Trying
A Memoir
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
If you’re writing about your life in real time, are you inherently f****d?
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The wildest thing about Chloé Caldwell’s captivating memoir of infertility, divorce, and queer reawakening is that she was already writing it before the most seismic events in her journey even happened. Through raw, perceptive vignettes, Caldwell pulls us intimately into her lived experience, complete with the penetrating insights that make her voice so singular. She discusses the immense importance that heteronormative society places on women’s ability to give birth, noticing in real time how infertility in women is treated with an air of immense tragedy and failure (and accompanied by a massive moneymaking industry). After Caldwell discovers her husband’s infidelity, however, the book becomes something else entirely. The ensuing divorce launches her back into her own queerness. Not only is this exhilarating, but it also prompts even more penetrating observations about American society. The most fascinating aspect of Trying might be the organic shift from a focus on creating life to a focus on living it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this hypnotic account, Caldwell (The Red Zone) chronicles a transformative stretch of her mid-30s. The title pulls triple duty: much of the book concerns Caldwell "trying" to get pregnant, which proves "trying" after years of failed treatments. When her husband admits his addiction to hiring sex workers and their marriage implodes, the title also nods to Caldwell "trying" to make their union work despite her preference for women. Told in short, poetic dispatches—many of which span less than a page—the book's first half marinates in the mundane awfulness of infertility, with Caldwell's signature wryness leavening the gloom. ("I shouldn't expect the writers of Friends to know all of this," she writes after pointing out the medical impossibility of the character Phoebe's pregnancy. "I just wish I didn't have to know it all, either.") Then her husband's transgressions jolt the narrative off its axis, and Caldwell recounts the dizzying liberation of rediscovering her queerness after her divorce. This reads more like a journal than a tidy narrative; there's little resolution on offer, just artful questioning. For readers grappling with similar questions about motherhood, sexuality, and the meaning of a life well-lived, it's a gift.
