Contemporary Authors

• I'll Tell You in Person ( essays) Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2016

https://lccn.loc.gov/2016007063 Caldwell, Chloe, author. Essays. Selections I'll tell you in person / Chloe Caldwell. Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2016. 170 pages ; 22 cm. PS3603.A432 A6 2016 ISBN: 9781566894531 (softcover)

• Women - October 15, 2014 Short Flight/Long Drive Books, https://www.amazon.com/Women-Chloe-Caldwell/dp/0989695018
• Legs Get Led Astray - April 3, 2012 Future Tense Books, https://www.amazon.com/Legs-Get-Astray-Chloe-Caldwell/dp/1892061422/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1491797593&sr=1-4
• The New Age CAmp - December 9, 2012 Thought CAtalog, https://www.amazon.com/New-Age-Camp-Chloe-Caldwell-ebook/dp/B00IHCI8CK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1491797593&sr=1-5

• Chloe Cadwell - https://chloecaldwell.com/about/

  CHLOE CALDWELL was recently named one of the 41 Hottest Singles of 2017 by Elle. It is her biggest accomplishment to date.

  She is the author of the essay collection I’ll Tell You in Person (Coffee House/Emily Books, 2016), and the novella, WOMEN (Short Flight/Long Drive, 2014). Her novella, AFTER WOMEN, will be released in 2017 from Short Flight/Long Drive, along with a reprint of her first book, Legs Get Led Astray.

  She teaches creative nonfiction writing in New York City and online, and lives in Hudson.

  Direct email: cocomonet@gmail.com
  Chloe’s work has appeared in Lenny Letter, New York Magazine, Longreads, Vice, Salon.com, The Rumpus, The Millions, Catapult, Hobart, Nylon, The Sun, Men’s Health, The Nervous Breakdown, and half a dozen anthologies.

• https://electricliterature.com/chloe-caldwell-has-gained-control-3ef1884bad0f - Electric Literature

  Chloe Caldwell Has Gained Control
  The author on personal essays, flaws and an existential attitude

  In 2012, Chloe Caldwell published her first book, the essay collection Legs Get Led Astray. She was only 26, and the book was warmly received by both readers and critics. Women, a restrained and beautiful novella followed in 2014. Her third book, an essay collection entitled I’ll Tell You in Person (Coffee House), was published Tuesday. The book covers a lot of ground, chronicling the life of a young woman who is in turns reckless, fastidious, self-aware, solipsistic, depressed, and joyful, and the combination of these contradictions makes the book both surprising and familiar. It’s a fun, funny, heartbreaking book, one that also happens to be compulsively readable.
  I’ll Tell You in Person is the second release from the new Emily Books imprint under Coffee House. Emily Books isn’t new — they’ve been an eBook store run by Emily Gould and Ruth Curry since 2011, selecting “underappreciated novels and memoirs, mostly by women.” They published the eBook of Women, and other writers like Eileen Myles, Renata Adler, Nell Zink, Chelsea Hodson, and Melissa Broder (and also myself).
  I interviewed Caldwell about the book, her publishing process, a substance called Kratom, writing about Lena Dunham, and other things, via email. Full disclosure: Caldwell and I are friends.
  Juliet Escoria: I have had a hard time with figuring out the difference between fiction and nonfiction in my writing. Has it been easier for you? When did you know that Women was fiction and not an essay? Do you worry about bending the truth with your essays? Did any of the essays in I’ll Tell You in Person begin as something else?
  Chloe Caldwell: I differentiate by structure. I’d never written in the structure of Women, like a novella, so that helped me fictionalize. For essays I go into them with some internal conflict, which you can see in most the ITYIP essays. ITYIP would never be a short story collection, for example. If I wanted to write a short story collection, I’d broach it completely differently.
  I feel like your first book could read more like short stories, and you use plot more, whereas my essays don’t usually have plots other than emotional plot. When I’m using emotional plot, it’s just super nonfiction essay-ish to me.
  I’d been working on Women for about two months before I began fictionalizing, bending truth, and adding characters. What freedom! I’d like to write in that style again. I’m pretty drained on the personal essay form.
  No, I don’t worry about bending the truth in my essays too much because I’m usually not reporting on plot-like stories or quoting tons of people. Most my essays are my internal thoughts. I don’t bend the truth as far as I know. I dramatize it, sure, with emotions, but I don’t bend it.
  JE: I love Emily Books, and think it is very cool that you are one of the first authors to be published under their Coffee House imprint. Can you talk about your publication & editing process with them?
  CC: We are so lucky to live in a world where Emily Books exists. When they bought the collection it looked quite different. With their direction, I added “Failing Singing” and “In Real Life,” and developed most of the other essays. We kept changing the order and talking about section titles (which ultimately felt unnecessary).
  After they bought it, Emily sent me a long “big picture” letter pointing out my strengths and weaknesses and discussing thematic ideas, essay by essay. I took that letter and went back to the MS for about four months, and then began the line editing process with Ruth. So they did all the editing stuff and then the Coffee House team came in with marketing questionnaires and cover ideas. It’s been a unique experience, especially since I was friends with Emily and Ruth ahead of time. That makes it even more special, because I can text them about TV shows and shit as well as professional stuff. Like I was just asking Emily which dress I should wear to my book party. It’s a lucky place to be in.
  JE: One thing I like about writers who write nonfiction and/or autobiographical fiction is that the actual life of the author becomes art, and part of a larger story that gets more complicated and nuanced with each book. Do you think of your three books in that way? How do you see them in relationship to Chloe Caldwell, the person?
  CC: I’m so close to it that it’s challenging for me to answer questions like this. The biggest thing for me is how they’ve organized my life. I look back at my books to remember where I was living, who I was dating, where I was working. Legs Get Led Astray was my move-to-Portland-start therapy-stop-doing-drugs book. After selling Women I moved into my apartment and got my shit together in many ways. With ITYIP I began teaching, bought a car, bought a couch. (Not off my advance, with teaching money.) That’s how I look at my books. Ha.
  JE: The essay “Hungry Ghost” is about your experiences with a celebrity who you describe as “somewhere on the spectrum between Eileen Myles and Beyonce” and as “someone [you, the reader] admire too — or you might hate her and think she’s fat.” Did you feel weird or uncomfortable or hopeful when thinking about her reading it? Were you worried you were portraying her in an unflattering way? Was there any particular weight to it, considering you were writing about someone who is so famous? What were you considering when you decided not to name her, but to make it fairly easy to figure out which celebrity you were talking about?
  CC: I suppose my superpower is not thinking about stuff like that when I write. I really let myself write the essay how I want to, because I’m writing for fun, and I can decide later to publish it or not. Mary Karr, I think, has what she calls a “compassion read.” I guess I do something similar and during line edits, by triple-checking if there’s any lines that are unnecessary or exposing or hurtful, and if so, then I delete them. I try to strike a balance of fairness. I don’t know if I achieve it but I attempt to.
  I was extremely worried Lena Dunham would feel disrespected, and fretted a lot about it, which now seems funny now. When galleys were sent out, I sent her a copy and an email warning her. That’s my rule, not letting people be surprised. She was totally understanding and said something like, “When you do what I do, you can’t get mad at anyone else for what they do!” Later when she read it, she sent me a kind email and we processed a bit and that was the end. This has been my experience for the most part with nonfiction and writing about people: it’s never as horrible as you imagine it will be. She understood I wasn’t trying to call her a flake, it was just good ground for an essay and I tried to make myself look like the retard in the essay. Which was easy! I did consider sending her the essay pre-galleys but ultimately didn’t want to change anything I’d written and not using her name was a way for us both to feel better about it, I think. I’m talking openly now that it’s her because she said that’s fine.
  Remember that reading we did in Chicago last winter? One chick came up to me afterwards and asked if it was Mindy Kaling!
  This has been my experience for the most part with nonfiction and writing about people: it’s never as horrible as you imagine it will be.
  JE: I’ve had this weird experience after publishing stuff I wrote that was based on the not-so-great parts of myself and my past. It always feels embarrassing at first but then eventually things shift, in a way that feels sort of like a healthy kind of compartmentalization. Is it like that for you? You certainly don’t seem to be concerned about making yourself out to be this person who has it all together, which is one of the things I most admire about your work.
  CC: I’ve noticed when my books first release there’s total adrenaline and it’s absolutely mortifying and then over a year or so, it starts to feel more like “work.” You read so much from your shit and answer all these questions that there’s a distance, more like a chore. You get tiny chunks of money for different things. I read from Women the other night and honestly have a feeling now of like, who wrote this? It’s bizarre. I guess I’m good at disassociating. I do that when I give readings as well, thinking about baseball in my head as I read so I can disconnect from the material.
  I just read an article in Psychology Today, which my therapist lets me take from her waiting room because it’s my guilty pleasure, about rewriting our life stories into a way you can live with. It says:
  We can’t change the past, but we can change how it affects us and who it makes us. When we tweak what we tell ourselves about the past, we can redirect our future. In our relationships, through our life choices, or at our jobs, we can recognize our mistakes, move on, and start to embody a different story. Rewriting helps you gain perspective, sort out your emotions and increase narrative coherence — your understanding of who you are, how you became that person and where you are going.
  That really resonated with me.
  JE: ITYIP covers a lot of ground, both in subject matter and tone. You have funny, gossipy essays like “Hungry Ghost,” and then heavier, more devastating essays like “Maggie and Me: A Love Story” and “Berlin.” Were you conscious of making sure you covered a wide variety of emotional experiences? How did you decide on the arrangement of the essays, and the decision to break the collection into three parts?
  CC: I’m glad it reads that way. I collected all of the essays I had into the MS, then cut some shitty ones and added others. I wrote a few specifically for the collection, such as “Sisterless” and “The Music & The Boys.” There was no reason for it to be chronological so we played around with order. The segments aren’t labeled which I like because the reader can take away whatever themes emerge for them on their own.
  Most collections are split into parts so I was just mimicking other books. I do sort of like how it starts off more druggie-like and self-destructive but then gives way to essays about women writers who have touched my life in some way. I don’t know how conscious I was. I just worked with what I had and prayed for the best!
  JE: I thought it was neat that you open your collection with a short essay about your relationship to personal essays — your experience with reading and publishing them, and also reactions you’ve gotten from other people. And then there is the conversation you once told me about, with another writer who was acting as though there was something unsavory or unliterary about the personal essay as form. Do you feel self-conscious about publishing personal essays? Why do people hate on them, or act as though there’s something tawdry about writing about oneself? I mean, isn’t all writing, in some way, about ourselves? At least personal essays are up-front about it.
  CC: I feel self-conscious about it in some ways, but not enough not to do it. I’d likely feel self-conscious about any career choice I’ve chosen.
  I don’t know why people hate on them. I think when people write openly about flaws, it reminds readers of parts of themselves they hate or aren’t always in touch with. Some people are so embarrassed by the personal essay that they won’t publish them, where I’m not that embarrassed, and that makes the difference between what they do and what I do — I put mine out there. It takes all kinds. Sorry for being corny. I just like, don’t care anymore. About genre snobbiness and people’s thoughts on personal essays. It seems beat. I don’t care if people find me “literary” or not. I enjoy writing and that’s more than I can say for a lot of writers. Excuse the rant.
  I don’t care if people find me “literary” or not. I enjoy writing and that’s more than I can say for a lot of writers. Excuse the rant.
  People keep asking me why they’re hated on, but that’s not my experience. Sure, people think fiction is a higher art. But in my world I publish them, read them, and teach them, so I’m biased and in a bubble of people who love and support them.
  My existential attitude of “We’re all gonna die who cares” has been helpful for me when it comes to this stuff. Because we’re all gonna die. Who cares? Let people write/read what they want. And yeah exactly — if I’m upfront about my flaws and stupid shit I’ve done, I guess I feel I’ve gained some control on that part of my life and since I’m calling it out first, it makes me in some way feel protected from what reviewers and people say.
  JE: One time you gave me Kratom before a reading and all it did was make me feel shaky and nervous. What the hell is Kratom? What does it do for you? Why do you like it so much? Also just now while Googling to make sure I was spelling Kratom correctly, I came across this article, which says as of 9/30, the FDA will designate it as a Schedule I drug. How does this make you feel? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?!
  CC: Juliet, I’m fucked. I can’t even get into it here. It’s too devastating and private. I don’t understand how Kratom did that to you, probably cause you mixed it with Red Bull or something. But I’m also relieved, I knew this day would come eventually.
  JE: Have you seen the Pitchfork series “Over/Under”? (If not, I highly recommend the Kathleen Hannah, RiFF RAFF, and Earl Sweatshirt episodes.) Can we play over/under with the following?
  CC: Never seen it, but I do love Erik Andre.
  JE: Ben Lerner.
  CC: Would anyone call Ben Lerner underrated? People cream their pants for his books.
  JE: Elizabeth Ellen.
  CC: HARD UNDER. EE is behind-the-scenes supportive of so many women writers and has helped me emotionally and financially. And romantically. Just kidding. Maybe.
  JE: Bread.
  CC: HARD UNDER. Why the fuck does no one eat bread anymore? Trust no one who doesn’t. In an ideal world, I eat bread every day.
  JE: Hummus.
  CC: OVER. Don’t get me wrong, I eat it, but you can just put chickpeas in a blender and make it instead of paying 6.99.

