Women: A Novella 👯
an interview with Chloé Caldwell, author of Women
In Women, a short novel by Chloé Caldwell, an unnamed narrator moves to an unnamed city and begins an affair with Finn, a butch librarian with a long-term partner. To say Finn and the narrator have bad boundaries is an understatement—they break up and vow to never speak again one day and exchange long, passionate emails the next. They enable each other’s insecurities, obsessive natures, and problem drinking. When the relationship sputters and ultimately ends, the narrator embarks on a period of heartbreak, sexual confusion, OkCupid dates, and L Word viewing.
Women was published by Short Flight / Long Drive Books in 2014. At the time, I was a barista living in West Philly. I thought I might start a business selling beaded earrings, but instead I applied to grad school. Somewhere in this mix, my ex-girlfriend lent me her copy of Women and was like, “You have to read this! It’s so good.“ I read it lying on my mattress, which was on the floor, and the stress I felt was visceral—with every page, I wanted to yell “Just break up already!!“ But of course, the narrator and Finn kept going, oblivious to my pleas.
In the decade since, I have acquired a bed frame and Women became one of those books that lesbians and queer women love to recommend with nervous laughter. It’s a book you see propped up at a used bookshop, next to the Anaïs Nin, or well-thumbed on a friend’s coffee table. Sophie reads a copy in Gen Q. The original edition is long out of print, but a new edition from HarperCollins is out NOW.
Chloé and I met up via GoogleDoc to discuss Women, women, the semantics of blocking, and blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction. I hope you enjoy this interview. I had so much fun talking to Chloé and I will definitely not be blocking her on Goodreads anytime soon.
Maddy: Hey Chloé, thank you so much for coming on my newsletter. I want to start with a big, open-ended question about what it’s like to be the author of a book like Women–a book with freaking legs, by which I mean that Women is well-traveled and well-loved by heartbroken queers, bisexuals who read, toxic dykes who love drama, and all kinds of readers you’ll probably never meet.
Chloé: Hi Maddy! Thanks for your interest and support of the OG Women. I am laughing so hard at “bisexuals who read.” My relationship to and with the book, I suppose, is ever evolving. It was a weird short micropress book without blurbs or a synopsis or genre even. It was my second book published, and I was 28 when it was released. I was in the Alt Lit world, where everyone published their friends and went on DIY book tours funded by Kickstarter. The book felt really underground and wasn’t too popular for the most part. What I mean is, it didn’t feel like it was being read very much. Because it wasn’t. Women was a slow burn. It wasn’t until some years later, that it felt solid in its being read-ness. This sounds whatever, but I can always tell if my books are being read through energy. And by energy I mean Instagram DMs, emails from strangers, and the book being included on listicles. I wasn’t paying much attention, I published two more books after the publication of Women, and it wasn’t a big part of my life. You know what’s funny? I think Women began going out of print right when I met the man I married a couple of years later. And now it’s coming back into print the same month my divorce is finalizing. You can’t make this up.
The funny thing is I’d say I do meet a good amount of the queers who have read Women, via events in NYC and so on. They introduce themselves. Recently, on the street outside a live “Poog” podcast episode in Brooklyn two came up to me. Of course I haven’t met them ALL. In fact, maybe there’s some hot masc lunatic who loves drama out there who has read the book and I’d totally vibe with. To be the author of a book that gets passed around is an incredible way to have your work be engaged with, and it's not something you think about really, when writing and publishing books. You’re not like, “I hope my book gets passed around by heartbroken toxic queers” — but now that it’s happened, I can’t think of anything more meaningful. It means there are always funny coincidences and stories and anecdotes and overlaps. I love it. Honestly, this happening has brought to my attention just how gay I am. How the gays have reacted to the book has been something of a mirror for me.
M: Congratulations on your divorce and the re-release of Women. I also feel a lot of circularity between my life and work— the older I get, the more I notice these patterns. Are you very woo when it comes to writing? Like, do you believe you’re manifesting or tapping into your subconscious? Do you have rituals? Do you believe writer’s block is real? I mean woo in a non-derogatory way, of course.
C: Thanks for your congratulations! Yeah, it definitely takes some getting older to see how the writing and life patterns play out. My past teacher Carole Maso has written about this a bit, when she got pregnant on the first try at forty—she’s in a gay relationship but intentionally slept with a man for pregnancy, she writes in her Bomb essay that she realizes the child she was meant to have had been in her pages all along.
