
Trying
A Memoir
by Chloe Caldwell
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
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Pub Date Aug 05 2025 | Archive Date Jul 31 2025
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Description
From the author of the best-selling Women, a stirring account of disenfranchised grief and queer reawakening
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.
Advance Praise
“The queen of irreverence and confessionalism Chloé 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.”—Felicia Reich, Paste Magazine
“This infertility memoir ends with rebirth: Caldwell’s new, energized sense of herself. An intimate, engaging memoir.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Chloé Caldwell's compact and wide-ranging musings are wry, surprising, and fresh.”—Amy Fusselman
“In Trying, Chloé 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
“When I finished reading the book, I began it again. I found pleasure in the limbo, in the between. I wanted to be in Chloé's language forever.”—LA Warman
“Chloé Caldwell has written a fearless ode to unrequited desire. In Trying, she speaks, with precision and wit, about the struggle to get pregnant. But her deeper subject is the suffering that comes with yearning for anything with all your heart.”—Steve Almond
Marketing Plan
National publicity campaign
National author tour
Winter Institute promotion
Bookseller outreach campaign
Social media marketing
Targeted digital advertising
National publicity campaign
National author tour
Winter Institute promotion
Bookseller outreach campaign
Social media marketing
Targeted digital advertising
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9781644453476 |
PRICE | $18.00 (USD) |
PAGES | 208 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews

As a fellow infertile person looking ahead to a future without children, this was the exact book I needed in my life right now. The book of my dreams. THANK YOU.

Memoirs are one of my favorite stories; I've read them extensively. Caldwell's book is interesting and insightful. It is much more than a story about a person trying to conceive. I liked how open and brave the words within this book are. It was easy to feel immersed in the story. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

*Trying* by Chloé Caldwell is a raw and introspective memoir that delves into the complexities of infertility, personal identity, and the unexpected twists life can take. Through candid reflections and sharp observations, Caldwell navigates the challenges of trying to conceive, the unraveling of her marriage, and her journey toward self-discovery. Her writing is both vulnerable and empowering, offering readers a glimpse into the messy, beautiful process of becoming who you truly are. For anyone who's ever questioned the path they're on or sought meaning in life's uncertainties, this book is a heartfelt companion.

Chloe Caldwell can do no wrong in my opinion. I've taken some of her writing classes, and forever hold her as the highest esteemed writer in queer literature. Though Chloe is always vulnerable and honest with her audience, Trying felt particularly raw and inviting to readers. Examining her own experience in the quest for motherhood, relationship shifts, and her place in the world led me to examine both my own wishes and preconceived notions of what these places we define for ourselves truly mean.

thank you to NetGalley and ESPECIALLY Graywolf Press for the advanced digital copy.
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i ate this up faster than i thought possible. trying is raw, nonlinear, smart, and deeply human. it's a memoir told in sharp, sometimes funny, often heartbreaking fragments. the vignettes that build slowly until you realize you've been sitting in something much deeper than you expected. what starts as a book about struggles with age and infertility becomes something much bigger: a story about shifting identity, queerness, betrayal, grief, consumerism, and trying, really trying, to find meaning in it all.
chloe caldwell writes about the cultural expectation that people with uteruses should be either dreaming of giving birth, actively pregnant, or raising children. she doesn't just challenge this, she interrogates how it's weaponized. how not wanting kids is treated like a failure. how being unable to have them is cast as tragedy. how age, especially for people with uteruses, becomes a countdown clock, while men get to coast, often leaving the child-rearing behind.
there's fascinating critique in here about heteronormativity within the fertility industry, how straight couples can jump right to IVF while queer couples are expected to "prove" infertility through multiple rounds of less effective treatments like IUI. there's also a brilliant metaphor tucked throughout the book about a boutique selling 'life-changing pants'. the pants don't fit everyone. they're advertised as inclusive, but they aren't. just like life, there's no one-size-fits-all. and no purchase, no herbal tea, no miracle diet will fix or change something if it's unfixable.
caldwell also touches on how infertility invites unsolicited advice: cut out caffeine, try acupuncture, take these supplements. it's part of a larger pattern - consumerism dressed up as wellness, fix-it culture disguised as care. the book doesn't scream about these issues. it just shows you how heavy it all gets when the trying leads nowhere.
the middle of the book contains a rupture. an infidelity, a divorce. the narrative shifts. caldwell finds herself moving from a hetero marriage into a new world of autonomy. the title still fits. she's trying to understand what she wants. trying to reclaim parts of herself that got buried. trying to write, trying to live, trying to start again.
there's a beautiful, piercing thread in here about how painful it is to be happy for others when your own grief is so big it eats you from the inside out. it doesn't make you cruel. it makes you human. caldwell handles that tenderness so well, without moralizing or apologizing. she just tells the truth.
and the details are SO good. there's pop culture scattered throughout like little gifts: hacks, MUNA, search party. it's specific and current in a way that grounds the book in time and place. the writing is clean, sharp, but not emotionless. it simmers. it stings. it lands hard.
the format - fragmented, meandering, vignette-based - won't be for everyone, but i found it perfect for a subject as slippery as this. trying doesn't offer neat resolutions. it doesn't tie things up. it just invites you to sit inside the mess of not knowing. and for anyone who's ever had to rewrite their life mid-sentence, this will feel like being seen.

An interesting book--I have read all of Caldwell's books and appreciate their deep lyricism and fragmentary nature. Many surprises and swerves in this short memoir which I very much enjoyed.
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