Trying
Chloé Caldwell
Graywolf
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?
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. Constantly optimizing her body to prepare for conception, she took…
