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. A New Yorker Best Book of the Year Praise for Trying “This infertility memoir ends with rebirth: Caldwell’s new, energized sense of herself. An intimate, engaging memoir.” ―Kirkus Reviews “Electrically candid.” ― The New Yorker ’s “Best Books of 2025” “Chloé Caldwell has the kind of natural storytelling ability that, in past centuries, would have marked her as the village’s record-keeping elder or maybe as a witch.” ―Emily Gould, The Cut ’s “Dinner Party” newsletter “A focus on language runs like a gold thread through Trying , Caldwell’s most condensed, structured, and technically interesting book.” ―Valerie Stivers, The Brooklyn Rail “ Trying becomes more about surrendering to the truth of her marriage’s implosion while embracing her own infinite potential outside of timeworn heterosexual norms. . . . Her writing slaps, and readers like it. . . . Certain to produce many more books, Caldwell shows readers how to endure catastrophe with aplomb; there can be no better recommendation for literature.” ―Kristen Millares Young, The Washington Post “[ Trying ] is simultaneously hilarious and vulnerable, offering readers an intimate exploration of the act of trying and how that shapes who we become.” ―Justine Payton, The Masters Review “[Caldwell’s] husband’s transgressions jolt the narrative off its axis, and Caldwell recounts the dizzying liberation of rediscovering her queerness after her divorce. . . . For readers grappling with similar questions about motherhood, sexuality, and the meaning of a life well-lived, it’s a gift.” ― Publishers Weekly “The book’s fragmentary style suits its aura of uncertainty about the future. . . . The open-ended conclusion suggests that loss can mean freedom; the choice is between novelty and surrender. Trying is a candid, intrepid memoir that documents shifting desires by interlacing infertility and queerness.” ― Foreword Reviews , starred review “ Trying is a sticky, sprawling glimpse at a life impossible to slice up. Each vignette is connected through intuition, while Caldwell’s colloquial voice captures the milieu of modern love and the agency needed to alter your narrative.” ―Hannah Burns, The Brooklyn Rail “With her characteristically wry and grounded prose, unnerving attention to detail, and emotional resonance, the author delivers a beautiful reclamation of desire and identity, one of trying, failing, and becoming once again. . . . Caldwell has achieved what many authors dedicate careers to accomplish: her wise and at times audacious snapshots fill holes in the marrow of our bones.” ―Tara Friedman, West Trade Review “In this sharply honest memoir, Women author Chloe Caldwell sets out to write about infertility―but ends up charting a far messier, more unexpected transformation. What begins as a chronicle of trying to conceive becomes a reckoning with betrayal, queer desire, and the question of what it actually means to build a life.” ―Michelle Hart, Electric Literature “Chloé Caldwell does what she wants―in life and on the page. This makes her writing deceptively casual: she is never precious and yet every word lands exactly as it’s meant to. She is never dogmatic and yet her books are brilliant feminist critiques. In Trying , Caldwell shows―in the most hilarious, heartbreaking ways―how our culture drives women bat-shit 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. I came away from this book wondering what ou