Keynote
From the author of the best-selling Women, a stirring account of disenfranchised grief and queer reawakening
Book Title
Trying
Subtitle
A Memoir
Cover Image
- “Chloé Caldwell’s Trying is 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
Body
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.
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.
List Price
$18.00
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About the Author
Credit: Colleen Trainor
Praise
- “Trying is Chloé Caldwell’s rawest, most vulnerable work yet, transporting us through fertility clinics, Parisian cafés, and the life cycle of a marriage. Her exploration of her own longing will make all of us feel less alone.”—Jen Winston
- “Trying reads like poetry and feels like a conversation with your coolest friend. In breaking the ‘rules’ of memoir, Caldwell has created something much greater. An extraordinary book.”—Molly Roden Winter
- “Chloé Caldwell describes desire like no one else. In Trying, she gives both herself and her readers the permission to consider all possibilities, to keep reimagining our lives until they are finally ours, to try and try again.”—Jill Louise Busby
- “Trying meets the reader at the intersection of fertility, creativity, and desire—I read it in long bursts, finding it nearly impossible to put down. Chloé Caldwell's writing is often profound and frequently electric—I loved this book.”—Chelsea Hodson