• The Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2012/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-chloe-caldwell/

  QUOTED: "Friends have definitely laughed at my matter-of-fact bluntness. I don’t think of LGLA as a release of my secret life or anything. I’ve never been much of a liar. Ever. It’s not that I sit at a bar and spit truths of my life at you, but wait, yeah, actually, maybe it is like that! I am, or was, like that. I’ve worked on it though. I’m a bit more composed now. I bite my tongue more, maybe."

  THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW WITH CHLOE CALDWELL
  BY STEVE ALMOND
  May 31st, 2012

  I first saw Chloe Caldwell do her thing a year ago. She read an essay about an orgy she’d participated in and how much she’d enjoyed the orgy, and the particular moments she’d enjoyed, such as when the men on hand admired her breasts, and how great the après-orgy cheeseburger she ate was, and how she recorded the orgy and listened to that recording on an airplane and got so turned on again that she masturbated under a blanket and all I could think was: Holy shit. Chloe Caldwell is my hero!

  Not because she took part in an orgy or pigged out afterwards or pleasured herself on an airplane, but because she wrote about these intimate events in luminous prose and without a trace of self-consciousness. She wasn’t exploiting the material, or degrading herself. She was just telling the truth about this thing that happened to her.

  We should all be so reckless with the truth.

  I am pleased to report that her new book of essays, Legs Get Led Astray is every bit as enthralling as her reading was. And even more pleased that Ms. Caldwell was able to field a few questions.

  ***

  The Rumpus: So the first thing I have to confess is that reading LGLA made me feel a little like a Jewish mother. I was saying to myself, “Oh my. What will people think?” Are you as candid in real life as you are on the page?

  Chloe Caldwell: Hah! My family actually is part Jewish and that is how my mom felt about my book for the suspenseful year before it came out. She knew what was in it. However, she completely came around. On a car ride recently, she said, “I’ve come to peace with it.” She totally supports my book.

  I thought about this question and also talked to a close friend about it. We decided that yes, it is who I am in real life. Friends have definitely laughed at my matter-of-fact bluntness. I don’t think of LGLA as a release of my secret life or anything. I’ve never been much of a liar. Ever. It’s not that I sit at a bar and spit truths of my life at you, but wait, yeah, actually, maybe it is like that! I am, or was, like that. I’ve worked on it though. I’m a bit more composed now. I bite my tongue more, maybe.

  Rumpus: Okay, so to be clear, I’m not just talking about the blue-lit stuff. You’ll also talk about being a lousy babysitter, or a flake. There’s a radical candor in all of it, an uncensored quality. How did you get this brave?

  Caldwell: I feel safer telling the truth. There’s something very isolating to me about being emotionally closed off or keeping secrets to yourself. It’s just not in my nature. I truly feel that telling the truth and not holding stuff in is such an easier way to live. I think the candor is just part of my make-up–my personality. I was definitely raised to be my most authentic self, and I think I am confident enough in myself that it doesn’t hurt my ego to admit the crappy things I’ve done, or thought. I don’t think I was raised to be radically honest or anything, but there was a lot of open communication in my family, especially with my mom. Like, let’s say I stole a lip gloss as a kid. I’d burst out crying and tell my mom I stole a lip gloss. My parents were always pretty understanding about stuff–so maybe since I didn’t have any traumatic repercussions from telling the truth, especially at a young age–it’s where I feel comfortable.

  I think that’s part of the reason I knew I could write the essays the way I did, in my natural voice. I think in the back of my mind, I knew that my family wouldn’t write me off or anything like that. I’m lucky to have a family that transcended for the sake of art.

  Rumpus: As I read the book, I wondered whether there’s a generational thing in effect. When I was growing up, there were no social media, no blogs, or on-line personas. The culture didn’t affirm confession and disclosure.

  Caldwell: I’ve always loved documenting things. I did so in my journals, and for a couple of years in my early twenties, I was intensely attached to one of those old school tape recorders. I recorded conversations with strangers at bars, friends and lovers, even during sex. I don’t know—everyone’s different. Some people (like myself) feel more comfortable confessing things through non-fiction writing. Others confess things on Twitter and Facebook. I like to think that the people that over-share on Facebook and the like, are just another version of non-fiction writers—they’re looking to connect. But maybe that’s too optimistic, maybe those people are just as annoying as they seem. Kidding!

  I know I bring up G-chat a few times in LGLA, but there’s not much in it about blogs or Facebook, etc. I’m pretty lame when it comes to technology. I was so scared of Skype and used it for the first time a couple weeks ago. I’ve never blogged either. Isn’t it funny, our weird technological preferences? Like, I can write this intimate book, but every time I go to post something on my website, I clam up. I didn’t have a website or a blog until a year ago. Kevin Sampsell made me build one before he would announce that he was going to be publishing my book. Ha! It felt like such a commitment to have all of my writing in one place. It was terrifying. But it makes it easier for readers to find you. I know I love looking at author’s websites.

  Rumpus: You clearly love everyone you write about, your pal Lauren, your folks, your brother, the kids you babysat and their parents, the old lovers. But I wondered if you worried about how they would feel about being written about? Did you check with folks, or change names?

  Caldwell: I changed names of everyone except for my brother, my aunt Shay, and my cousin Henri. Shay gave me permission to use Henri’s name. She said, “It’s not like this is gonna stop him from running for President one day” or something like that. The one guy I mostly write about—we met in a non-fiction writing class, so he has always supported me and encouraged my honesty. “Luke” isn’t alive to have an opinion but I’m sure he’d be stoked about it. I do worry about the moms of the kids I wrote about that I babysat, a little.

  Rumpus: In the essay, “The Legendary Luke” you write a love letter to him, but also to New York City. It read to me like a raunchy re-telling of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That.” I loved this line, especially: “But you come to New York as nothing, having to create your own mythology…” Do you think of LGLA as your mythology?

  Caldwell: Oh, thank you. When my brother moved to Berlin, he left me a CD on which he’d recorded himself talking and saying goodbye to me. He mentioned something about me creating my own mythology in New York. That’s where I got that line from. But isn’t that from a Leonard Cohen song? I would say yes, that I do think of LGLA like that, though, the word “mythology” implies a more fabricated truth, and my book isn’t a myth. It’s my truth. I have about twenty-five journals that I poured my heart into during my early twenties, and I think of all of them as forms of LGLA. They hold some of the same sentences and the same exact tone as LGLA. I love that because it makes me feel like I wrote LGLA twenty-five times until it was a book. I would say LGLA is more of my revised and crafted diary.

  Rumpus: How have your people reacted to having the book in the world?

  Caldwell: So far, so good—I’ve had mainly positive reactions. Many of my relationships have blossomed. Maybe the most interesting thing is that my 91-year-old grandmother mailed me a letter with her thoughts on it. She told me that since she lived through World War Two, she always felt she’d missed out on “the best years of her life” but after reading LGLA, she now thinks differently. I’ve been getting quite a few sweet emails from men and women, and some women have sent me poems. It’s all very touching. The best is when someone I thought of as super conservative approaches me and tells me they loved my “masturbation essay” or something like that. Because I’ve given personal details of my life, others are more prone to share their personal details with me. It’s pretty lovely, and it’s teaching me how much people can surprise you. I like to think it cracks people open.

  Rumpus: How have you reacted?

  Caldwell: Mixed emotions. My dad recently was like, “Careful what you wish for cause you just might get it.” I’m proud of myself and happy, but I’ve noticed that since the book release, I have more days where I want to sleep the day away. It’s been emotional. I guess I’ve always felt like my twenties were similar to most people’s so the most jarring thing is reading the reviews that talk about how “self-destructive” and “reckless” I was. Then I start to wonder, was I? And if so, why? I guess you could say it’s self-reflection overload.

  Rumpus: Did you ever consider writing the book as a memoir, rather than essays?

  Caldwell: Nah. I got lucky that the pieces even seem to have a time beginning and end to them. I don’t look at it as a memoir and never did. I think we thought about calling it “A memoir in essays” but it didn’t stick.

  Rumpus: What question should I have asked but didn’t?

  Caldwell: Maybe what some of my absolute favorite pieces of writing are. Here they are—in the order that they came to my mind. I love the below works to death and often go back to study them. They all make me bawl like a baby.

  “Baton Rogue” by Louis E. Bourgeois (The Sun Magazine)

  “The Love Of My Life” by Cheryl Strayed (The Sun Magazine)

  “Mono No Aware” by Miki Howald (Like Water Burning, Issue One)

  “The Isabel Fish” by Julie Orringer (How To Breathe Underwater)

  “Under The Apple Tree” by Laura Pritchett (The Sun Magazine)

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/writing-in-a-bubble-of-idiocy/

  QUOTED: "The title is a phrase I was texting to my friends all the time. They found it incredibly annoying. I liked annoying them. I wanted to tell them the anecdotes I was relaying face-to-face over wine, so I could speak more animatedly and use my hands and make eye contact. That sounds so creepy! I smacked the title on my manuscript and no one ever suggested a change, so it stuck."

