5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Her fertility struggles were gutting. Then came her husband's infidelity.
Chloé Caldwell walked through fire to write 'Trying.'
Not literally, of course. But how else to describe working in a boutique that sells 'life changing pants' while scrimping and saving for a baby who never arrived, suffering through myriad attempts to get pregnant with a husband who, it turns out, had been blowing thousands of dollars on sex workers?
Fire is what Caldwell endured, and fire is what her fifth book became. Like her recently reissued novella 'Women,' a cult classic, 'Trying' traces her queer liberation with breezy candor.
'Trying' was forged in her failure to get pregnant despite taking letrozole and Clomid to increase her egg supply for repeated insertions of her husband's sperm, and despite obsessing about 'digestion, sugar, alcohol, warm food, room temperature water, caffeine, meditation, antidepressants, yoga, walking' and whatever else her doctors, acupuncturists, therapists, friends and culture instructed her to do: 'the herbs, the supplements, and everyone's favorite—putting my legs up on the wall after sex.'
Constantly optimizing her body to prepare for conception, she took to googling the ages of pregnant celebrities and avoiding birth announcements on social media, wallowing in the public disappointment of her own efforts: 'I thought it would go like this: I'd tell people I was trying, and six months later I'd be pregnant, and everyone would see that I get what I want when I want it.'
Caldwell was foolhardy enough to chronicle her life in real time, which led to stellar moments like depicting her book editor receiving news of a spousal betrayal that would reshape the trajectory of what she had pitched as a memoir about struggling to conceive a child.
Instead, 'Trying' becomes more about surrendering to the truth of her marriage's implosion while embracing her own infinite potential outside of timeworn heterosexual norms. Whether in her memoir 'The Red Zone' or her essay collections 'I'll Tell You in Person' and 'Legs Get Led Astray,' Caldwell has built her literary career by disclosing intimate details, from a young life that veered through dabbling in hard drugs, casual sex, bars and indie bookstores to a midlife grappling with premenstrual dysphoric disorder.
Her writing slaps, and readers like it. As a teacher of writing, she is practiced enough to subvert common tropes, like the tendency to interweave themes from nature to lend gravitas to a series of personal disclosures. 'If I were a different kind of writer, I'd make this bird's nest a motif, a metaphor, and return to it every twenty pages or so,' she writes. 'But I don't feel like it.'
Instead, Caldwell returned to the petty indignities of her retail job. Try selling pants for a living, listening to women deride their bodies in the fitting rooms while you count the hours until you can write. Then you'd see what you're really made of. Showing up for your own life can be harder than it looks, particularly when you had other plans for yourself. Having presumed she'd give birth to her own children, Caldwell received bad news so many times that 'I don't flinch. I'm used to not getting pregnant. It's my normal, resting state.'
After she and her husband broke up, Caldwell began a series of queer relationships that didn't end well but also got her through a 'summer of sure' (as opposed to a 'year of yes'). Ignoring the rules about what she should do, whom she should date and how she should write, she reflects on the deferential choices she had made before her divorce, such as accepting his edict that they not adopt, though she had 'always been interested in non-biological bonds and adored being a stepmom.'
To summarize: During their marriage, her husband insisted she only have children they could conceive together, despite the corporeal, emotional and financial duress caused by that decision. A touring musician, he tasked her with parenting while he was cheating on her, only to forbid contact with his daughter after his expensive sex and drug addictions came to light.
How to invoke the stolen love of a stepdaughter?
It would be easy for 'Trying' to descend into revenge, but Caldwell handles her grief with the detached, informed expertise of a clinician, reporting on her own experience with clarity and without bitterness. 'Other women have similar stories to mine. Prostitutes and cocaine. It's not uncommon.'
Having left her husband's abuses out of 'The Red Zone,' Caldwell does not dwell on them in 'Trying,' instead chronicling what happens as she relinquished her hold on a predetermined future. Developing aversions to sperm and fertility tests, she patched her life back together with dates, sex, travel and work only to be criticized for a speedy recovery. 'It's funny that people think they know my healing process,' she writes of a journey she expects to last a lifetime.
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 is the author of the award-winning novel 'Subduction' and 'Desire Lines — Essays,' forthcoming from Red Hen Press on Oct. 6, 2026.
