Since its original release in 2014, Chloé Caldwell’s novella Women has gathered a fanatic following, earning celebrity blurbs and other celebrities Instagramming themselves carrying tote bags with pull quotes from the book on them.
My own teachers reference the book as a quintessential piece of queer literature. I found a copy in 2024 when it was rereleased by HarperCollins due to the revived hype and its cult status; as a white woman who came out late in life, I thought living vicariously through a narrator who fumbles and bumbles her way into a fully toxic multi-year-long mess of a first queer love affair with a much older person would be a sweet gift to myself. Honestly, it made me mostly relieved I missed it: I’m not made for the game, you guys.
So when I saw that Caldwell had another book coming out, a memoir, I was intrigued. I jumped at the chance to talk to a writer who had created essential reading for young queer women, especially with a new memoir that changes direction mid-writing due to life events outside her control.
“Originally I had pitched [this book] to Graywolf from the angle that I’ve been going through this unexplained infertility and reading tons of memoirs and essay collections, novels, whatever I could find, about infertility, and they all end with a baby. There was one, The Panic Years by Nell Frizzell, which I thought was really good, but she also ended up having a baby. I didn’t know if I was going to have a baby or not, but [I thought], ‘I don’t have one now,’ [and] maybe [the book] ends regardless of if I do or don’t when I’m done with the writing. That was something I wanted to see in the world. I wanted to put out another kind of narrative.”
Trying begins with Caldwell deep in obsession over how to get pregnant with her then-husband, B. Much more is revealed in Act III (no spoilers), but in the first two acts, this obsession is where our sight is directed. As someone who has now watched many friends go through a series of hellish scenarios in attempts to get pregnant, stay pregnant, and survive birthing, I really appreciated this captured tunnel of experience. In our conversation, Caldwell said she was surprised, rereading that section, just how dark it was. The cliché stands that for as many women who try to get pregnant, there are the same number of ways it can happen as there are ways it can go unexpectedly.
Soapbox, incoming: It astonishes me how I learn something new every time someone I know tries to get pregnant, tries to adopt, is pregnant, has a child. Why do we not have more and better education about this? We know why. But still, WHY?
About this book: Maybe it will make me a better friend. I know that for Caldwell, connection, not accuracy, not a neat ending or an academic read, is the point.
“I found a Discord group that was so niche. Four stepmoms experiencing unexplained infertility, the most specific thing ever [and] two [experiences] that are already really isolated. Our culture doesn’t know how to have a casual conversation about those things because they’re so loaded. Those were really hard years, and connection is always the answer
for everything.”
Other comforts were found in this story for the speaker. As someone who is not averse to using retail as a coping strategy—my miraculously maintained middle-class existence is reinforced by quasi-luxuries that allow me an extremely temporary distraction from personal and global pains—the number of brands and references to retail in this short book
had me caught up.
“Why is she doing this?” I thought. What does the frequent appearance of Trader Joe’s mean? The mention of the beauty brand ILIA had me titillated, not just because I love their foundation, but because their sales were juxtaposed with the discounts offered to Caldwell via algorithm and email for sperm. Buy one vial, get the second half off. Was this commentary on American happiness? The American Dream? What’s for sale? What we can actually buy, and what we can’t?
This book is about an isolating experience, agonizing for the ways Caldwell is absolutely desperate with desire, and for the ways these brand names appear again and again—little cortisol boosts familiar to anyone who’s sought consumerist distraction between posts about the many wars, bills in Congress, arrests, court cases, violences, GoFundMes, and on and on and on through that little screen. So I wondered about Caldwell’s intention with these name-drops.
“I really enjoy hyper-specificity. When I’m teaching writing, if someone names a jacket or coffee, I always want to know the brand because it does so much. I really like capturing time periods. I look back at my other [four books], and referencing Doc Martens [will place us] 20 years from now. I’m a hyper-specificity junkie.
“A lot of things in my books are [also] subconscious. I trust that the reader will make connections that I myself didn’t make. I’ve been doing this long enough to see that happen all the time. So sometimes, I will put in something a little random, [but] I do think about consumerism and getting pregnant: You can buy it, throw money at it.”
Trying will not give you a tidy ending, a clear trajectory, an example to follow. In their place, we receive a different truth: Sometimes you’re refused the thing you most want, perhaps the thing you even need, and somehow, in great pain, you keep going. You go and go, because that’s what there is to do, and no more information than to keep going is what you get. For those in the middle of great pain or great loss, this book can be a companion, not the friend telling you what to do, how to fix it, how to bend yourself around it, but keeping messy company inside circumstances beyond your control. We’re served spoonfuls of Caldwell’s pain in equal measure to her retail and other distractions, and I hope that people who’re attempting to have children and struggling, or attempting anything and don’t know how it will end, find company in these pages.
There is this, though: I asked her about the central desire in this book.
“Definitely feeling free within yourself. I was really trapped in Act I and Act II. I didn’t know I was trapped, is the interesting thing, and I don’t just mean by my marriage. [I mean] the fertility clinic. You’re not treated like a human. It’s all just so awful! When I read this book now, I think, ‘This person was in a cage, then came out [of it].’ So freedom, whatever that means to everyone. Even just the freedom to write.”
Trying is out August 5 on Graywolf Press.
