Published in 2024 (first published 2014)
160 pages
Chloé Caldwell is the author of the national bestseller, WOMEN (Harper Perennial, 2024). Her book TRYING will be published by Graywolf Press on August 5th, 2025. She is also the author of the essay collections I’ll Tell You in Person, Legs Get Led Astray, and the memoir The Red Zone: A Love Story.
Chloe’s work has been published in The New York Times, Bon Appétit, The Cut, Vogue, and many anthologies, including SLUTS, Without a Net, and Goodbye To All That. Chloe teaches creative nonfiction online and hosts retreats and offers writing support at scrappyliterary.com.
What is this book about?
The cult-classic novella that intimately explores one young writer’s whirlwind and whiplash affair as she falls deeply in love with a woman for the first time.
Sometimes I wonder what it is I could tell you about her for my job here to be done. I am looking for a shortcut. . . .But that would be asking too much from you. It wasn’t you who loved her.
A young writer moves from the country to the city and falls in love with another woman for the very first time. From the start, the relationship is doomed; Finn is nineteen years older, wears men’s clothes, has a cocky smirk of a smile . . . and a long-term girlfriend.
With startling clarity and breathtaking tenderness, Chloé Caldwell writes the story of a love in reverse: of nights spent drunkenly hurling a phone against a brick wall; of early mornings hungover in bed, curled up together; of emails and poems exchanged at breakneck speed. In Women, Caldwell lays bare the fierce obsession of addictive love, and asks the question: what, if anything, can who we love teach us about who we are?
In this beautiful, transcendent, bracingly sexy novella, Caldwell tells a lust-love story that will bring you to your knees. Capturing the feverish heartbreak of Sapphic romance, painting a stark picture of an identity in crisis, and illuminating the exploratory possibilities of queer life, Women brands the heart and sears the soul.
