The Brooklyn Rail

The one-word title of Chloé Caldwell’s new memoir has several different resonances. Caldwell and her husband, B, are trying to conceive via assisted fertility, as the cringe expression goes. But then, surprisingly, the couple splits up mid-book, a trying experience. A third, comedic, spin on the word appears in a series of anecdotes about Caldwell’s retail job in a clothing store whose sign advertises “life-changing pants.” Women come in and try them on. Sometimes it’s a fit and sometimes it isn’t, as with fertility and husbands.

The multiplicity is meaningful because a focus on language runs like a gold thread through Trying, Caldwell’s most condensed, structured, and technically interesting book, elevating it from the women’s confessional and smaller indie-press work she has mostly been associated with. Trying is a divorce memoir and a female-body book, following the same themes as Caldwell’s earlier work, which includes Women, an autobiographical 2014 novella about a young woman having her first experience of sleeping with women, and The Red Zone, a 2022 memoir about her PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder). It appears to chronicle the end of the relationship that started during The Red Zone, and employs the fragmental, anecdotal style drawn from daily life that we’ve come to expect from Caldwell, and that’s so often employed in women’s confessional work. But here she does so with mastery, more Marguerite Duras than Sarah Manguso (one of Trying’s two epigraphs comes from Manguso’s flawed Liars).

The book takes place in three “acts” of loosely linked sections, most shorter than a page, which themselves can be made up of short atmospherically connected paragraphs or even just a few words or lines. The language is plain, but the poetry comes in the gaps and juxtapositions. On a representative page with four entries, Caldwell starts with an anecdote from the pants store: “A man opens the door and asks ‘Do you like art?’…. I resent him for putting me in the position of having to firmly say, ‘No, I don’t like art.’” Next, after some white space, she writes: “A man walks by the shop and I hear him say, ‘Every time I walk by that sign, I…’ Since he is in motion, I didn’t get to hear the end of the sentence.” Next comes a line of feedback written to a student (‘This is so fertile and juicy…’”, deleted, she tells us, for being “ew”), and then a longer paragraph on binge-shopping at a farm store on a morning she has gotten her period (and thus is not pregnant). She buys “orange-creamsicle French ice cream, feng shui spray, and two hard seltzers. It is a chaotic purchase, even for me.” She considers “all the money I don’t spend on diapers,” tries not to flinch when the cashier tells her the price, and walks away, “opening the pint of ice cream and eating it with my teeth.”

The connection between the above anecdotes is chaotic even for Caldwell, as the resonance in the last passage suggests, but it’s also accomplished beautifully. She writes with such engaging directness that it’s easy to skim along the surface, but viewed more deeply, the page challenges the reader to wonder what a phrase overheard and a phrase deleted might have in common with each other and with the third use of words, the question framed in a way that it can’t be honestly answered. We realize that the quest to have a child, which is full of possibility and uncertainty and fraught with other people’s expectations, is laden with similarly elusive and intrusive sketches of possible meaning. Caldwell achieves this sophisticated interrogation of meaning while staying effortlessly grounded in ordinary life. And the last line, where she attempts to eat a pint of ice cream with her teeth, ferrets out the kind of original, secret detail that the reader can relate to (I’ve eaten ice cream that way, probably in similar circumstances of sorrow and need), and is confessional writing at its best.

Caldwell isn’t yet pregnant by the time the hints that she might be “trying” alone bear fruit. She discovers that B has been hiding things from her, and they separate. Certain fragments earlier in the text whose inclusion seemed mysterious become meaningful, such as those concerning rainwater leaking into the couple’s apartment. One early short paragraph on a standalone page has Caldwell walking around her office, obliviously stepping over bowls of water “as though they were pets, sleeping cats,” and texting B to joke about it. She’s unaware that the cats are sleeping dogs, and the marital ship is leaking too, and will soon sink. We understand in retrospect why this paragraph received the special emphasis of its own page. The structure of the book itself also takes on new significance: the words are alone, surrounded by blank space, but they’re also self-affirming, recording the details of Caldwell’s experience in her chosen metier. She tells us that she’d settled on the book’s style prior to learning of B’s misgivings; “my writing knew something before I did,” she says. She also believes that “some delays are protection”—her body knew too. It’s a holistic ending for a book in fragments, and a final elegant, textual surprise.