  Writing in a “Bubble of Idiocy”
  Alyssa Oursler interviews Chloe Caldwell

  129 1 3

  OCTOBER 15, 2016

  CHLOE CALDWELL could easily be considered a veteran among millennial authors. Her forthright honesty and trademark “oversharing” have made her one of the most endearing and exciting writers of a generation. Her first book, Legs Get Led Astray, was published on her 26th birthday in 2012. It is a winning tapestry of candid essays that traces her stumbling path through young adulthood. Two years later, she explored her first time falling in and out of love with a woman in the widely applauded autobiographical novella, Women. Both books are poetic, intimate page-turners, and demonstrate Caldwell’s knack for slicing through the bullshit.
  Her new book, I’ll Tell You in Person (Emily Books), is just as fierce, from her straight-talk on how heroin exacerbated her acne to things she hasn’t quite figured out, including her sexuality and her writing career. She’s candid about the pain of her parents’ divorce, and grateful to the myriad friends who helped her through it. “Friends in all forms. Childhood friends, Twitter friends, bad friends, fun friends, complicated friends, parental friends, mentor friends, food as a friend, drugs as a friend, attention as an addiction,” Caldwell said of those who inspired her. “Also, failure; growth.”
  I’ll Tell You in Person also shows how much Caldwell’s voice has matured. While she’s divulging all her secrets, it feels less raw than before. Has age made her cautious? Or have famously unabashed women such as Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer taken some of the thunder out of her in-your-face ballsiness? Or is it simply more intimidating to let it all hang out when you know you there’s an audience waiting to get inside?
  Her own feelings about the work are, at best, mixed. “I’ll Tell You in Person was like a breached baby,” she said. “The process toward publication was much more stressful than my other two books. It’s like my fucked-up kid. I look at it and think: What the hell is wrong with you? Why were you such a pain in the ass? Oh fine I love you, but you’re weird. It’s definitely harder to write when you know you have readers. I rarely thought about my readers during the writing of Women, but while writing I’ll Tell You in Person I got pretty paranoid.”
  Caldwell was just as candid throughout our conversation.
  ¤
  ALYSSA OURSLER: Let’s start with the title. How’d you come up with it?
  CHLOE CALDWELL: The title is a phrase I was texting to my friends all the time. They found it incredibly annoying. I liked annoying them. I wanted to tell them the anecdotes I was relaying face-to-face over wine, so I could speak more animatedly and use my hands and make eye contact. That sounds so creepy! I smacked the title on my manuscript and no one ever suggested a change, so it stuck.
  I’ll Tell You in Person felt more grounded in time and place than your first two books. Do you agree, and was that intentional?
  I do agree. Legs Get Led Astray has an urgent feel, as my material was really close to the bone as I wrote it, and Women is raw and urgent emotion, the kind of art that comes out of a painful experience. It makes sense that I’ll Tell You in Person is more grounded, because in my life I became more grounded. I gave recurring characters names and added more scenes and dialogue than in my previous books.
  That said, nothing I do is usually intentional. I try not to analyze my work or purposely make something different from something else. I like to stay in a bubble of idiocy. It keeps me creative.
  At what point did these essays come together as a collection, and was that process different from your first collection?
  Legs Get Led Astray was just a shitshow I was working on. I was publishing essays online and then put them in a manuscript. For this, I was working on piecemeal essays for various publications. A few publishers were emailing my agent at the time — asking what I was up to post-Women — and she encouraged me to put together an essay collection. We started seeing how they’d fit together and what themes were prevalent: friendship, intimacy, identity, failure.
  Is that why you decided to break up I’ll Tell You in Person into these different parts, which is something you didn’t do with your first collection?
  Most essay collections are split into parts. Anne Lamott does it with most of her collections, Jonathan Ames does it, Lena Dunham did it with Not That Kind of Girl. It was a helpful way for me to wrap my head around theme: How are these essays similar and how are others different? What feel do I want to evoke? It’s not exactly a “This is how I’ve grown from childhood” memoir, so we didn’t have to use chronological order and got to play a little. The sections did have titles I kept changing in the early stages of the manuscript but over time we found them cheesy, so I nixed them.
  In the intro, you write: “The liberating thing about publishing an essay collection before you are a fully formed person is that there is nothing to fear. You have no readers. No experience. No memories of doing it before. No wounds.” What were your wounds from your first collection? How have they shaped this collection?
  I was probably just being dramatic.
  Okay. [Laughs.] But you obviously wanted to say something specific about your love for this genre of writing? Why?
  I guess because it was my third book, and I was teaching nonfiction and was sort of drowning in personal stories, my own and others. I was looking at my life and asking, “How did I get here? How am I so balls deep in nonfiction?”
  Do you ever worry about reactions from the people you are writing about?
  This is a question I feel we should stop asking women writers. I just read an interview with Mishka Shubaly, who writes about his life constantly. His prose was called “muscular” and “passionate.” He said his writing has ruined all of his relationships and the person interviewing him just ignored that disclosure. Since I’m a woman I get called “vulnerable,” never “muscular” or “passionate.”
  If writing had impacted my life that negatively I’d probably have stopped doing it. I understand the impulse to ask me the question, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the book I wrote. I read an interview with Emma Cline recently, who said, “Asking what my parents think of my work is a way of reminding me of my social and emotional obligations as woman.”
  What, then, are you hoping readers will take away from the work?
  I recently had a conversation with my friend, the writer Chelsea Martin, about our essay collections, and our lack of angles and branding. I said, “I feel like my brand is just me bragging about how dumb I am,” and she said, “I just want everyone to admit they don’t understand themselves.” Ideally, everyone walks away with something different from I’ll Tell You in Person. I really like the idea of readers projecting their own lives onto it. There should be more books about women just living their lives, being human, having experiences, fucking around, and I’m honored I get to contribute to that small genre.
  In the first section of the book, food is quite prominent. Then, the second part kicks off with an essay about heroin. In that progression, you really capture the way innocence and naïveté can escalate into danger. Do you think that self-awareness sets this collection apart from Legs Get Led Astray?
  Probably. In Women and in Legs Get Led Astray, I’d allude to my parents’ divorce, or how I used to be into musical theater, or grew up with a bunch of guy friends, in just a fleeting sentence. In I’ll Tell You in Person, I had the space to explore those situations and themes more. I didn’t have any word count restraints, as I would if I were writing an essay for the internet, so I got to really take time and sit with sentiments I’d previously found uninteresting.
  Throughout the collection, you give a lot of detail, especially with music — listing band names, citing specific song lyrics, and the like. What do you think is the key in using specifics to get to the universal?
  What I love about using music is that people remember where they were when they heard a song or an artist for the first time. It brings them back to themselves, to their own home screen. I never know if I’m making the specific universal, but hopefully sometimes I do.
  Most of your work centers around relationships, but I’ll Tell You in Person stands out in that it focuses far less on romantic relationships, which seem to be mentioned only tangentially. Were you done exploring romance?
  I was more interested in other types of unconventional relationships I was having or had in my childhood, mentors like Cheryl Strayed and Maggie Estep, and babysitting Cheryl’s daughter Bobbi; artists I met via Twitter or through my work, like Lena Dunham, and my formative relationships with my girlfriends and guy friends. I was asking: How did I get to be the person that I am? How do we become who we are? How has relationship X from the past informed relationship Y or inspired relationship Z in the present?
  Your essay “The Laziest Coming Out Story You’ve Ever Heard” is more about identity and sexuality, and, essentially, ties your three books together. Is that what you were hoping to do with the piece?
  “The Laziest Coming Out Story” was born of a few anecdotes I’d forgotten to include in Women or, for whatever reason, were deleted. I like the essay because it’s never finished. Every week something happens that I could include in it. When Emily Gould [co-founder of Emily Books] sent me my editor letter before I did a new draft on the book, she said, “At times, this essay is lazy!” and I went back to it and just couldn’t make it un-lazy. Finally at the end of the editing process, my editor Ruth Curry [the other co-founder] was like, “Though this is still lazy, it’s fine. Maybe that’s the point.” I was like, “Yeah, that’s the point!”
  Did you feel any pressure to include an essay about sexuality, since Women was widely considered an LGBT book?
  No. I wrote “The Laziest Coming Out Story” for fun a couple of years ago and published it on Medium because I needed the money. Just because I wrote one book on sexuality doesn’t mean I’m a spokesperson for it. I guess I do feel a little pressure about it, but I don’t give into it. Women is a thing of its own and not all my books are going to be Women.
  It’s funny, because Legs Get Led Astray reads pretty hetero, though one reviewer said I didn’t use pronouns in many of the essays, and another person told me they never knew if I was gay or straight in it. But I read it as a super heteronormative book. Women is kind of LGBT, and I’ll Tell You in Person has barely any sex in it at all! It’s my most sexless book to date.
  I’ll Tell You in Person begins with you at age 20, without a college diploma — and you still don’t have one, even though you’re now teaching. Has this lack of “formal” writing education impacted your writing, and this collection in particular?
  It impacts my writing immensely. I’m self-taught. I’m not a perfectionist. I didn’t sit through writing workshops thinking critically about writing. We submitted this collection on my 29th birthday. I was at a place in my life where I had to make some decisions. I had two books out, and no skills, really. No money. I began reflecting heavily on the choices I’d made. Like, “Well, shit. Where is there to go from here?” I either have to dive head first into my so-called career or waitress or go back to school.
  Not going to college or getting an MFA means I skipped learning to be competitive. I didn’t get assaulted with people telling me I suck. I get people telling me I suck now, sure. But I’m not as vulnerable a writer as I would have been at 20. I got to stay sort of sheltered. Plus, I got to publish books with three indie presses and learn about writing and editing and publishing in this hands-on way. It was like my college.
  What is your writing routine like now, and how does that compare with your routine for previous books?
  I don’t have special writing routines. I work every day. Sometimes that means I’m teaching online, sometimes book edits, sometimes a new piece of writing.
  My reading routines are what really vary from book to book. For Women, I read novellas as I wrote it. For this essay collection, I reread essay collections: Jonathan Ames, Joan Didion, Dodie Bellamy, Sallie Tisdale. I like immersing myself in the form I’m writing in as I work. I keep the sorts of books I’m aspiring to be like in my bed for months in case it works by osmosis.
  What are you working on now?
  A short story collection called Relatively Unknown. Each story will be from a different woman’s point of view, kind of like Personal Velocity by Rebecca Miller. I’m also dabbling in Final Draft, thinking about taking my shot at a screenplay.
  You talk about five-year plans in the book, and laugh about them. But you also grow up a lot throughout the book. Do you have one now?
  Nah. It makes me uncomfortable to think about my life in that way.
  What’s been the most unexpected thing about your writing career?
  Teaching. Never in a billion years would I have expected I’d be helping people with their writing or making my income this way. It’s so challenging, constantly changing, and exciting. I now have dozens of interesting women in my life whom I met in my classes. It’s unbelievable. And I get to work from home most days a week. I feel so lucky.
  What advice do you have to other writers of personal essays?
  Change names and/or let your friends choose their pseudonyms. Don’t ask for permission, but do warn people. Never surprise those in your life with an essay you haven’t given them a warning about. Sit with the essay longer than you think you have to. And always write with love.

• Lambada Literary - http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/02/09/chloe-caldwell-on-writing-her-novella-women-her-literary-inspirations-and-falling-in-love-with-queer-literature/

  QUOTED: "A break-up, and not finding the book I wanted. When I was twenty-three, and a nanny in Seattle, I found this book in one of the homes I worked in. It’s called Break Up: The End of a Love Story and it’s by a woman named Catherine Texier. I’d never read anything so honest and vulnerable. After desperately scouring the Internet for her contact information and not finding it, I even had the gall to write to her ex-husband (who the book is about!) and ask for her email address."
  "He gave it to me, and I was able to contact her. That book has stayed with me in a deep way since then. A true original. I wanted to someday write a book like that, and now I have! But also, a book about the weird ways humans act when they’re mourning—how you can sometimes embody a whole different identity when grieving a broken heart."

  FEATURES : ARTICLE

  Chloe Caldwell: On Writing Her Novella ‘Women,’ Her Literary Inspirations, and Falling in Love With Queer Literature
  by Paige Cohen
  February 9, 2015

  “I THINK IT’S SO MAGICAL WHEN YOU FIND SOME NEW KIND OF ART, AND ONCE YOU START OPENING YOUR EYES TO IT, YOU START SEEING IT EVERYWHERE.”
  Chloe Caldwell’s writing first appeared on the literary radar in 2012 with her electric debut collection of nonfiction essays, Legs Get Led Astray (Future Tense Books), accurately described as “a scorching hot glitter box of youthful despair and dark delight…” by author Cheryl Strayed. Her second book and first work of fiction, the novella Women (SF/LD Books), is a deeply human examination of how one woman grieves her broken heart through the connections she develops with other women in her life—in friendship, in family, and in potential lovers—after the fallout of her first lesbian relationship. Graceful, devastating, and filled with moments of humor and joy—Chloe’s words resonate in their ability to render characters who are at once brave and vulnerable.

  Chloe took some time to talk to Lambda Literary about her inspirations, and her experience writing fiction and enveloping herself in the world of queer literature.

  Whenever I read one of your pieces, I’m immediately enveloped in the world of the story and the voice of the narrator—whether it’s fiction (as in Women) or nonfiction (as in Legs Get Led Astray). You’re not afraid to be honest or vulnerable on the page and neither is the narrator in Women. How did writing this work of fiction differ from writing nonfiction?

  It’s a nice break. You don’t have to scrutinize your memory or check your journals. While doing it, I was like, “I can do this? I can just lie? On paper? And people are supposed to believe it?” Insane phenomenon to me, as someone who has never studied writing fiction or been very imaginative.

  What inspired you to write Women?

  A break-up, and not finding the book I wanted. When I was twenty-three, and a nanny in Seattle, I found this book in one of the homes I worked in. It’s called Break Up: The End of a Love Story and it’s by a woman named Catherine Texier. I’d never read anything so honest and vulnerable. After desperately scouring the Internet for her contact information and not finding it, I even had the gall to write to her ex-husband (who the book is about!) and ask for her email address. He gave it to me, and I was able to contact her. That book has stayed with me in a deep way since then. A true original. I wanted to someday write a book like that, and now I have! But also, a book about the weird ways humans act when they’re mourning—how you can sometimes embody a whole different identity when grieving a broken heart.

  I was also beginning to notice power plays, sexual and nonsexual. Once I started thinking about power plays, I couldn’t not see them, and I wanted to learn more about them—why we like them and need them. I wanted to explore how power plays can begin one way but end the opposite way. I began reading articles about butch lesbians seducing straight girls and all that.

  Another thing I’ve always been interested in is self-identity and self-image dysmorphia. The way we can look like one thing, but be another thing entirely. Back when I still did drugs, I was fascinated by this, and now I’m fascinated again with sexual identity. The mirror is a confusing place!

  In Women, the narrator sometimes pauses to address the reader and reveal her fears about the ways in which the reader is going to perceive her characters, the decisions she is making while writing the story, and sometimes her deepest insecurities. (I loved this line: “I worry that if I cannot make you fall in love with her inexplicably, inexorably, and immediately, the way I did, then you will not be experiencing this book in the way I hope you will.”)

  Was addressing the reader in this way something that happened organically while writing? What gave you the idea to do it?

  It was conscious. It helped me disassociate, I think. This book was also the first time I’d worked with an editor the way I did with Elizabeth Ellen. We were in our own world. It was such an interesting time and I was inspired by that. In Elizabeth’s work, she does some meta-writing, so I sort of copied her, sorry to say. Lydia Davis does it in End of The Story as well. I’ve always loved seeing writers write about writing in a book that isn’t necessarily about writing.

  Finn introduces the narrator to this new, queer world she hadn’t yet discovered. She even gives the narrator books like Stone Butch Blues to help the narrator understand her perspective, and tells the narrator about Annie on My Mind and shows like The L Word. What I love about this book is that we get to accompany the narrator as she discovers queer literature for the first time, and is brought into this world for the first time. What was it like to write about and tap into that experience?

  It was wonderful! I’m obsessed with females and female art by nature. I think I always have been. It all came into focus rather quickly, like I looked up one day and was going to Frances Ha once a week (that’s an exaggeration, but barely) and waking up with books by women author’s around me and dating women and making new female friends everywhere. There’s that age-old story about women being difficult to make friends with and all that, but that’s never been my situation.

  It was glorious to tap into because I got to read Kate Millett and Ann Rower and Ivan Coyote and Eileen Myles, etc., constantly, for my book. This past spring was awesome. All I did was write and walk to the library to pick up the books I’d requested, and then go home and make scrambled eggs and toast and read my books and work on my own book.

  Can you talk a little bit about your literary influences and how they’ve impacted your work?

  Growing up I loved personal stories and true stories. In my late teens I’d read the essays in The Sun Magazine, because my mom had a subscription. The essays would often be about sex and drugs and death and break-ups, and I was into it. I was moved. I loved authors in The Sun: Sparrow, Alison Luterman, Krista Bremer, Poe Ballantine, Cheryl Strayed, and Stephen Elliott. It’s really through them that I found writing.

  I moved to New York City shortly after my twentieth birthday. There, I got into male authors: Bukowski, Henry Miller, and Ernest Hemingway. Jonathan Ames. Jonathan Lethem. Then there was Joan Didion.

  Then I got pretty into erotica. 1000 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, Story of O, The Sexual Life of Catherine M.

