Trying
A Memoir
by Chloé Caldwell
You must sign in to see if this title is available for request. Sign In or Register Now
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date 27 Nov 2025 | Archive Date 30 Sep 2025
Talking about this book? Use #Trying #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
* UNCORRECTED DIGITAL PROOF - NOT FOR QUOTATION *
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.
For fans of Kirsty Logan’s The Unfamiliar, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson and Untamed by Glennon Doyle.
Advance Praise
'Trying moved me and consumed me; it's a great gutting swirl of grief and freedom and vitality' - Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
'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, author of Dust
'Every sentence is intimate and stunning, and it will take you weeks from when you arrive at the end of this book to extricate yourself from Caldwell's brain, to separate your thoughts from hers, to even want to... In Trying, Caldwell exposes the messiness of growth, forgiveness, and moving on' - Jill Louise Busby, author of Unfollow Me: Essays on Complicity
'A fearless ode to unrequited desire' - Steve Almond, author of Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow
'An intimate, engaging memoir' - Kirkus Reviews
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9780857309365 |
| PRICE | £12.99 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 192 |
