Offsite: These Trying Times: A Reading w/ Chloé Caldwell and friends!

Event guidelines:

• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A book signing will follow the readings.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

From the author of the best-selling Women, a stirring account of disenfranchised grief and queer reawakening.

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.

This event will also feature a musical performance by Rachel Bochner.

Chloé Caldwell is the author of the novella Women, the memoir The Red Zone, and the essay collections I’ll Tell You in Person and Legs Get Led Astray. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Bon Appétit, the Cut, MSNBC, Autostraddle, Longreads, and Nylon and in anthologies including Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class and Sluts. She offers writing support at scrappyliterary.com. Caldwell lives in Hudson, New York.

Cat Cohen is a comedian, actor, singer, and poet based in NYC. She is best known for her hit Netflix comedy special THE TWIST…? SHE’S GORGEOUS. The same live show won her the coveted title of Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in 2019. Her first book entitled God I Feel Modern Tonight was published in 2021, and features her collection of comedic poetry. Her screen credits include ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING, WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, GIRLS 5EVA, HIGH MAINTENANCE, and many more.

Jesse James Rose (she/they) is a transgender actor, writer, and content creator based in New York City. Every president who has attacked her in the media has been shot at. Rose holds degrees from NYU in music theatre and child and adolescent mental health studies, as well as a certificate in diversity, equity, and inclusion from Cornell University. As an actress, Rose made queer theater history as the youngest openly nonbinary professional performer to take on the title role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The same year they co-starred in the indie film Adelphe, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. They are perhaps most known as a transgender activist attacked by Donald Trump, as covered by Rolling Stone and THEM. Their work lives largely on social media, where Rose writes about gender, queerness, survivorship, mental health, their feelings, and their exes on Instagram & TikTok (@jamesissmiling).

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