Passages I Cut From My Book TRYING (forthcoming from Graywolf, 8/5/25)
Most writers wouldn't dare to share. My book was 45,000 words and I cut it to 30k. Here are (some of) the orphaned passages.
My editor, Yuka Igarashi, (damn okay Yuka having a Wikipedia page!) once used the term “orphaned passages” in an editor letter to me during the revision of my book The Red Zone, about cleaning up some of my fragments that didn’t have a home. The phrase spoke to me as a neat revision term, like “cut the orphaned passages” or “find a home for the orphaned passages” and then it brought me to “I want to write a book of orphaned passages” which was how I conceptualized what Trying would be. In 2023 when I sold the in-progress-draft, it was with the title Orphaned Passages: Notes on Trying. Overtime, everyone working on the book realized we referred to it “the trying book” and alas, shortened to Trying.
Since I’m releasing these “cuts” before you’ve read the book itself, here is a synopsis my publicist at Graywolf, Claire Laine, wrote:
Trying Synopsis
TRYING begins with Caldwell's attempts to conceive a child with her husband. She is working at a boutique that sells "life-changing pants," caring for their stepdaughter, driving back and forth to the fertility clinic, and writing and teaching from a constantly leaking storage room. In May 2023, her husband's shocking confessions of infidelity and addiction bring about the dissolution of her life as she knew it.
This revelation occurs halfway through the memoir, and Caldwell writes her way through the chaos in real time. She had sold her book as a project about infertility, about trying to get pregnant within a heterosexual marriage. As her life rapidly changed, so did the book. She moves into a studio apartment, quits her retail job, starts drinking too much coffee again, downloads dating apps, and reconnects with her body, desires, and queerness.
What began as a memoir about trying to create life becomes a story of remaking one's own. In the aftermath of devastation, Caldwell wakes up. Her life shifts from black-and-white to color. Even in the midst of grieving, she recognizes that "Having your life blow up is somewhat fun. It means you’re in reality all the time. Friends come into focus. Writing comes into focus. Dormant desires come into focus. Complacency, contentment, is gone. It’s like being a child again, like being in a foreign country, like being reborn." Writing is her one constant companion throughout, and she writes the hell out of this book.
You can thank
, and for encouraging me to have paid posts. I appreciate you.CUTS FROM TRYING: A MEMOIR
How predictable I am. When I did drugs I read about drugs. When I am trying to get pregnant I read about people trying to get pregnant. I’m a basic trying-to-get-pregnant bitch.
I pull a Frances Ha by sleeping two days away in Paris instead of seeing the city and the next day when I finally get up, I pull the character-from-My-Year-of-Rest-and-Relaxation by
by ordering two coffees and taking them to my room so I won’t have to go back for a second. I’m what Marilyn Hacker calls “disponsible” in her 1986 book Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. “Call it free man in Paris syndrome,” she writes.This is your year of no rest and no relaxation, my friend Mia says.
One morning I got an email from the investment app, Acorns: “The news may make you want to take a wait-and-see approach with your money, but it’s important to consider how much waiting can cost you in the long run. Let’s take a closer look.” How much will waiting cost me in the long run?