  After those phases, I was obsessed with memoir and creative nonfiction and personal essay collections, and also with my contemporaries. I took classes at the Gotham Writer’s Workshop for four years. At Gotham, I learned from Katherine Dykstra of Guernica Magazine, Cheryl B. who, sadly, has since passed away, and the author Melissa Febos.

  I was lucky enough to meet Lidia Yuknavitch and Cheryl Strayed and have them mentor me. I totally dove into their nonfiction essays and memoirs. I loved reading women who were telling their stories. I loved reading and writing about feelings.

  Okay, so you may have gotten this question before, but I’m curious about the title of your book. The book itself has a simple cover. It’s graceful-looking, small enough to hold in one hand, but it conveys a pretty enormous experience. I know titles can be hard, so I’m curious how you decided on what you would call this story and why.

  People don’t ask me very frequently, actually. The book was called Dyke Aching, and I absolutely loved that title. Still do. But a few people reminded me that the book is about more than that—it is about so many different kinds of women: therapists, roommates, co-workers, and friends. I’d written an essay called “Women I Have Loved” and I was really excited about writing a book chronicling my female friendships from childhood. I never wrote that book, but I was calling it The Women Book in my mind, and my friend said something to the extent, “Go write that Women book in New York.” I didn’t know if I would regret calling it Dyke Aching—like maybe it was too intense, and when a book comes out, you know, you have to talk about it all the time. So I made a list of a bunch of titles and emailed the list to my friends. My publisher and I agreed that Women would be “funny.” I’m okay with it. It’s definitely not my best title. But it’s straight and to the point. Thinking about this now, I wonder what would have happened if I’d gone with the first title. Women has become sort of this trendy book for people to Instagram—I wonder if there would have been less hype it if were called Dyke Aching or what.

  About halfway through the book, after the narrator falls for Finn, she begins to crave to be around women, to crave the attention of women. It is almost as if desire has the possibility to open all sorts of alternative connections and longings. Can you speak a little on the ways you view how new desires can open up new road-maps and nascent wantings?

  Nascent wantings, I like that! Yes! I like to say it’s like waking up one day and suddenly being attracted to cats. And nothing and everything has changed, because you have to see cats everywhere, but now it’s a struggle to act normal. This always makes sense to me but I have a hard time dropping it into other people’s brains. I can be very inarticulate. It’s why I write books.

  I think it’s so magical when you find some new kind of art, and once you start opening your eyes to it, you start seeing it everywhere. I think this happened for me when I discovered personal essays and creative nonfiction, and again when I discovered queer literature and movies. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I didn’t go to college, so I’d never been in a Women’s Studies class. I found these things on my own or through my friends and partners. This, I guess, is part of the fun in your twenties. Discovery.

  Is any of the book influenced by the experiences you had as a writer living in Brooklyn?

  I don’t think so! It’s definitely about being alone in a city, and that could be anywhere. But I was pretty Brooklyn-ed out after living there and also after writing Legs Get Led Astray, which is super NYC-centric.

  What’s next for you? Any projects in the future that we can look forward to?

  I want to get into screenwriting! And TV. But that’s far-fetched. I’m working on another collection of my essays. Some are published online already and others I’m working on behind the scenes. There will be a lot of female friendship in them, I think, and also the trials and tribulations of publishing personal work. I have some other ideas for experimental creative nonfiction memoir books, and also a Young Adult book, but those are only in the really beginning stages.

  - See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/02/09/chloe-caldwell-on-writing-her-novella-women-her-literary-inspirations-and-falling-in-love-with-queer-literature/#sthash.y7fPpMFe.dpuf

• http://www.out.com/popnography/2015/10/08/need-know-emerging-writer-chloe-caldwell - Out

  QUOTED: "I never wrote it as personal essay. I couldn’t find a way to tell the story in personal essay. I approached it as vignettes and little paragraphs. I sent it to Emily Gould and she told me, “what if you wrote this as if it happened to someone else as an experiment?” So, I did, and I saw what she meant. ... I love the novella form and fictionalizing. I’ll never be the person who writes about aliens, but I felt a lot more space writing Women and a lot more freedom to play with form and facts."

  Need to Know: Emerging Writer Chloe Caldwell
  chloe
  Chloe Caldwell, author of Women and Legs Get Led Astray, is proving herself an invaluable voice in queer literature.

  BY ADAM ARMSTRONG
  THU, 2015-10-08 10:58
  72 SHARES Share on Twitter Share on Facebook
  Roughly a year ago, Lena Dunham posted a photo to her Instagram. In it, she praised a slim book she had just read, saying that whoever had gotten it for her understood her “on the deepest level.” The book she devoured was Chloe Caldwell's novella Women, which chronicles one woman's doomed romantic relationship with another. Dunham told The Guardian that, in addition to Women being one of the best books of 2014, it "perfectly captures the way good sex can make us throw anything under the bus—even our identities."

  Caldwell has also written a collection of personal essays, Legs Get Led Astray. Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild, praised her essays are “tender and sharp, wide-eyed and searching,” adding that they possessed “a reckless beauty that feels to me like magic.”

  ADVERTISING

  When reading Caldwell's books, the sensation of her life flashing before your eyes as if it was your own becomes common. That’s the kind of writer she is. She’s a documenter of real life, her life, life that has shaped her, challenged her, and created her. She wields her writing to help orient her own life, inspire her own life, and lead her to exactly where she needs to be.

  Out had a chance to speak with Caldwell about writing, her life, and her new collection of essays, I'll Tell You in Person, which will hit shelves in 2016.

  Out: Have you always wanted to be a writer? When did you realize that you needed to be one?

  Chloe Caldwell: I never thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was really into theater and singing, so I initially thought I wanted to do that. The moment I knew I needed to be a writer I was in Williamsburg, actually with my brother. He said I talked about writing so much that I should stop talking about it and just write. Then I signed up for a bunch of nonfiction classes at Gotham [Writers Workshop], and in those classes I realized I had to write.

  You decided to forego college and just start writing. Why is that? And do you think it has helped advance your career?

  Yes, I think it helped because I was about 20 when I realized I loved writing, and then I spent the next decade just doing it. I hadn’t been knocked down during workshops. I chose to forego college because I did poorly in high school—I do poorly in academic settings. I was relieved to not have to sit in a classroom again. I hated paperwork, I didn’t know how to apply to college, and I had no idea how to get financial aid. So, I got a Eurorail pass and went to Europe. It was amazing. And then when I was 20, I moved to Hudson, and it threw me into the real world, as they say. I feel like a dick, but you know what I mean.

  Do you have a writing or reading daily regiment? If so, what is it?

  I get up pretty early. If I don’t write in the morning, I get anxious and depressed later in the day. I make my coffee or tea and I sit at the desk from 8am to 3pm. Then at 3pm I go into the real world and I do errands, take a walk. At night I do something to escape. I don’t like to be on the computer at night. So, I read or watch a movie, watch interviews with Amy Schumer, drink wine, maybe go to yoga, and then go to bed.

  Have you ever come close to giving up writing?

  No, but I take time off. After I have a book come out, at least with my previous books, I don’t push myself into the next project immediately. I spend time with that book doing readings and interviews and being in the world with it while it finds readers. I usually take a year to decompress.

  Nowadays, it seems as if every story and experience has been written about. What pushes you to move forward with an idea in spite of this?

  I just don’t think about it. [Laughs] You have to stay in tunnelvision. You have to keep your head down. If you put your head up, read similar things, read the internet, it becomes self-sabotage. Everyone’s written about everything. You have to stay in your bubble because nobody’s written it in your voice.

  Your novella Women is very autobiographical. How was the transition process to fiction?

  I never wrote it as personal essay. I couldn’t find a way to tell the story in personal essay. I approached it as vignettes and little paragraphs. I sent it to Emily Gould and she told me, “what if you wrote this as if it happened to someone else as an experiment?” So, I did, and I saw what she meant. Now I’m writing this new collection of personal essays, and I see how draining it is. I love the novella form and fictionalizing. I’ll never be the person who writes about aliens, but I felt a lot more space writing Women and a lot more freedom to play with form and facts.

  How will your new essay collection differ from Legs Get Led Astray?

  It’s interesting because a few of the editors of I’ll Tell You in Person wanted me to write a response essay to Legs Get Led Astray. I was so young when it [Legs Get Led Astray] came out. Everything I wrote about took place before I turned 25. So I had a lot more living to do. There is an essay in I’ll Tell You in Person that may or may not end up being the introduction. In it, I take some of the things I declared in Legs Get Led Astray and describe how they’ve changed. Like, I wrote about how I love giving head, and how weight doesn’t go to my stomach. Like, dude you were 25, of course it didn’t go to your stomach. I don’t want to say that it’s more mature, but there’s a little more reflection.

  How has being mentored by Cheryl Strayed (Wild) impacted your trajectory or writing?

  It’s shown me what the life of a writer can look like and that you can have a healthy life even though you write personal nonfiction.

  Why do you prefer to write about yourself?

  For me, the self is fascinating subject matter because I’m using myself and my thoughts and my observations to convey the world around me. Hopefully, I make it about the reader as well. I think what it boils down to is that even though it’s so clearly about me, I’d like whoever’s reading it to feel like it’s about them, too. Or to comfort them and make them feel less lonely and less shame.

  What authors and books have inspired you?

  Anything by Anne Lamott. Lidia Yuknavitch. Maggie Nelson. Lena Dunham. Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles. Henry Miller. Jeanette Winterson. Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy. David Sedaris. Ariana Reines. How to be a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead by Ariel Gore. Ask the Dust by John Fante. Jonathan Ames.

  Bonus Questions! What is one book you wish you wrote?

  Summer Sisters by Judy Blume.

  What is your spirit animal?

  My chinese zodiac is a tiger, so I’ll go with that.

• Nylon - http://www.nylon.com/articles/chloe-caldwell-ill-tell-you-in-person

  Author Chloe Caldwell On Her New Book And The Art Of Intimacy
  Intimacy is sort of her thing

  BY KRISTIN IVERSEN OCTOBER 04, 2016

  PHOTO OF CHLOE CALDWELL BY ANNA TY BERGMAN

  There is a time in every avid reader’s life when books play the part of the best friend. Or, at least, there was a time in this avid reader’s life when books were her best friend. My favorite books served several of the same roles that IRL friends did; the voices that came out of my most dog-eared pages made me laugh and cry, taught me things about the people around me and about myself; they kept me company on nights I couldn’t sleep and were what I turned toward when I needed reassurance that I was not alone in this world—or, at least, that I wouldn’t be forever. It was in these books that I found a reflection of myself and my experiences, even if that reflection wasn’t crystal clear; the distortion sometimes even made it easier to connect.

  A book doesn’t have to feel like a friend for me to love it, but it is this type of book that I am likely to read over and over again; it’s this type of book whose pages I fill with marginalia, whose underlined passages I text to everyone I know, whose sentences resonate as much—or more—in my head as do those in conversations I have over the course of a day. And Chloe Caldwell’s latest, a collection of essays titled I’ll Tell You in Person, is one such book; it will stay with you in its messy, funny, bitter, poignant, ecstatic, tragic wholeness while you read it and long after, as if it were a person you met at a party, one who you want to see again and again.

  Caldwell, whose previous works include the novella Women and the essay collection Legs Get Led Astray, has an uncanny gift for engaging her readers on a level of intimacy usually felt only between people who know one another in reality. Perhaps this is because Caldwell exposes the parts of her life that so many young women tend to keep hidden, that so many young women are told are too private for public consumption, the very definition of the overshare. But, of course, refusing to name or speak about something doesn’t take away its power, and Caldwell’s essays prove this by illuminating problems both mundane and extraordinary, granting readers the ability to confront the things that trouble them in their own lives.

  This is a powerful thing, but its importance does not weigh down Caldwell’s work; the fact that she covers weighty topics in some of her essays does not detract from the overall lightness of this collection. In fact, there is an airiness, a breathability to Caldwell’s writing, maybe because reading it feels like she is talking to you, in one long, beautifully constructed burst, and so the selections in this book feel correspondingly like a conversation, rather than a lecture. There’s a throughline of wit and a hyper-attuned awareness of the absurdity of some of the situations Caldwell finds herself in, ones that are recognizable to any woman who’s been in her 20s, but also distinct to the author (and distinctly funny—after reading “Hungry Ghost,” you will have a hard time not cracking yourself up thinking about candle shopping at T.J. Maxx). In short, ITYIP is the type of book that is tempting to describe as a bible for young women, but which, since it lacks any pomposity or self-seriousness, evades that type of classification. Rather, it feels more like a beautifully written set of field notes, a journal from the front lines of being a young woman, the kind of book that is impossible not to respond to and not to want to press into the hands of all your best friends, the ones that aren’t books.

  Below, Caldwell explains how “intimacy is sort of her thing,” what makes something worth writing about for her, and how it’s stupid to think that successful writers need to live in New York City.

  The title of this collection really struck me, I think because it speaks to an intimacy that can be difficult to experience in this era of texting and canceled plans. I feel like I tend to hoard my best stories to tell to friends and family on the chances I get to actually see them, rather than via phone or email. Were you aiming for this level of intimacy when writing these?
  Yes—I hoard my stories too! Then, when I find I’m telling the same story over and over, like I did with “Hungry Ghost,” I know I need to make it into an essay. I’m always aiming for intimacy in my work, it’s sort of my thing. With my novella Women, though written in a really intimate voice, I was vague. The narrator had no name, no age, worked at an unspecified library, and never named a city. That was fun for me, and I purposely did that so the reader could envelop themself in the experience and project onto it. One girl asked me if it was about NYC, another thought it was set in San Francisco.