This past year as I came into my queerness, I realized how queer-coded all of my books are, even and especially my first book, Legs Get Led Astray, from 2012. I was also really interested in writing about divorce as a topic in my last book, even though I was ostensibly writing about marriage, a year later, I got divorced. And Women definitely knew I was gay before I did.
I wouldn’t say I’m too woo about writing. I keep my writing life relatively simple. Music, headphones, coffee, morning. I like lighting a tea light because it feels grounding to light it at the beginning of a work morning and write until it burns out. If I’m going on a writing residency (often self-made) I like to bring books as guides with me and keep them on my desk. I do that at home too. Especially when I’m struggling with a project. Keeping dream journals can really play into your projects, though. I looked at some I kept a couple of years ago, and the dreams I’d written down truly predicted the future.
Writing is mystical and magical but I feel I’ll ruin it if I try to articulate the why and the how. The thing I like most about writing is how I don’t often know where it is going to take me or what I’m going to say. Because of this, sometimes I am scared to journal. “Writer’s block” isn’t part of my lexicon or world. Sometimes we write, sometimes we don’t. It’s called life. There’s a lot of writing culture I hate, like writer’s block, #amwriting bullshit, and Publisher’s Marketplace Deal posting which makes everyone else feel bad about themselves (but I’m soooo guilty of that one; I absolutely post mine).
M: I want to ask you about Jenny Schecter, an L Word character who looms large for the narrator of Women. At one point, the narrator becomes transfixed on the scene from season one when Jenny’s friend visits from the midwest. Jenny tells her friend about Marina, thereby coming out as queer. If I remember her correctly, the friend is like, “Are you attracted to me?” And just has a really fucked up, homophobic reaction that would be difficult to imagine someone in their 20s having today.
It makes sense that the narrator relates to Jenny–they’re both writers, they’re both questioning their sexualities and having destructive affairs with older, decidedly not-single lesbians. But at the same time, I can’t think of a more hated TV character than Jenny Schecter. She’s a bad writer and becomes progressively more and more unhinged as the show goes on. She murders a dog. Do you think the narrator is a Jenny apologist, or has she just not seen more than the first few episodes of season one?
C: Oh, my first instinct is that the narrator is absolutely a Jenny Schecter apologist. It’s funny you point out that scene, I’m a little bummed because we had to tweak that scene for the new edition, because we couldn’t get the rights to the dialogue in time. I was so obsessed with the, “Oh my god, she broke your heart,” line that Jenny’s friend says, and that was cut from the book. I think I loved that line because of the compassion and empathy it was said with. But yeah, total LOL to the friend being like, oh so you must be in love with me? I did have one friend recently, since I began dating women again, say she loved me but clarify she meant platonically, lmao.
I watched The L Word for the first time in 2012 bleeding into 2013. Since then, I think there’s a couple of times I’ve rewatched certain episodes, but I haven’t sat down to rewatch the whole thing a decade later though I desperately want to.
The narrator of Women is totally naive and doesn’t have examples of women also shaken by their identity and having an affair with an older lesbian so I feel like it makes sense that she would cling to Jenny. It’s obvious and lame, but it’s the resource she has.
Jenny lives rent free in so many people’s heads. I feel like I can’t speak to Jenny with my older and wiser perspective since I haven’t watched her on the screen in a literal decade. Like, I don’t even remember what happened with the dog, or what her writing sounded like. I do agree with
on most of her points in her piece for Go Magazine, “An Ode to Jenny Schecter.” Plus, a lot of people can’t stand the Women narrator either, so it tracks. She doesn’t murder a dog, but she does put a cat to sleep.M: Kids today will never understand how little representation there was for lesbians and queer women on television until the streaming era brought us Orange Is the New Black, Transparent, Broad City, etc. If you wanted to watch queer women on TV before 2013 or 2014, The L Word was seriously it.
On a non-Jenny note, my copy of Women just arrived in the mail and I’m so happy that this re-release looks just like the original edition. It’s small and portable. The off-white cover and thin pages give it this napkin-like quality. It’s really going to show if you pick this book up with greasy potato chip hands or shove it in your backpack. In the afterword, you write about Women as a cult object, a book that got passed around between friends and lovers. That was my experience too—my ex-girlfriend/friend lent me her copy and said, “You have to read this.” I remember the cover being bent and taking that as a sign that she read it really fast, possibly multiple times (MAYBE EVEN LENT IT TO ANOTHER GIRL??)
