Exploring the boundaries between friends and family, hobbies and obsessions, and honesty and oversharing, Chloe Caldwell showcases an irresistible talent for navigating the infinite territory of in-between. I’ll Tell You in Person is a candid and captivating account of attempts at adulthood and all the less-than-perfect ways we get there. Disarmingly frank essays on sexuality, celebrity, acne, wanting to write, and the eternal what-should-I-do-with-my-life. Caldwell has an unsparing knack for looking within and reporting back what’s really there, rather than what she’d like you to see.
Pre-order a signed copy from WORD Bookstore.
Buy from Coffee House, IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon. Pub date: October 4, 2016
“Chloe Caldwell writes with an emotional intensity that is insightful, heartfelt, and often hilarious. In her new essay collection, I’ll Tell You in Person, she perfectly captures what it’s like to try and navigate your way through the traumatic first decade of adulthood. It’s filled with a raw honesty and voyeuristic allure that’s utterly captivating.”
—Shawn Donley, Powell’s Books
“This collection isn’t some righteous manifesto. There is no moral to the story because, as seasoned writers know, stories don’t need morals. Chloe Caldwell’s sharp wit and keen powers of observation are in full force in her newest book.”
—PANK Magazine
“This book kicked my ass, heart and brain. It’s wildly entertaining and deeply loving. A heroic triumph in intrepid self-observation. A testament to the heights and depths the personal essay can reach. Caldwell shows how, in writing about ‘nothing’, we can discover the everything.”
—Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals
“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’s her deep and enduring compassion that gives Caldwell’s essays both their literary and their moral backbone.”
—Heavy Feather Review
“Chloe Caldwell tells you all her secrets in a controlled mania so that we can devour them in a more compulsive fashion. I couldn’t stop reading this book, and when I was finished I kept looking around to see where my awesome new friend went. She’s right in here, brimming with most excellent girl-dom, a commitment to experience that feels religious, a dedication to vulnerability that likewise radiates holy holy holy. I love this person’s life and I love the way she writes about it – funny and blunt and chatty and truthful.”
—Michelle Tea, author of How To Grow Up
“Chloe Caldwell has written the ideal “female companion book”—meaning, while reading, I felt like I had a female companion with at all times. On the subway, I had my female companion. In my backpack, I had my female companion. On the sidewalk, I held on tight to my female companion, and pedestrians would stare at her, so boldly yellow in my hands. Pretty soon my female companion took up residency in my head. She helped me process the world with sass, spite, sympathy, and wit. I don’t know what could be better than a book that allows you to be alone but to never feel lonely. I’ll Tell You in Person does this and more. It projects the most potent afterglow, and Caldwell is a writer beyond gifted and generous. She is like a sage. ”
—Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock
Women
Women is a novella that explores an affair and the aftermath between two women nineteen years apart. The book is about the blurred line of female friendship, about being a daughter, a mother, a woman, and a friend. It’s an urgent recall of a heartbreak and a stark identity in crisis.
Available from Hobart, Powell’s, Amazon, & The Strand. Ebook available from Emily Books.
Featured in The New York Times Style Magazine, Time Out New York, Playboy, The Guardian, The Oregonian, Buzzfeed, and OUT Magazine.
“Women by Chloe Caldwell is a beautiful read/a perfect primer for an explosive lesbian affair/an essential truth.”
—Lena Dunham
“Women is a book of raw emotion and wrenching introspection.”—Barnes & Noble
“Chloe Caldwell’s slim and sensual novella, Women, defies labels. It is not merely a love story, or a story of sexual awakening, or a coming out story, but a story about two women wrecking each other’s lives during an illicit whirlwind romance.”
—Fjords Review
“Women captures the agonizing luminescence of young adulthood and the people who define and destroy us. It is one of the only books I can name that deals exclusively with female characters, with men pushed so far into the periphery they’re practically in orbit. It is a breathless comet-book that commands an evening with your heart, and a next-day pass-along to all the women you treasure.”
—Bustle
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 nonfiction in new and unpredictable ways. (Out of print. Reprint August 2017 from Short Flight/Long Drive Books)
“I’ve read Chloe Caldwell’s essays online, one on the tiny screen of my phone just because it was too good to stop reading. She’s young. She’s talented. Her prose has a reckless beauty that feels to me like magic.”
—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
“The essays in this collection are as exuberant as they are sad. Her storytelling is as vulnerable as it is bombastic. These essays roll in gangsta, but wear freshly picked daisies in their hair.”
—Rookie
“For the reader, going astray means getting happily lost in the prose of this daring, graceful debut.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“Legs Get Led Astray swells with a bruised innocence and self-indulgence reminiscent of two great story collections that preceded it, Susan Minot’s Lust and Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior. Like theirs, Caldwell’s is a contemporary slice of sex and struggle.”
—Bitch Magazine
