REVIEW: Trying: A Memoir by Chloe Caldwell

Reviewed by Rae Pagliarulo

I started reading Chloe Caldwell’s Trying (Graywolf Press; August 2025) after a long summer of inhaling novel after novel. I think I burned out a little from true stories (blasphemy, I know), so when Trying greeted me from a shelf in my favorite bookshop, I decided to dive in.

I am so glad I did.

On its surface, this is a memoir about the time Caldwell spent “trying” for a baby, but as with all the best memoirs, it’s so much more than that. While the author takes us through countless IUI appointments (that’s intrauterine insemination, for all you fertility noobs), unexpected periods, and ovulation tests, she also constructs a rich inner world of reflection, panic, and a good dose of resentment for herself and others.

In this way, Trying reminded me of one of the best books about the will-she-or-won’t-she-have-a-baby question, Sheila Heti’s Motherhood. Both of these books took me deep into the psyche of a woman fighting with herself, with her biological reality, with her sociological obligations, with her deepest and most primal desires. This is what I appreciated most about Trying — that every moment I spent in the very real (and sometimes cruel) real world with Caldwell was buffered by these beautiful interior explorations of what it feels like to live in the mind of someone who can only think about one thing.

It’s also interesting to read this book as a woman who’s child-free by choice — I love reading about the effort and the desire and the conflict around motherhood because I’ve been trying (har har) to figure out how I myself feel about it forever. I love to explore the grittiest and most unromantic dispatches from the front-lines, letting the words of other writers I love help me formulate my own understanding of the issue.

Much of Caldwell’s Trying is written in fragments that appear in a non-linear fashion, to echo the vacuum and the confusion of this time in her life. I have to say, I love this structure, because each individual section almost feels like a flash essay — a little moment in time that illustrates something big but gives you a feeling for these brief interactions — the conversations and the incidents that hit Caldwell in the chest, heavy and disorienting, as she navigates her endless quest.

There are so many layers in this book — not just biology and the concept of motherhood, but queerness, and economic concerns, and creativity, and capitalism, and pants, the most life-changing pants you will ever wear. (That’s an inside book joke that might be worth reading the book alone for.) This is to say, that even if you are not yourself grappling with the question of will-I-or-won’t-I, Trying is a book that will likely give you something beautiful, something difficult, something complex and perfect and awful to sit with.

This reviewer’s advice is that you let it.