I also noticed that the title is now Women: A Novella, whereas the original cover just said Women. Do readers confuse Women for nonfiction and by extension, you for the narrator? For the record, I don’t dislike this narrator. I can’t be mad at someone who’s punishing themselves so completely.
M: Ha, imagine getting your copy of Women back and finding annotations in it from ANOTHER GIRL. Devastating. When the book was out of print and people would email me asking where they could find it, I’d always send them the link to the UK edition, which was in print. The cover of the UK paperback is hot pink with a woman’s body sketched on it, and the hardcover is blue with a variation of the woman’s body sketched on it. I always got the feedback from people that they didn’t want that one, they wanted the original. Which I understand; there are certain books I’m of course attached to covers of. This was a point of discussion with the team at Harper Perennial. There was a moment where we were all excited about doing something fresh and colorful, but ultimately decided to stick with the original, which was a good call, in my opinion, especially because lesbians love to be the ones who knew “the original” of something, so I think if the cover was new, the readers would be disappointed and talk shit. And yeah, I also love how cream colored books get dirty and bent and lipstick on them. Some book industry people actually say they recommend not doing cream books for that reason.
The inside of the original Women said “a novella” — just not on the cover. We didn’t do that for any real reason except that the word “Women” looked minimal and cool on its own. Bringing “A Novella” to the cover now, I think gives more of a hint of the book’s structure and genre. Actually, Elissa Gabbert once talked about this on Twitter, how the novella form lends itself to love stories.
For the record I personally wouldn’t call my own book as having a “cult” but it seems to be an industry term publishers use for books now, haha.
I think Women was written in the autofiction style without me really knowing I was doing that style. And in autofiction, the line is blurred and readers wonder what’s real, what’s imagined, what’s from life, what’s fiction. It was never really called autofiction when it was reviewed though, always fiction. Although yeah, I’ve seen some Goodreads reviews, etc. that refer to it as a memoir. I think the reason it can be easily confused for straight shot nonfiction is because my other three books are. None of it really matters to me. I used to care about genre; but the older I get the less I care, and I’ve always been interested in genre fluidity.
M: Well now I’m thinking about genre and genre fluidity re: the relationship at the center of Women. Finn and the narrator are constantly emailing and writing to each other, but they’re not actually communicating in an honest, effective way. It’s like they’re collaborating on a fantasy or epistolary novel, but they--or at least the narrator--want to believe that it’s non-fiction. To me, this disconnect is what makes reading Women such a forget-to-breathe, clench-your-butt experience.
C: Thinking of Women as a clench-your-butt reading experience is so funny. Yeah, they are really grandiose and a lot of “how epic is our love story” feelings in Finn and the narrator’s back and forth. Almost like they are living a double life together. And life takes place only by email and when they’re in bed together. Have you had any courtships / relationships / situationships over email? It feels like such a different world to how it is now, flirting in the DMs or stories. But email is an enormous part of the book and the iPhone isn’t.
M: I have and that’s why my butt was clenched! Both times were really painful, Women-esque situationships in the early to mid-2010s where I made myself 110% available for women who kept me around because they were bored and/or flattered by the attention. What do you think it is about email and doomed lesbian affairs? I think it’s bigger than just the time period. Email is the most languid form of digital communication, so it’s easier to build a fantasy and wax poetic about stupid shit? It’s also a lot easier to conceal emails if one of you is cheating or in the middle of a gnarly breakup. It’s something you can do from work, assuming your job entails writing emails.
A while ago, I talked to
about her novel All This Could Be Different, which is also queer and set in the early 2010s–an era when most people had iPhones, but apps for dating, transportation, food delivery, and all aspects of human life were still on the horizon. She said she really liked writing this time period because phones couldn’t be the solution for everything. Her characters had to interact with each other, ask for rides, etc.C: On email there’s more freedom to go super long-form. You can like, tell a whole story about your life, memories, and ask all kinds of questions you likely wouldn’t text. If you send that on a text message, it would be strange. I think, especially back then, there was a knowing that the person wouldn’t respond until they actually had time to and were sitting at a computer. It lent itself to more thorough and considered responses. Emailing was to 2014 what blocking is to 2024. Blocking is my present day favorite form of intimacy. I’ve had a situationship off and on for a year and blocking and unblocking is one of our forms of communication. It’s funny because I write about Goodreads blocking in Women, and this past summer once I found myself dating women again, blocking returned.
Also, there’s the scene in Women where the narrator throws her phone and cracks it on the pavement. We could do shit like that back then, because phones weren’t as valuable, both emotionally and financially. I remember once, my friend dropped her phone in her margarita, “just to make you laugh.”