  With ITYIP, since they were personal essays, I had to get more detailed, giving names and locations to ground the reader in place and time. I love tiny nuanced details. I do realize they alienate some people, but it doesn’t matter to me.

  You cover a lot of ground in these essays, touching on topics ranging from the death of a close friend to acne and heroin problems to babysitting to preparing for the visit of a (famous) internet friend to what it was like to come out as queer. Some of the essays center around objectively big, life-changing events, whereas others are about smaller moments, the kind of things some people might not think to write about. What makes something worthy of writing about for you?
  There’s no criteria for me. The more interviews I do and questions I am asked, the more I realize how laid-back I am. I honestly do what I want. I keep writing [what’s] enjoyable for myself. I will never force myself to write something and I never tell myself “who cares that’s boring.” Some of the essays, like “Soul Killer,” of course everyone responds to because of the content, and then there is “Failing Singing,” which is about, like, nothing, and inspired by Meghan Daum’s Music Is My Bag. I guess I wanted to challenge myself to take something mundane, like my relationship and singing, and see what I could make of it. Internal conflict is often the basis for my essays.

  Personal essays are having a real moment, enjoying both positive and negative attention. Why do you think they—specifically ones written by women—are such current cultural lightning rods?
  I think women are hungry to hear the experiences of other women in literature and film. And we’re lacking them. Just look at the success of Jill Soloway or Cheryl Strayed—though they’d been working towards it for decades. They dared to tell stories from their experience and point of view, through the female gaze, and people are responding. We need more women to do this!

  What is it like to write about people that are still in your lives? Your family members and friends play prominent roles in many of these stories, and one famous friend—whom you leave anonymous, but who is relatively identifiable—has a story based around her; what’s it like for you to write so honestly about these relationships? Have you ever experienced any blowback? Or, the opposite? Has it strengthened ties?
  This question is asked to me in almost every interview, and you’re the first to ask me if it has strengthened ties. Yes, it has. I’m working on an essay either called “In Defense of the Parents of Writers” or “On Shame and Shamelessness” about this question. I feel like many times I’m asked, the person is implying that I am doing something wrong or bad. I’m not, and my family and friends know I write because I’m a writer—not to expose anyone or stir the pot. I researched interviews with male writers like Jonathan Ames, Mishka Shubaly, and Daniel Nester to see how often they are asked these types of questions, and barely found anything.

  I spoke to Lena [Dunham] about the essay I wrote about her [“Hungry Ghost”]. I never blindsided anyone; I always warn them ahead of publication. She read Hungry Ghost before the book published. She was supportive. She said she trusted me completely. I made sure I was the one who looked like the idiot in the essay. The essay is truly for me, mostly about making internet “friends” and money and class.

  You’ve written both non-fiction and fiction, with your excellent novella Women. Which comes easier for you? Are you working on any more fiction?
  Women was more enjoyable to write than ITYIP. I love using white space the way I did in the novella; there’s more room for experimentation. I do have some exciting news to announce about another book of fiction, but the contract is still in the works so that’s all I’ll say.

  Recently, there’s been some conflicting takes about whether or not writing is “a job,” and, if it is “a job,” whether or not it’s one off of which people can make a living. As someone who writes, but also teaches and who has written about money—and lack of it—in a highly relatable way, what’s your feeling about the current state of writing as profession? Is it tenable to expect to be able to make money solely as a writer? Or is it necessarily a bad thing if writers have other sources of income, out of need or even desire?
  I survive as a writer by teaching writing. This is huge for me, as I didn’t study writing myself or go to college. I’m hanging on by a financial thread, and to do that, I have to teach three classes at a time, host private workshops at my apartment, work for a catering company, and, once in a while, work at my dad’s music shop. I make chunks of money from writing or book advances once in a while, but not enough to live on.

  A lot of writers feel like they need to live in New York City in order to be part of the larger publishing scene. What’s it like for you to be a working writer and not living in New York?
  Do people still think that? Seems stupid. There’s no time to write in NYC. Everyone is at their job 40 hours a week or commuting to their job. I love living in Hudson because my bank, post office, and therapist are all a two-minute walk away. It saves me so much time. I’ve lived all over the place, running to buses and trains, writing during my work time, so I love being settled and I love working from home and having a nicer apartment than I’d ever have in NYC. Plus, I’m in NYC once a week, sometimes more, for teaching and events, so I get my fix that way. Personally, I’d love to read more books and see more movies NOT set in NYC.

  Do you have any advice for young women writers who aren’t sure how to begin their careers?
  Make friends with other writers. Go to events, book parties, classes, readings. Support the writers you love and they will support you back. Read everything. Use Twitter to make friends. Many women have been asking me how to find a mentor. They will find you, but they can’t find you without you taking some risks. Put yourself and your work out there, so you can be found. Don’t wait for anyone else’s permission to write.

  What have you read lately that you’ve really enjoyed?
  I loved When Watched by Leopoldine Core. It’s an incredible work of art of short stories, each inserts you into the point of view of a different character experiencing their relationship. Right now I’m enjoying a novel called Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover by Mila Jaroniec, which will be released mid-November.

  I’ll Tell You in Person is now available for purchase here.

• Pank Magazine - http://pankmagazine.com/2016/09/14/interview-chloe-caldwell-on-ill-tell-you-in-person/

  [INTERVIEW] Chloe Caldwell on I’ll Tell You In Person
  POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

  Publisher: Coffee House Press in collaboration with Emily Books
  Publication date: October 4, 2016
  Number of pages: 184
  Price: $16.95

  —

  REVIEW AND INTERVIEW BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

  With stories about growing up and fearing growing old, friendships and friend foibles, the intimacies of obsession and the intricacies of depression, I’ll Tell You In Person is an essay collection as vulnerable as it is blunt. Chloe Caldwell’s sharp wit and keen powers of observation are in full force in her newest book.

  Caldwell takes readers on an odyssey through turbulent formative years of heroin, binge eating, Craigslist dating, the loss of a close friend, coming out, living in Europe, best friends, ex-friends, relationship blunders, encounters with celebrities, and all the experiences of youth that make us who we are. I inhaled Caldwell’s essays with unusual quickness—losing track of time, forgetting the presence of people around me, being fully present and absorbed in a way that only the words of a gifted essayist can produce.

  I’ll Tell You In Person chronicles young adulthood with aplomb. Though it can feel as if the reader is meant to recall her own adolescent calamities and stack them up for comparison, this collection isn’t some righteous manifesto. There is no moral to the story because, as seasoned writers know, stories don’t need morals.

  ***

  I talked to Chloe about her book and the challenges of writing personal essays. (This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.)

  Mandy Shunnarah: I have to start off by congratulating you because I read I’ll Tell You In Person faster than any book in recent memory. One of the elements I most adored about the book is that you’re deeply self-deprecating without being overly critical or judgmental of yourself, and without apologizing. I got the sense that writing about your past heroin addiction, binge eating, masturbation, job woes, and nearly over-drafting your bank account to impress a millionaire celebrity was cathartic. Tell me more about your writing process and the emotional pilgrimage of writing this book.

  Chloe Caldwell: Thank you! I’m touched you felt that way. The essays all came to be in different ways and times. “Yodels” I wrote back in 2013 for The Rumpus. “Soul Killer” I sent to Salon that same year because I had no money and $150 was a lot for me. Same with “The Laziest Coming Out Story.” So half of the book was already written without being considered a book. I began putting the essays together and then added five new ones over the course of 2014-2016.

  I don’t know if it gives me any sort of relief or catharsis at all. The tough thing about this book was I was super broke during the process of putting it together, and submitting it to publishers. It’s stressful to work on a book without money, because to have time, you need money. It was difficult for me to sit and work on essays when I knew I should be working at my dad’s music store for money or catering or finding more teaching jobs.

  MS: With I’ll Tell You In Person being your second collection of essays, how did you find yourself evolving as you explored more facets of what it means to grow up?

  CC: It’s hard to talk about this stuff, it’s so ephemeral. I’ve always been smart in spite of my stupid choices and have been hyper-aware enough to know I could only make ridiculous decisions before I got older. And now I am older. It’s a creepily acute feeling I have at thirty, both like a child and a grown woman. My life is unconventional in the sense that I documented my wilder years. It’s not that I did anything more interesting than anyone else, it’s just that I have it out there in the form of a book. I feel myself evolving in many ways—I’ve always been into growth and therapy, etc., but I like to keep some of my evolving private.

  MS: You share very openly in your work, though it sounds like people are always wanting more. What’s that like? How do you separate yourself from your work and maintain a personal life as a personal essay writer?

  CC: I share openly in my work and in my life as well, mostly. But my essays are by no means my life story. There’s a ton I haven’t written about. The essays are just what I thought would be entertaining or enjoyable for a reader, what I had ideas for. People are definitely always wanting more and it’s a slippery slope. Luckily, I have an awesome therapist who used to work in publishing in NYC and knows a lot about the writer lifestyle, reads my books, and is familiar with the “scene” and the authors and books I mention. She’s helped me create clear boundaries around a lot of this stuff.

  As Maggie Nelson says, “I don’t worry about people who ‘think they know me’ because, not to sound flip, they just literally don’t.” I’m paraphrasing, but I feel the same way. I have a private life just like everyone. I just write about certain “slices of life” if you will excuse that horrendous expression. “Prime Meats,” for example, is about something I did ten years ago. So I don’t feel super close to a lot of the essays in the collection.

  MS: You seem at peace with your younger self, and I get the feeling that’s something a lot of people wish they could do. How did you get to that point? Was it a difficult place to reach when, as a writer of personal essays, you’re inevitably reaching into the past?

  CC: Well, I don’t think I thought of it as a point to get to or a place to reach, which helps. I guess it’s just part of my make up, and comes naturally to me, which is why I ended up being a personal nonfiction writer—a lifestyle most certainly not for everyone. I did some weird shit in my youth, but who doesn’t? Plus, it got me to where I am: healthy, with books published, a job I love. My life is filled with the classes I teach, so I’m constantly reading personal essays of other people’s mistakes, so to me, it’s the new normal.

  MS: The title harkens an intimacy that’s present on every page. Considering how I inhaled the book it almost feels strange that you’re not actually my real life best friend telling me these stories in person. Are these essays stories you did tell people in person before writing them down?

  CC: No, they weren’t. I was just texting that phrase to my friends/family all the time about small things, like what I felt about a movie I’d just seen or whatever. I felt limited on text message and email and many of my close girl friends live in cities across the country from me, so I liked saving up anecdotes until I saw them in person and we could chat over glasses of wine. I liked the conversational tone of it for a book title, so it stuck. None of the essays aside from “Hungry Ghost” are exactly riveting stories or anecdotes. That’s why I say in the opener that I don’t necessarily have “good stories.” I’m more the kind of writer who tries to make narrative out of nothing.

QUOTED: "Full of the uncertainty, vibrancy, and pitfalls of youth, this collection is prime for teens and new adults."

I'll Tell You in Person
Julia Smith
Booklist.
113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
I'll Tell You in Person. By Chloe Caldwell. Oct. 2016.184p. Coffee House, paper, $16.95 (97815668945311.814.
Caldwell's slender, new collection of essays, following Legs Get Led Astray (2012), is built around formative moments from her twenties that
will strike a chord with those who have struggled (or are struggling) to find firm footing as adults. At first, this seems like standard fare, with
accounts of youthful experiences marked by alcohol, drugs, or questionable decisions, but a shift occurs around the halfway point, as a subtle
maturity creeps into the writing. The essay "Failing Singing" discusses how singing used to be an important part of Caldwell's life, yet it was her
first public reading as a writer where she truly found her voice. She shares the important friendships that have helped her on her way to becoming
a "fully formed person," particularly those described in "Sisterless" and "Maggie and Me: A Love Story." While details are often heaped into listlike
paragraphs--and in one instance an actual bulleted list--it's within these specifics that readers are most likely to recognize bits of themselves
and form a connection with Caldwell's stories.--Julia Smith
YA: Full of the uncertainty, vibrancy, and pitfalls of youth, this collection is prime for teens and new adults. JS.
Smith, Julia
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Smith, Julia. "I'll Tell You in Person." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 30. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463755027&it=r&asid=0bc32785daca2d9495caef3be768fe8f. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463755027

---
QUOTED: "Caldwell ... brings an intelligent, confessional voice to this entertaining collection of personal essays."

