Trying: A Memoir
By Chloé Caldwell.
By Chloé Caldwell.
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What happens when the future you've been trying so hard to create suddenly changes completely?
Trying begins with Chloé Caldwell attempting to write about infertility. She is married, hoping to conceive and searching for an account that resembles her own experience, particularly one that doesn't inevitably lead towards IVF, pregnancy and the arrival of a baby. What emerges instead is a memoir that gradually changes direction alongside the life of the person writing it.
The first half explores the repetitive, often exhausting reality of trying to conceive. Appointments, blood tests, acupuncture, decisions about treatment and the endless questioning of what she could or should be doing differently become part of everyday life. I particularly appreciated Caldwell's willingness to include the mundane and occasionally absurd alongside the painful. Her humour around some of the more invasive aspects of fertility treatment gives the book a conversational quality without diminishing how consuming the experience can become.
Caldwell writes openly about not wanting IVF despite being surrounded by narratives in which it is presented as the obvious next step. I found this one of the most interesting elements because Trying allows uncertainty to exist. There isn't always another treatment to pursue, nor does deciding that something isn't right for you mean you wanted a child any less.
Then the memoir changes.
While Caldwell is writing about infertility, she discovers her husband's betrayal, and suddenly the future she has spent so much time attempting to create looks entirely different. From this point, Trying becomes less concerned with whether she will become a mother and increasingly interested in who she might become when the life she had imagined is no longer available to her.
I thought this shift was both fascinating and slightly challenging. The first half connected with me more strongly, particularly in its depiction of the peculiar ache surrounding pregnancy and fertility, something I've witnessed in people I know. When the focus moves elsewhere, I didn't feel quite the same connection to the material, but I appreciated that the book itself reflects the unpredictability of Caldwell's experience. She begins writing one memoir and effectively finds herself living another.
Her exploration of queer identity, desire, marriage and relationships opens the second half considerably. Importantly, the change in direction never feels like a convenient rejection of motherhood. Instead, Caldwell begins questioning the assumptions that had shaped her understanding of what family, fulfilment and her future were supposed to look like.
The writing remains wonderfully accessible throughout. Caldwell's style feels intimate and conversational, as though we're being allowed into thoughts that are still developing rather than receiving carefully packaged conclusions after everything has been resolved. That immediacy suited the subject particularly well.
Trying may begin with infertility, but reducing it to an infertility memoir would miss much of what Caldwell ultimately explores. It's about wanting something desperately, discovering that your circumstances have changed beneath you and working out what remains when the future you've been pursuing suddenly disappears.
A candid and refreshingly unresolved memoir about fertility, betrayal, identity and the complicated process of choosing how to move forwards when there isn't a conventional happy ending waiting to neatly complete the story.
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