LEGS GET LED ASTRAY

Legs Get Led Astray is a provocative collection of essays that vividly rockets the reader through one young woman’s life. Chloe Caldwell beautifully and bluntly escorts you through her childhood dreams, her first loves, her most unguarded sexual exploits, bookstore crushes, babysitting jobs, heartbroken wanderlust, and the suicide of a lost lover. Caldwell’s writing remarkably explores the genre of personal non-fiction in new and unpredictable ways.

“Chloe Caldwell’s Legs Get Led Astray is a scorching hot glitter box of youthful despair and dark delight. Tender and sharp, wide-eyed and searching, these essays have a reckless beauty that feels to me like magic .”

-Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, Torch, and Tiny Beautiful Things

Steve Almond discusses Legs Get Led Astray on The Emily Rooney Show

PRAISE FOR LEGS GET LED ASTRAY

“Prepare to shed skin. Chloe Caldwell’s essays will dare you to dissect your own life. Shot-through with sexuality and sass, her language will get up in you and turn you inside out–in the best possible way.

-Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water

“I befriended the voice and the humor immediately–she writes in such a fresh, brutally honest, somewhat sad and satirical new way.”

-Mira Ptacin, founder and curator of Freerange Nonfiction

“A really good, honest confessional essay works a little like hypnotism. Its language is direct and rhythmic. It makes you focus. And even if at first you think, ‘I can’t believe the author is telling me this,’ eventually it convinces you to want to be as brave and open as the author. After reading just a few of the pieces in Chloe Caldwell’s Legs Get Led Astray, I’m pretty sure I’d be willing to tell her anything about myself if she asked. Mesmerism, pure and simple.”

—Matthew Simmons, University Bookstore, Seattle.

These true stories are raw and heartfelt…gems galore.

-Poe Ballantine, author of Things I Like About America

“I read the entire manuscript this evening in one sitting. It’s very hypnotic. There are so many excellent lines. Lines where I may have said “amen” aloud a couple of times. And it covers all of my favorite topics: boys, drinking, drugging, sex, mania, and being a woman.”

-Elizabeth Ellen, author of Fast Machine and Before You She Was A Pittbull

“Chloe Caldwell delivers slice-of-life essays with social commentary which bites, chews and changes you as she spits you out. There is no direction she can’t go in this fearless collection.”

-John Barrios, Powells

“It’s such raucously funny, sincere, and economical nonfiction that she writes. Her prose flashes. It’s like a peep show with emotional depth and amazing artistry.”

-Amy Monticello, author of Close Quarters