NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A Most Anticipated Pride Read by Autostraddle, Electric Literature, and GO Magazine - One of Cosmopolitan UK's Best Erotic Novels of All Time

Brief, sharp, and utterly consuming. . . Like your first love, it lingers long after the final chapter. - Tegan Quin

The cult-classic novella that intimately explores one young writer's whirlwind and whiplash affair as she falls deeply in love with a woman for the first time.

Sometimes I wonder what it is I could tell you about her for my job here to be done. I am looking for a short-cut. . . .But that would be asking too much from you. It wasn't you who loved her.

A young writer moves from the country to the city and falls in love with another woman for the very first time. From the start, the relationship is doomed; Finn is nineteen years older, wears men's clothes, has a cocky smirk of a smile . . . and a long-term girlfriend.

With startling clarity and breathtaking tenderness, Chloé Caldwell writes the story of a love in reverse: of nights spent drunkenly hurling a phone against a brick wall; of early mornings hungover in bed, curled up together; of emails and poems exchanged at breakneck speed. In Women, Caldwell lays bare the fierce obsession of addictive love, and asks the question: what, if anything, can who we love teach us about who we are?

In this beautiful, transcendent, bracingly sexy novella, Caldwell tells a lust-love story that will bring you to your knees. Capturing the feverish heartbreak of Sapphic romance, painting a stark picture of an identity in crisis, and illuminating the exploratory possibilities of queer life, Women brands the heart and sears the soul.

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.

Chloe Caldwell's period has often felt inconvenient, uncomfortable, or even painful. It's only once she's in her thirties, as she's falling in love with Tony, a musician and single dad, that its effects on her mood start to dominate her life. Spurred by the intensity and seriousness of her new relationship, it strikes her: her outbursts of anxiety and rage match her hormonal cycle.

Compelled to understand the truth of what's happening to her, Chloe documents attitudes toward menstruation among her peers and family, reads Reddit threads about PMS, attends a conference called Break the Cycle, and learns about premenstrual dysphoric disorder, PMDD, which helps her name what she's been going through. For Chloe, healing isn't about finding a single cure. It means reflecting on underlying patterns in her life: her feelings about her queer identity and writing persona in the context of a heterosexual relationship; how her parents' divorce contributed to her issues with trust; and what it means to blend a family.

The Red Zone is a candid, revelatory memoir for anyone grappling with controversial medical diagnoses and labels of all kinds. It's about coming to terms with the fact that--along with proper treatment--self-acceptance, self-compassion, and transcending shame are the ultimate keys to relief. It's also about love: how challenging it can be, how it reveals your weaknesses and wounds, and how, if you allow it, it will push you to grow and change.