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I'll Tell You in Person: Essays
Publishers Weekly.
263.32 (Aug. 8, 2016): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
I'll Tell You in Person: Essays
Chloe Caldwell. Emily Books (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (164p) ISBN 978-156689-453-1
Caldwell (Women) brings an intelligent, confessional voice to this entertaining collection of personal essays about adolescence and young
adulthood- She reports on her youthful hi jinks involving fake ads on Craigslist, on drinking and shoplifting, the thrill of getting her driver's
license, her roles in school plays, and hitchhiking in Europe. She writes about the "enormous anxiety" she harbored in her 20s and drifting from
one job interview to the next. Earnest self-indulgence lies heavily on these pages, with references to Caldwell's "gluten-free high horse," and her
own hotness. She points to "making kale chips [and] dentist appointments" as markers of maturity and includes lists of tedious details ("in no
particular order, here are some foods I've binged on"), which playfully convey her unrepentant self-awareness. Like in her last collection, Legs
Get Led Astray, Caldwell writes about her life with warmth, humor, and not a trace of apology--only this time around the stories are tamer. Agent:
Chelsea Lindman, Greenburger Associates. (Oct.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"I'll Tell You in Person: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 53. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900394&it=r&asid=c9e7b70f53ba9b65f69625ecd57e9781. Accessed 9 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460900394

---

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The big Indie books of fall
Judith Rosen
Publishers Weekly.
263.35 (Aug. 29, 2016): p23.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
The strength of the many small presses that have sprung up in recent years made compiling our annual list of the best fall indie titles especially
challenging. We -worked hard to balance fiction and nonfiction, adult and children's titles, and books in translation and books originally in
English. PW's reviews editors contributed significantly to the effort; we also scoured bookstore newsletters and the Indie Next List, and spoke
with premier booksellers to find out the small-press books they're most excited about this fall.
Emily Books
(dist. by Consortium)
I'll Tell You in Person: Essays
Chloe Caldwell (Oct., $16.95 trade paper)
Author tour, 8,000-copy first printing
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The second book from Coffee House's new imprint addresses becoming an adult and the various imperfect ways most of us get there. "Chloe
Caldwell writes with an emotional intensity that is insightful, heartfelt, and often hilarious," commented Shawn Donley, new-book purchasing
supervisor at Powell's Books in Portland, Ore. "She perfectly captures what it's like to try to navigate your way through the traumatic first decade
of adulthood."
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Europa
(dist. by PRH)
Shelter in Place
Alexander Maksik (Sept., $18 trade paper)
12-city U.S. and Canadian tour, bartender marketing campaign on West Coast, 45,000-copy first printing Chuck Robinson, owner of Village
Books in Bellingham, Wash., calls this "an incredibly courageous novel that delves deeply into issues of love, gender, violence, and mental
illness. Like A Marker to Measure Drift, Masik's earlier book, the writing is not only beautiful but is evocative of time and place--in this case the
Pacific Northwest in the early '90s."
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Fantagraphics
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
Emil Ferris (Oct., $39-99 trade paper)
Author events, 10,000-copy first printing
In a story that offers a vivid embrace of 1960s working-class Chicago, 10-year-old Karen Reyes tries to solve the murder of her upstairs neighbor
in a graphic diary, employing B movie horror imagery and pulp monster magazines. PW senior news editor Calvin Reid calls Ferris's debut
graphic novel "awesome."
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Graywolf
The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood
Belle Boggs (Sept., $16 trade paper)
12-city tour, Goodreads giveaways, an Indie Next Pick, 25,000-copy first printing
"The Art of Waiting is essential reading for those interested in what an essay today can do," says John Francisconi at Bank Square Books in
Mystic, Conn. "Boggs is somehow able here to transform the clinical and sedate language of infertility treatments into a beautiful song of hope,
and transformation. The metaphors Boggs finds for her travails sing, and the patient quality of her narration stuns."
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Grove
Christodora
Tim Murphy (Aug., $27)
An Indie Next pick, an Amazon best book of August, 17,500-copy first printing
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Set in the Christodora, an iconic building in Manhattan's East Village, this novel moves from the Tompkins Square Riots and the attempts by
activists to galvanize a response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s to a future New York City of the 2020s, where subzero winters no longer
exist. Paul Yamazaki, head buyer at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, called it "the best novel I've read about the cost of activism."
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New Directions
The Last Wolf and Herman
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, trans. from the Hungarian by George Szirtes and John Batki
(Sept., $16.95 trade paper)
These two novellas by the most recent winner of the Man Booker International Prize showcase why he won. "On their own, both volumes are
slender storytelling jewels, but together they are an existential inquiry into the human animal by a unique and ingenious writer," PW wrote in a
starred review.
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New York Review Books
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(dist. by PRH)
Zama
Antonio di Benedetto, trans. from the Spanish by Esther Allen (Aug., $15.95 trade paper)
It has taken 50 years for this classic of Argentinian literature to be translated into English. Set in the last decade of the 18th century, Zama
describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a high-up servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asuncion, the
capital of remote Paraguay. Don Diego does as little as he possibly can while plotting a transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his
hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed. PW's starred review called it "a once and future classic."
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Oneworld
(dist. by PGW)
Umami
Laiajufresa, trans. from the Spanish by Sophie
Hughes (Sept., $21.99)
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Winner of an English PEN award, 1,500-copy first printing
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This novel, which was listed as an International Hot Property by PW last year and was named one of the most anticipated books of 2016 by the
Millions, takes place in Mexico City. Ana, , a precocious 12-year-old who reads Agatha Christie to forget the mysterious death of her little sister,
decides to plant a milpa, a crop-growing system common in the Yucatan, in her backyard. As she digs, her neighbors delve into their own past.
The ripple effects of grief; childlessness, illness, and displacement saturate their stories, secrets seep out, and questions emerge.
Open Letter
(dist. by Consortium)
A Greater Music
Bae Suah, trans. from the Korean
by Deborah Smith (Oct., $13-95)
Author and translator tour
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A young Korean writer falls into an icy river in the Berlin suburbs, which sets in motion a series of her memories. Throughout, the writer's
relationship with Joachim, a rough-and-ready metalworker, is contrasted with her friendship with M, an ultra-refined music-loving German
teacher, who was once her lover. Some see Suah as the next big South s Korean writer to break out, following Han Kang (The Vegetarian). This is
her second novel to be published in English; two more are slated for 2017.
Other Press
(dist. by PRH)
Agnes
Peter Stamm, trans. from the
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German by Michael Hofmann
(Oct. $18.95)
Chicago outreach, backlist promotion, reading group guide, Goodreads giveaways, 25,000-copy first printing
Stamm's international bestselling debut novel, a psychological romance first published in Germany in 1998, is being published in the U.S. for the
first time. In it, an unnamed writer pursues a love affair with a Ph.D. candidate after meeting her at the Chicago Public Library. "'Write a story
about me,' she said, 'so I know what you think of me.'" While he crafts the story of their love, their relationship is often dictated by the story itself,
as he imagines what might be rather than what is.
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Princeton Univ.
(dist. by Perseus Academic)
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Welcome to the Universe
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael Strauss, and J. Richard Gott (Oct., $39.95)
Author appearances, advertising, 25,000-copy first printing
This heavily illustrated book by three leading astrophysicists covers topics including why Pluto lost its planetary status, whether our universe is
part of an infinite cosmos, and the prospects of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
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Sarabande
(dist. by Consortium)
Malafemmena
Louisa Ermelino (Aug., $15.95 trade paper)
In this eclectic collection from PW's reviews director, the stories follow strong-willed women on adventures at home and abroad. In a starred
review, PW wrote that "the stories' themes are elemental and affecting, lingering in the mind like parables or myths sketching something vital,
sad, and true."
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Soft Skull
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(dist. by PGW)
Another Place You've Never Been
Rebecca Kauffman (Oct., $25)
These linked stories, set in Buffalo, N.Y., follow Tracy from being a spunky 10-year-old to a troubled adolescent to a struggling adult. A starred
PW review calls this "an undeniably moving and emotionally true portrayal of the kitchen sink of human experience." Longlisted for the 2016
Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
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Soho
(dist. by PRH)
Never Look an American in the Eye: Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts, and the Making of a Nigerian American
Okey Ndibe (Oct., $25)
Author tour, 35,000-copy first printing
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Ndibe's memoir takes its name from the advice his uncle gave him when he left Nigeria to edit African Commentary magazine--advice that
caused some problems when he was mistaken for a bank robber 10 days after he arrived in the U.S. Ndibe examines his development as a
novelist, as well as the differences between Nigerian and American etiquette and politics. His novel Foreign Gods, Inc. was starred in PW and
was an NPR Great Read of 2014.
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Two Dollar Radio
(dist. by Consortium)
The Gloaming
Melanie Finn (Sept., $16.99 trade paper)
5,000--copy first printing
In her second novel after Away from You, Finn, a finalist for the Orange Prize, has created a literary thriller about a young woman whose husband
has left her. After a tragic accident in the Swiss countryside, the woman flees to Tanzania, where she can't shake the feeling that she's being
followed. Published in the U.K. last year (under the title Shame), the novel was shortlisted for the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize.
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Univ. of California
(dist. by Perseus Academic)
Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas
Edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (Oct., $49-95 hardcover; $29-95 trade paper)
Author tour; advertising, including in New York subways and subway stations; first printing: 55,000-copies paper, 5,000-copies hardcover
This beautifully designed and illustrated . volume from journalist Solnit and Jelly Schapiro, author of Island People (Knopf, Nov.), conveys the
experience of being in New York City through 26 maps and essays by experts including linguists and ethnographers. The book, which completes
a trilogy of atlases, celebrates New York City's unique vitality, while critiquing its racial and economic inequality.
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Univ. of Chicago
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Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row
Forrest Stuart (Aug., $27.50)
In his first year working in Los Angeles's Skid Row, sociologist Stuart was stopped on the street by police 14 times, usually for doing little more
than standing still. A woman he met there was stopped more than 100 times and arrested upward of 60 times for sitting on the sidewalk. Down,
Out, and Under Arrest looks at how zero-tolerance policing and mass incarceration have reshaped the social fabric of Skid Row and other
disadvantaged neighborhoods.
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Wave
(dist. by Consortium)
My Private Property
Mary Ruefle (Oct., $25)
5,000-copy first printing
Excerpted in Granta, Harper's, the Paris Review, and Tin House; 5,000-copy first printing
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Laurie Greer of Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C., comments on this collection of short prose pieces from the Whiting Award-winning poet:
"Like snapshots of a mind caught in brief pauses, these fully justified blocks of language look like prose. They act like poetry, argue like essays."
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Just for Kids
Cinco Puntos
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Rani Patel in Full Effect
Sonia Patel (Sept., $16.95 hardcover; $11.95 trade paper)
This was the only book by a small independent publisher to be featured in the YA Editors' and Authors' Buzz panels at BEA. In a starred review,
PW wrote: "Patel sets her powerful debut novel in 1991, filling it with bygone rap references and an electric verbal blend of Gujarati, slang,
Hawaiian pidgin, and the rhymes Rani crafts. Patel compassionately portrays Rani's entangled emotions, lack of self-confidence, and burgeoning
sense of empowerment as she moves forward from trauma." Ages 12-up.
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Flying Eye
(dist. by Consortium)
The Journey
Francesca Sanna (Sept., $18.95)
"I am so grateful for this candid, colorful, and graceful retelling of a family's fleeing home, which transcends any specific time in history or place
on Earth to welcome us all into its pages and its story of common courage and hope," says Joanna Parzakonis, co-owner of Kalamazoo's
Bookbug. PW gave it a starred review. Ages 3-7
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Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Rosen, Judith. "The big Indie books of fall." Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2016, p. 23+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462236394&it=r&asid=e4f2799d0c103720a15e553ab7250f22. Accessed 9 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462236394

Smith, Julia. "I'll Tell You in Person." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 30. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463755027&it=r. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017. "I'll Tell You in Person: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 53. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900394&it=r. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017. Rosen, Judith. "The big Indie books of fall." Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2016, p. 23+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462236394&it=r. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

• The Opiate
  https://theopiatemagazine.com/2016/09/14/pain-is-a-virtue-chloe-caldwells-ill-tell-you-in-person/
  Word count: 1760

  Pain Is A Virtue: Chloe Caldwell’s I’ll Tell You In Person
  GENNA RIVIECCIO SEPTEMBER 14, 2016 0 COMMENTS

  It’s pretty much unspoken in the twenty-first century that any book or collection of stories about being, essentially, a fuck-up with no concrete life direction is going to be highly desirable reading material to most audiences in their 20s and 30s. That being said, Chloe Caldwell’s latest, I’ll Tell You in Person, is a love letter to anyone who has no idea what the hell she’s doing.

  Starting with the poignant introductory quote, “I get it. Nothin’s ever happened to you–and you write books about it,” Caldwell sets the tone for the condemnation frequently thrown at those (often women) who feel compelled to write about the minutiae and so-called mundanity of everyday existence, ill-advised steak seeking and heroin dependency included. Feeling the need to constantly defend herself for preferring the genre that is the personal essay, Caldwell offers a prologue (“In Real Life”) that explains the genesis of her fascination with personal writing (a piece entitled “Mono No Aware” by Miki Howald from a book called Like Water Burning: Issue One).

  It is within the parameters of this introduction that Caldwell calls out the most problematic issue with being a writer who writes about, well, herself–or at least a more caricaturized version of herself. As she laments, “I’ve learned this notion of not knowing where you end and the artist begins, while watching films and reading books, has a term: participation mystique.” This difficulty that not just readers, but those in one’s own life, have with separating the artist from the persona is elaborated on when Caldwell rehashes, “‘The thing about your essays is that they’re always about you,’ a past boyfriend said. ‘Well, yeah–personal essays are a genre,’ I retorted. ‘Ever heard of it?'”

