Trying: A Memoir

If you’re writing about your life in real time, are you inherently fucked?

Over the years that Chloe 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.

Chloe began a book. She imagined a selective journal about coping with stasis, heartbreak, and envy. Is it time to quit coffee, find a new acupuncturist, get another blood test? Her questions extended to other aspects of her life, to her job at a clothing boutique and her teaching and writing practice. Why do people love equating publishing books with giving birth? If splurging and an open mind got you the perfect pair of pants, should those same things get you pregnant? She ignored the sense that something else was wrong that was not yet on the page . . . until she extracted the truth from her husband.

Broken by betrayal but released from uncertainty, Chloe 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 has made Chloe beloved, Trying intimately captures a self in a continuous process of becoming—and the mysterious ways that writing informs that process. View Less