I loved All This Could Be Different. One of the best novels I’d read in ages, I left it in an AirBnB in Paris last month, so I hope the owner enjoys it, too.
M: Wait, you block each other in a flirty way? Please say more about this. For me, blocking carries a lot of finality and even anger. One time I blocked an ex on Venmo just to vent some frustration and then a few weeks later, we had a conciliatory dinner. They went to pay me for their half and I remember them looking at me and slowly being like, “Did you block me on Venmo?” We laughed about it, but I still felt exposed.
Blocking your ex on Goodreads is really funny, though—kind of like running them over in a clown car. I don’t think the website has been updated in the past 10 or 15 years, it’s so clunky to use. A situation where you would block someone reminds me of those memes that are like, “every app is a dating app if you try hard enough.” Speaking of All This Could be Different, the main character uses the desktop version of OkCupid which also appears in Women. That was big early 2010s baby dyke nostalgia for me. The little pink envelopes!
C: Yeah, there’s one person I have a dysfunctional dynamic with and maybe it isn’t flirty, exactly, but it’s a game. She recently paid me a dollar on Venmo to unblock her. Long Gay Story. Now we are chatting in the Venmo comments. Anyway, she got me thinking about blocking as being less as final and more as temporary, even as self-care or something that can ultimately bring you closer. I know what I sound like right now.
I think “Finn'' from Women still has me blocked because in a moment of weakness a couple years ago I tried adding her as a friend and it said, “This person isn’t accepting friends right now.” WHAT! That’s an internet message I’d never seen before. Running someone over in a clown car is the PERFECT analogy. I’m laughing. I’m also laughing because of course you had a conciliatory dinner with your ex. Do you think it’s actually possible for lesbians to break up? I just read Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn and based on that and my own life, I’m convinced they can’t.
M: It’s not you, she’s just not accepting friends right now! Two of my current life goals are to never date again and also delete all my social media, which should hint at the emotional toll these pursuits have taken on me–especially in tandem.
I do think lesbians can break up, I’ve seen it happen, and the truth is that they’re so, so much happier six months to a year later. It’s about bearing that initial discomfort and learning to be alone, which is really difficult for a lot of lesbians. Why? So many reasons, including but not limited to attachment issues, self-esteem, the high cost of living, dyke scarcity, etc, etc, on and on.
It’s been so fun talking. My final question for you is one you get all the time as a writer of nonfiction and autofiction, how do you approach writing about real people and events? How do you decide what to keep private and what to share?
C: Wow, I feel called out so hard that I’m humiliated: attachment issues, self-esteem, the high cost of living, dyke scarcity. I go back and forth from the masc scarcity to abundance mindset, depending on where I am in my menstrual cycle. I was calling it that “masc scarcity” all of last summer so it was really funny to hear you say that. I think I feel the scarcity deep since I ended up with a man for so long and feel like I *lost time* which is a common feeling I know. I related hard to the person 37, Yearning who wrote you for advice.
I respect your life goals and get it. I keep swearing to go celibate and then deciding it's too boring.
I don’t know if I decide what to keep private versus public; more like I trust my instinct and intuition. I’ve always just done what has felt comfortable for me at that moment in time. And whatever rules each writer has for themselves has to constantly evolve and change. It’s always challenging to answer this question, because it is case by case and relationship by relationship. I think since I began publishing books so young, it’s just more of a lifestyle at this point and it isn’t a conflict for me. I try to make sure I don’t publish anything I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about in a social situation, I guess that’s my baseline.
I recently found this quote from Erica Jong saved on my desktop:
"The fact is--you can’t really write about somebody you don’t love. Even if the portrait is vitriolic, even if the pen is sharpened with old grudges, there has to have been love somewhere along the line, or the sheer, brute energy of pushing that pen across the page will not be there. And writing takes energy--more energy than you ever think you have. And energy comes from love."
Talking to you has been so soothing in a weird way, and I really appreciate your support of Women. Thanks for taking the time to read (again) and these engaging questions. 👯
Women: A Novella is stressful, gay, and out TODAY. It’s pocket-sized, but only if you’re wearing cargo pants. Purchase it at your favorite bookshop, download it straight to your e-reader device, or march down to your local library and demand that they provide you with a copy. There’s no wrong way to read Women. The cover is a beautiful off-white color. Read an excerpt here.
I wrote the ode to Jenny Schecter and I loved this interview! 💗
omg i have to read this