  But this knee-jerk reaction Caldwell has to defend herself against those who would attack her for either 1) writing them into her tales of shame or 2) candidly speaking about her most intimate traumas (drug addiction spurred on by acne-related self-consciousness chief among them) is not necessary. We all endure these moments of pain in our lives, and to be able to identify with someone else who so succinctly describes the general embarrassment and remorse associated with long-term living is nothing if not a comfort. Starting with “Prime Meats,” a tale that focuses primarily on the various problematic ins and outs of first getting a job in New York City and then actually sustaining it amid a busy social and drinking schedule, Caldwell ingratiates us into the innovative ways one can procure “extras” when her budget isn’t exactly flush. In this case, that innovation is through posting an ad on Craigslist (all the rage at the time of her jewelry store sales job, whereas, now, it’s more of a novelty item than anything else). With her cohort, Ana, Caldwell crafted the bait that would get men to pay for their steak dinner with no sexual expectations:

  Steak and Scotch
  Hey sexy bros, who wants to buy some prime bitches some prime
  meat and drink obscene amounts of liquor? Let’s kick it.
  P.S. We’re psycho (in a fun way) and we want to
  give you surveys

  Of course, most people who responded had sexual expectations, ultimately leading to Caldwell’s mother cautioning, “I bet most artists don’t visit unknown strangers in a strange and unknown environment.” Though Caldwell’s mother is completely wrong, it spooked the Craigslist connoisseur enough to stop the experiment altogether.

  From the schemes of the week that make life in New York interesting, Caldwell then covers the early days of her inability to control intake–of anything. And it all began, naturally, with Yodels. This propensity toward binging led to another means to fill a void: drug use. “I was addicted to everything and absolutely nothing. I reached for anything that would keep me away from being with myself. Whenever a drug dealer asked me, ‘So what do you want?’ I had to think for a second. I went in never knowing what it was I wanted.” The craving to distract and destruct is all too common, particularly among those who move to “the big city” expecting to be special and then somehow finding themselves going on interviews at Brooklyn Industries.

  “Hungry Ghost” is a story entirely about “the Celebrity” Caldwell anticipates visiting her at her Hudson abode in the wake of the publication of her first book, Women. This “celebrity” is clearly Lena Dunham based on the description: “she’s somewhere on the spectrum between Eileen Myles and Beyoncé. You probably admire her too–or you might hate her and think she’s fat.” From there, we’re taken into the hyper-stressed mindset of Caldwell as she prepares for “the Celebrity’s” arrival, spending money she doesn’t have on candles from TJ Maxx and such. Ultimately, all this build up and anticipation in awaiting “the Celebrity” leads Caldwell to the following analogy: “In Buddhism, the term hungry ghost refers to the person whose appetite exceeds their capacity for satisfaction.” Even if Dunham had showed up, it would have somehow never met with the expectations Caldwell had allowed to mount. And, hopefully, in the wake of the Lena Dunham backlash (an “author” The Opiate has long not held in high esteem), Caldwell will distance herself from making proud claims about being published on Lenny Letter. But one supposes that’s neither here nor there.

  “Soul Killer,” which commences Part 2 of I’ll Tell You In Person, highlights this unique and beautiful ability Caldwell has to unironically contrast her white girlness against her inner hardened criminal. The first sentence, “I got a pedicure each time I promised myself I’d stop doing heroin–which is to say, I got pedicures that whole summer,” toes the line (no pun intended) between just the right amount of absurdity and genuineness. After moving in with her father for one of those periods that most millennials seems to be forced into, Caldwell’s skin became plagued with acne, a topic she’s all too familiar with writing about (the story originally appeared as “My Year of Heroin and Acne” on Salon.com). While some readers may not feel empathy for getting addicted to heroin solely because of a skin condition, Caldwell writes with such tortured chagrin that you, too, start to think maybe that lip pimple is reason enough to understand hitting the hard stuff. A season spent growing acclimated to the effects of the drug (which she never allowed herself to inject) found Caldwell plateauing. Her realization that she would need to shoot it up in order to continue feeling anything is what eventually forced her to wean off. Like her yoga teacher said, “What feels like nectar in the beginning turns into poison in the long run, and what feels like poison in the beginning is nectar in the end.”

  Easily mistakable for the title of a Lana Del Rey song, “The Music & The Boys” is Caldwell reaching the farthest back into her past, recounting her place in high school as a boys’ girl, the kind you could hang out with sans worrying about any sexual weirdness (her novella, Women, possibly offers some insight into why). Name checking such dated references as You’ve Got Mail, Titanic and Gwen Stefani, Caldwell delights in these carefree memories of the past, with a specific emphasis on her then best boy-friend, Nat.

  “The Music & The Boys” marks something of a decline in the quality of essays briefly, with “Failing Singing” an examination of Caldwell’s gradual digression from promising vocalist to fun-loving alcohol consumer. Subsequently, “Sisterless” is a somewhat schmaltzy examination of all the surrogate sisters Caldwell has taken in as her own over the years. “The Girls of My Youth” is an appropriate precursor to “The Laziest Coming Out Story You’ve Ever Heard,” with its allusions to the type of sexuality-blurring activities girls in their preadolescence and teenage years can engage in. This segue into “The Laziest Coming Out Story…” is a natural one, though both stories are, for all intents and purposes, lazy. After all, most people are in the same boat as Caldwell these days, who asserts, “I will never have a sexual identity.

  An incarnation of the essay, “Maggie and Me: A Love Story,” first appeared in VICE, and details the blossoming friendship between Maggie Estep (who also appeared in the same collection as Caldwell, Goodbye to All That) and Caldwell after both found themselves in Upstate New York.

  Caldwell’s strong (and arguably best) essay, “Berlin 2009,” concludes I’ll Tell You In Person with a powerful punch, emphasizing a common issue among longtime New York residents: an ennui that propels a strong desire to leave. In Caldwell’s case, having a brother who lived in Berlin was helpful to making the switch. A bad relationship with that classic breed of older man–emotionally unavailable–propelled Caldwell to take the plunge in partaking of a drastic environmental change. But upon arriving, it was as though she knew she had made a grave mistake: “It wasn’t my first trip to Europe. I’d taken other trips there, and they left dark memories. Maybe I just get depressed in Europe, I thought. It’s my major character flaw.”

  In spite of having a partner in crime, Rain, while there, it was like having all that free time was what they wanted in a city that they knew–New York. When friends would ask Caldwell about how it was going, expecting tales of sexual escapades and drunken mishaps, she would ask, “Have you ever been anxious and depressed?” They would reply, “Yeah,” to which Caldwell would drive home the point, “Have you ever been anxious and depressed in Berlin?”

  Of course, like so many girls of the Caldwell breed, she had to get back to New York after enough months spent in this form of purgatorial “vacationing.” On her way back, she thought to herself, “I was almost home. I was getting closer to knowing what that meant.” With I’ll Tell You In Person we’re closer to knowing who she is as a writer–persona separated from the actual woman or not.

• Buzzfeed LGBT
  https://www.buzzfeed.com/ashleyford/this-woman-wrote-a-book-with-almost-no-male-characters-and-w?utm_term=.taj8Ej0Y5#.wx5rnlqj4
  Word count: 1031

  QUOTED: "I wanted space for people to make themselves the narrator, and project themselves into the book. Especially anyone who was grieving really hard about losing someone else. ... I wanted the narrator to be someone who was looking into the sun, and not shying away. This person was openly saying how am I going to grieve and self-destruct today."

  This Woman Wrote A Book With Almost No Male Characters And Women Love It
  With Women, Chloe Caldwell proves great literature doesn’t require the voices of men.

  posted on Jan. 12, 2015, at 2:53 p.m.
  Ashley C. Ford
  Ashley C. Ford
  BuzzFeed News Reporter
  TweetTumblr

  Hobart Books

  You might think a small-press autobiographical novella called Women that features one transgender man and texts with one cisgender man would find its way into the hands of only so many people. In the case of Chloe Caldwell’s book, this has not been true. Perhaps because the story interacts with the reader, with The Narrator exposing her own fears, obsessions, and insecurities as we follow along. She tells us what she’s afraid we won’t understand, then exposes herself anyway with lines like, “I don’t know if I will be able to get you to see her the way I saw her. I worry that if I cannot make you fall in love with her inexplicably, inexorably, and immediately, the way that I did, then you will not be experiencing this book in the way I hope you will.”
  Women has been publicly praised by writer Cheryl Strayed, Lena Dunham, and fashion model Elle Macpherson. Despite Caldwell’s long-standing mentoring relationship with Strayed, she had no connection to the other two women until after her book was published. She chalks up the sudden interest in her work to women wanting to help other women: “It’s so crazy to me when people say women are so hard to make friends with. I’m like, What? It’s happened for me so many times. It’s always been other women writers in my corner. I trust women and I value their opinions,” Caldwell says. As is the case in Strayed’s stunningly successful (and moving) memoir Wild, The Narrator has trouble relaying her intense level of grief to the people in her life. When someone mentions Finn’s name, she cries, leaves, goes to another bar, and drinks whiskey until she needs to call a cab to get home. When told she’s too hard, that she needs to be softer, she admits, “I don’t know what to grieve.”
  When asked why the protagonist of her new novel, Women, has no name, Caldwell responds, “I wanted space for people to make themselves the narrator, and project themselves into the book. Especially anyone who was grieving really hard about losing someone else.” With The Narrator, Caldwell wanted to create a character who was raw in the post-breakup recovery process. “I wanted the narrator to be someone who was looking into the sun, and not shying away. This person was openly saying how am I going to grieve and self-destruct today.”
  For Caldwell, who spoke with BuzzFeed over the phone, the best thing about the character is The Narrator’s willingness to accept her part in her own pain. “With heartbreak, at the end of the day, if you’re honest with yourself you know that it takes two people to break a heart. You need to understand that to grow.” After a huge fight via email, The Narrator’s ex-girlfriend, Finn, points to her for “throwing tantrums” and what she calls “manic behavior” as a cause for their dissolution. After reading this, The Narrator comes to the conclusion that, “It’s me that I hate. I know it’s me that has chosen this.”
  This idea of learning compassion through owning your pain is a central theme in Women. Caldwell says, “I think sometimes we have to suffer and be our shittiest, neediest, ugliest selves and come out on the other side. I think that’s how we gain compassion for others when they’re suffering.” Unfortunately, a wealth of compassion — or maybe a delusion of empathy — backfires on the protagonist. Despite dealing with infidelity and possessiveness from her love interest, Finn, The Narrator continues to believe she won’t or can’t be hurt by her Finn. “She thinks because Finn is a woman she can trust her with her heart and soul, but she is still wronged by a woman. That’s something I wanted to get through — that women don’t and can’t date other women because women are safer to date in general. Finn hurt her too. Just like a man could.”
  The brevity of Women allows for deep introspection, but forces The Narrator to act, move, and show the reader the urgency of her pain. The story follows her through her first intimate relationship with an older woman, subsequent heartbreak, and the inevitable deconstruction and reassembling of one’s life in the wake of devastating emotions. For The Narrator, this means finding her way back home emotionally, and geographically.
  Caldwell admits she’s “uncomfortable” writing fiction. She considers nonfiction familiar if not slightly harrowing. “It’s a curse when you feel comfortable writing about yourself. A lot of people aren’t. Sometimes I wish I were good at something else, or I wish it wasn’t my thing, but it is my thing. I’m mostly happy about that, but it’s challenging.” To be fair, she calls her novel “mostly autobiographical.”
  Even though she’s experienced her own romantic relationships with women, not unlike The Narrator’s relationship with Finn, Caldwell is still reluctant to identify her sexuality. “I still don’t know how to label myself and I’m still really confused about it. I feel embarrassed saying that. Part of me wants to have a label so bad because I’m actually also confused without them, but I’m still terrified by them.” After a beat she says, “I’m OK with bisexual.”

• Hippocampus Magazine
  http://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/2016/10/review-ill-tell-you-in-person-by-chloe-caldwell/
  Word count: 1014

  QUOTED: "Chloe Caldwell is a force. A quirky writer who shares personal details of her life and describes them in a way that never feels like TMI, it’s the opposite. You want more, the result of a trustworthy narrator and a skilled storyteller."

  Review: I’ll Tell You in Person by Chloe Caldwell
  October 1, 2016

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  cover of I'll tell you in person - all yellowChloe Caldwell once clogged Cheryl Strayed’s toilet. She also untangled Naomi Wolf’s jewelry. As a child, Chloe liked spaghetti before it was fully cooked, greenish bananas, and orange tic-tacs. Always wanting more. And here we begin to see what Chloe’s second book of essays, I’ll Tell You in Person (Coffee House Press; October 2016) is about: Chloe’s desire for more. More friendship, more love, more drugs, more sex, more New York City, more literature, and most of all, more life. Lucky for us Chloe shares this passion for life with the reader, and by proxy we experience more life too.

  In the introduction, Chloe describes an experience when she was eighteen and sneaking into her brother’s room looking for Halloween candy or quarters to steal. She spots a random book on her brother’s bookshelf and begins reading an essay, “Mono No Aware” by Miki Howald. This is a central moment for Chloe, the moment of falling in love with the transformative quality of language and writing. “I inserted myself into her words and made her experience mine.” This is exactly what Chloe Caldwell does with her essays; she invites us into her life. “I hope you will project your mistakes and failures and heartache and joys into mine.”

