoir

“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

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.

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