Join First Light Books on Friday, August 22, to celebrate the release of TRYING, Chloé Caldwell's highly anticipated follow-up to the bestselling novella WOMEN.

About the book

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.

About the authors

Chloé Caldwell is the author of Women, I’ll Tell You In Person, The Red Zone, and Legs Get Led Astray. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Bon Appétit, The Cut, Vice, Longreads, Nylon, The Rumpus, The Sun, and half a dozen anthologies including Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NYC, Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, and Sluts. She has taught writing around the world and is the co-founder of Scrappy Literary where she runs writing retreats and offers personalized support for writers. She lives in Hudson, New York.

Szilvia Molnar is the author of The Nursery, which the Texas Observer called a “postpartum page-turner” and will be published in ten countries. Szilvia was born Budapest, raised in Sweden, and now resides in Austin, Texas. She works as a foreign rights director for a New York-based literary agency.