  In this second collection of essays following her novel Women, readers travel back and forth in time as Caldwell shares stories with language both stark and kaleidoscopically colorful. By the time you finish the first essay, “Prime Meats,” a hilarious Chutzpah-filled romp searching for men, sex, Scotch, and steak on Craigslist, Chloe feels like a good friend, the kind you’ll hopefully have at least once in your life.

  In 2012, I read Steve Almond’s Rumpus interview with Caldwell and was immediately curious and smitten. Who is this writer just a few years older than my daughter having such a full life? I found myself a copy of a first collection of essays, Legs Get Led Astray, and ever since I can’t help but think about Caldwell whenever I step inside the Seattle Public Library. (For an explanation, you must read LGLA.)

  Chloe Caldwell is a force. A quirky writer who shares personal details of her life and describes them in a way that never feels like TMI, it’s the opposite. You want more, the result of a trustworthy narrator and a skilled storyteller. I have been trying to find a way to compare Caldwell to another writer, but no one quite fits. Then it hit me. Vivian Gornick. These two writers fifty years apart are both ‘odd women in the city’ taking solace in what Gornick describes as “a salvation on the streets.” With a shared urgency to make sense of their lives through writing, inner worlds collide with daily encounterings, causing the reader’s desire to follow these writers everywhere.

  The book is divided into three parts. The parts are untitled, allowing us to categorize themes for ourselves. “In Hungry Ghost,” Caldwell unfurls the drama and disappointment of an almost sleepover with a big time celebrity (not a writer). This celebrity was “somewhere on the spectrum between Eileen Myles and Beyoncé.” We receive just enough hints to figure out who the celebrity might be: “You probably admire her too — or you might hate her and think she’s fat.” Or “She’s read Women and publicly supported it.” We hear about the preparations for the sleepover, glimpsing Caldwell’s longings and anxieties, “I practiced my smile.” And we see the gift she selects for this celebrity at T.J. Maxx as “a half joke.” Caldwell’s friend Karina says, “She’ll love that! It’s the perfect amount of creepy.” This essay reveals Caldwell’s maturity and skill as a writer, describing the past with the throbbing immediacy of the present – I was rooting for Caldwell like I rooted for Greta Gerwig in Mistress America, who by the way should play Chloe should this book be made into a movie. When doom arrives, I am glad she has Fran, a supportive friend who says, “At least you didn’t buy new sheets.” It occurs to me after a second reading that this essay reads as a love note to the squadron of women friends who comprise the fabric of Caldwell’s life.

  And this brings me to the penultimate essay, “Maggie and Me: A Love Story,” a recounting of the mutual love between Caldwell and writer Maggie Essep, however brief. Describing her friends’ excitement for this new friend Maggie, Caldwell exclaims, “I know this is a stroke of insane luck.” But the analyst in me is thinking, not really, because everything we learn about Caldwell reveals a woman who lives her life open to new experiences, random encounters, and friendships. Of course she would eventually find her way to Essep. In describing Vivian Gornick, book critic Dwight Garner says, “She is as good a writer about friendship as we have.” How funny, because I was thinking the same thing about Chloe Caldwell.

  Emily Books and Coffee House Press has gifted us with a vibrant yellow book of essays written by a vibrant gifted writer. If you’re wondering what Chloe has to say because she’s only thirty, don’t bother. Chloe gets there first, “Who do I think I am to write about myself? Who do I think I am to be so solipsistic? Who the fuck am I?”

  You are Chloe Fucking Caldwell, that’s who. More, please.

• Heavy Feather Review
  https://heavyfeatherreview.com/2016/09/20/ill-tell-you-in-person-by-chloe-caldwell/
  Word count: 1247

  QUOTED: "In her new book of essays, I’ll Tell You in Person, Chloe Caldwell has the voice of a best girlfriend confiding all of her deepest, darkest secrets—about acne and drugs, sex and binge eating. Caldwell makes it seem easy to speak with such a lively and intimate voice, but that’s only because she’s a masterful writer. It takes both a fair amount of guts and a fine sense of craft to create the airy, breezy, cavalier persona who inhabits these essays. And it takes even more skill—and heart—to make that persona likeable."

  I’LL TELL YOU IN PERSON by Chloe Caldwell
  Heavy FeatherSeptember 20, 2016book reviews, nonfictionPost navigation
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  I’ll Tell You in Person, by Chloe Caldwell. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Coffee House Press/Emily Books, October 2016. 184 pages. $16.95, paper.

  In her new book of essays, I’ll Tell You in Person, Chloe Caldwell has the voice of a best girlfriend confiding all of her deepest, darkest secrets—about acne and drugs, sex and binge eating. Caldwell makes it seem easy to speak with such a lively and intimate voice, but that’s only because she’s a masterful writer. It takes both a fair amount of guts and a fine sense of craft to create the airy, breezy, cavalier persona who inhabits these essays. And it takes even more skill—and heart—to make that persona likeable.

  The collection begins with a kind of prologue essay called “In Real Life.” It’s a meta-essay about the process of writing and publishing, and about Caldwell’s discovery of and love for the personal essay form. It’s also an homage to an essay by Miki Howald called “Mono No Aware,” which inspired Caldwell to become an essayist herself. As she says, “I realized I’d found something I didn’t want to quit, something I desired, something I wanted to show up for.” Essay writing, in other words, saved her from herself, even as it gave her a way to express and create that self.

  In the following essay, “Prime Meats,” she tells a story of her reckless young days in New York working for a jewelry store, drinking, hanging out with her friend Ana, and meeting men. She and Ana put an ad on Craigslist to help them in their pursuit of men. They don’t, however, want to date these men, at least, not exactly. Rather, they make it clear that they’re just looking for food and drink—scotch and steaks, specifically. Their ad reads as follows:

  Steak and Scotch

  Hey sexy bros, who wants to buy some prime bitches some prime
  meat and drink obscene amounts of liquor? Let’s kick it.
  P.S. We’re psycho (in a fun way) and we want to
  give you surveys.

  It’s a good laugh for a time, and Caldwell romps through this period with all of her signature candor and humor. The essay reaches its apex, though, when her mom comments that it’s a dangerous thing to be doing. Caldwell eventually takes this evaluation to heart, despite herself, and in the last part of the essay, she essentially grows up, seeing that part of her life with her mother’s eyes and through her own newfound wisdom. When she and Ana meet one of their previous “dates” on the street, they go for coffee with him. Caldwell says, though, “I had my guard up the whole time.” This turn is key to Caldwell’s style. It’s a moment of growing up, of realization, of change, and it casts a sympathetic light on all the Sex and the City-type antics of the rest of the essay. It’s a turn, essentially, toward likeability. And, as in several other essays in this collection, it’s also a turn toward her mother.

  It is that kind of moment that makes me love Caldwell’s work. If it were all simply about the hapless adventures of her twenties, I’d get bored and annoyed pretty quickly. What Caldwell does well with each essay, though, is to bring in a perspective of age and experience, without coming across as judgmental about her younger self. In fact, she shows a remarkable sense of care, both for that younger self and for everyone else she writes about. It’s her deep and enduring compassion that gives Caldwell’s essays both their literary and their moral backbone.

  All of the essays have a similar turn. In “Hungry Ghost,” for instance, she tells a story of preparing herself and her apartment for a visit from an unnamed famous person, referred to simply as the “Celebrity.” She is infatuated with the woman, buying candles she can’t afford and gift-bagging a book, The Writer and her Work, to offer to her. It’s a book, it turns out, that Caldwell’s mom had given her, but anything for the Celebrity, right? The Celebrity, however, never shows, and Caldwell comes back to earth, returns to herself, and reconnects with what really matters to her—true friends, family, and her own sanity. And reclaiming that book as her own is part of this process: “I groggily walked over to the bag, untied the ribbon, but the gift bag in the recycling, and put my book back on the shelf where it belonged.”

  In “Failing Singing,” she tells of how she once took voice lessons and considered herself a singer. She doesn’t, however, like to advertise that fact: “Telling people you stopped singing is something you regret the moment the words leave your mouth. It’s meant to impress, but it backfires and disappoints. It just makes you look like a loser. A giver-upper. A has-been. Possibly even a liar.” What she discovers, though, is that she’s discovered a new love: writing. And in a beautifully-subtle moment at the end of the essay, she sees a photo of herself giving a reading and thinks, “I look like I’m singing.” It’s a moving scene, showing us both her fear of failure and her shy pride in at last finding her calling.

  The final section of the book deals with her love of women and her conflicted bisexuality, and in this territory, too, Caldwell has a disarmingly good-natured voice that ends up exploring difficult, emotional topics. In “Girls of my Youth,” she tells stories of early experiences with girlfriends, both as friends and as proto-lovers. In “The Laziest Coming Out Story You’ve Ever Heard,” she offers a list of anecdotes and vignettes about her inability, finally, to understand her own sexuality. And in “Maggie and Me: A Love Story,” she tells about her friendship with slam poet Maggie Estep—a friendship that barely had time to begin before Estep’s untimely death. All of the essays in this section play with terms, expectations, and the sexual continuum, but ultimately they celebrate the power of love and connectedness.

  Caldwell’s essays are fun to read, and by the end of the collection I felt like I’d made a new friend who’d invited me into a long, extended conversation that I didn’t want to end. So now I’m looking forward to her next book. And her next after that.

• The MAsters Review
  https://mastersreview.com/book-review-women-by-chloe-caldwell/
  Word count: 890

  QUOTED: "She brings to the page such an urgency that it is impossible not to be swept up, to remember what it was like when we ourselves were so engulfed by another person that when we emerged, we had to struggle to find ourselves again. Women is a skillfully and engrossingly written novella, a small slice of overwhelming love and heartbreak, and the search for belonging and self. Caldwell proves herself as a writer to watch."

  Book Review: Women by Chloe Caldwell

  full_WOMEN-web-front-coverPublished by Short Drive/Long Flight Books, Women is the thickness of my index finger and nearly the height of my (rather small) hand. It’s not often that I can palm a book like a basketball. But for all its brevity, Chloe Caldwell’s debut novella packs a serious gut-punch. It’s about falling in love with a woman for the first time, about the crisis of identity that comes with it, about female friendship, the female body, and learning to accept yourself. It’s largely about rushing love and crushing heartbreak, but it is also pretty damn funny.

  The story begins when our protagonist moves to a new city to get clean. She gets a job at a library, and begins to meet new people. This includes Finn, an older woman who works at another branch of the library. They talk about books and writing, and grow attracted to one another. Finn has a long-term girlfriend of ten years, but both parties stubbornly push that fact aside. Our narrator has never fallen in love with another woman before, and so we experience her searching and grasping for identity: “I did not know if I were straight or gay. This or that. Being in the middle was somewhere I did not know how to be.” Their relationship is intense, tumultuous—either euphorically amazing or terribly low. They are obsessed with each other, and the narrator likens it to a replacement for her drug addiction.

  When it inevitably must end, it ends messily, fractures splitting and coursing into the future. The narrator goes on OkCupid dates and tries out writing classes, meets new people, all the while still occasionally seeing Finn. It seems nearly impossible to rid Finn from her system. Yet when she finally leaves the city and heads for home, she doesn’t say goodbye to Finn, at least not in person. The obsession and heartbreak have finally faded, in the way that the most intense feelings cannot be sustained. The story ends on a note of acceptance and resilience. Not so much “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” but rather, “we all keep going.”

  I was struck by the immediate intimacy I felt with the narrator—it felt like that exhilarating moment in which you earn a person’s confidence and pass from acquaintance to friend, yet extended over the course of the story. The book feels deeply heartfelt. Although it is only semi-autobiographical, I was hard-pressed to imagine that all this hadn’t happened verbatim in our everyday, waking life; it seemed impossible that Finn was not real, but “an amalgamation of a dozen women,” as Caldwell states in an interview Lit Reactor. This is a testament to Caldwell’s skill at weaving plot and character to create fiction. It is rare that I am so thoroughly convinced by a story.

  This verisimilitude is helped by its occasional meta-fictional narrative. Every so often, a passage will refer to the writing of the manuscript itself:

  During lunch with an editor, he tells me that to write fiction, I should just make the situation go the way I want it to go. So I tried leaving Finn’s girlfriend out of the manuscript. But it didn’t work that way. Early readers didn’t understand where all the drama was coming from. Finn and I rarely talked about her girlfriend. Instead, we allowed her to be a looming tempest around everything we did.

  The reader understands that what they’re holding is the result of process, that the narrator has written this book after several drafts and is now willing to share it with you. Of course, this is true, but the story, strictly speaking, is not. It acts as an interesting study in the fuzzy line between fiction and memoir, and the reader can never quite know which parts are “real”—although it hardly matters, since it all feels real.

  The book situates itself firmly in the precedent of queer women’s fiction; hardly a few pages go by without a reference to Anne Carson, Jeanette Winterson, or, in one case, The L Word. Caldwell uses these as tethers for her own book, and earns a spot for herself among those she references. She brings to the page such an urgency that it is impossible not to be swept up, to remember what it was like when we ourselves were so engulfed by another person that when we emerged, we had to struggle to find ourselves again. Women is a skillfully and engrossingly written novella, a small slice of overwhelming love and heartbreak, and the search for belonging and self. Caldwell proves herself as a writer to watch in the coming years.

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