Chloe Caldwell - The Red Zone: A Love Story

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

T HE R ED Z ONE

Chloe Caldwell invites us to call shotgun on one of her most intimate, moving, and hilarious rides yet! Tinder, THC, Poshmark, WebMD, Prozac, diner eggs, ovulationThe Red Zone has all the highs and lows you come to expect in her delightful nonfiction. Plus, her exploration of PMDD and being a stepmom offers a texture all its own. The Red Zone operates like a love story indeed on so many levelswe readers feel so loved turning every page of this gorgeous offering.

Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity and Sick: A Memoir

Its the greatest love story known to woman: that of herself with her own body. This is deep, wild genius at worka sharp, generous, questing, very funny book that lays bare the grueling extremes of menstruation. THERE WILL BE BLOOD. And thank god for that. Because we bleed. We bleed and bleed and bleed. As much as they want to pretend we dont. Chloe Caldwell writes with guts and grace. We are very lucky to have her.

Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Grown Ups

The Red Zone: A Love Story is a period memoir as only Chloe Caldwell could write it, with warmth and particularity and charm. I smiled in recognition every few pages, read parts angrily aloud to my husband as though they were his fault, and laughed loudly enough at others to wake up my dogs. Yes, its a love story, but The Red Zone is also an adventure, which may sound like a strange descriptor for a book about PMDD until you have experienced it through Caldwells wry, piercing, fundamentally optimistic eyes. Both personal and communal, searching and exuberant, The Red Zone will speak to anyone who has been led by pain, curiosity, or misdiagnosis to become a detective of her own body.

Kristi Coulter, author of Nothing Good Can Come from This

The necessity and urgency of The Red Zone made me wonder how Iand any womanhad lived so long without it. Through the lens of PMDD and the female body, Caldwell refracts every issue imaginable, from relationships to hormones to queerness to stepmotherhood to blended families, all with hilarity, intimacy, and depth. Feeling seen by this book is an understatement; its a survival guide.

Zaina Arafat, author of You Exist Too Much

A coming-of-age memoir for those of us in our thirties who are still trying to come of age, Chloe Caldwells The Red Zone is an incredible tale of vulnerability, family, and periods. As hilarious as it is heartfelt, and as informative as it is inspirational, here is as honest a tale of self-discoveryand eventual self-acceptanceas has ever been written. A bloody brilliant book.

Isaac Fitzgerald, author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts

Finally (finally!) someone wrote a book about struggling to understand your body and your heart and finding the answers on the internet. This book is moving, funny, and impossible to put down. Caldwell reveals the messiness of life in a way few writers can pull off.

Chelsea Martin, author of Caca Dolce: Essays from a Lowbrow Life

Not since Elizabeth Wurtzels More, Now, Again have I been so obsessed with a book of nonfiction. I read The Red Zone in one day, in one chair, four cups of coffee, and after: a single cigarette. Obsessed.

Elizabeth Ellen, founder/editor of SF/LD Books and author of Person/a and Her Lesser Work

Sentences like poetry, insights like medicine, the most romantic love story, the most spot-on depiction of life in the female body. I needed this book. Chloe Caldwell is among the most important literary voices of our time. Women are going to pass The Red Zone around forever.

Diana Spechler, author of Who by Fire and Skinny

The Red Zone is an intense, informative, highly entertaining book about the menstrual cycle, sexism, bickering, divorce, marriage, stepmotherhood, holistic gradual self-healing, and the layered effort to move from impulsivity and fear to stability and growth.

Tao Lin, author of Leave Society

The Red Zone showcases Chloe Caldwell at her best, with her trademark blend of humor and vulnerability. This is a special book, skillfully balancing practical knowledge and artistic deftness, and sharpness with sweetness.

Juliet Escoria, author of Juliet the Maniac

PRAISE FOR

I LL T ELL Y OU IN P ERSON

Caldwell is refreshingly regular and, German sojourn notwithstanding, unspoiled. Not once does the word internship appear.

The Village Voice

Caldwell writes about her life with warmth, humor, and not a trace of apology.

Publishers Weekly

Her essays are diaristic in tonetheyre unpretentious and personal and she draws powerful conclusions about what it means to grow into a decisive, fully formed person, if such a thing is even possible.

HuffPost

The authors confessionalism has an engagingly conversational tone, yet the shock-value solipsism gives way to a stylistic maturity in which the author seems to develop command over her material.

Kirkus Reviews

Caldwells work is impressively devoid of horn-tooting. No humble-brags, no pity-parties. Just first-rate warts-and-all human complexity.

Electric Literature

Unfortunately, when women write or speak about themselves with brutal honesty, everyone has an opinion. Conflating confession with universality, this literature is often dismissed for lacking inclusivity. Its as if society can only handle one womanas long as she speaks on behalf of all women. Instead, we need more voices instead of asking women to speak for all women at all times.

StarTribune

Caldwell makes it seem easy to speak with such a lively and intimate voice, but thats because shes a masterful writer. Its her deep and enduring compassion that gives Caldwells essays both their literary and their moral backbone.

Heavy Feather Review

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.

NYLON

Caldwell provides a pacing to her narrative which renders it impossible to put down; and, with a truth as fanciful as any fiction, theres no lack of plot twisting to drive each story home.

NewPages

Chloe Caldwells sharp wit and keen powers of observation are in full force in her newest book.

PANK

Chloe Caldwells Ill Tell You in Person is an intense collection of essays that astonishes with its self-awareness and keen storytelling.

Largehearted Boy

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, its the opposite. You want more, the result of a trustworthy narrator and a skilled storyteller.

Hippocampus Magazine

The job of the personal essayist is to make readers feel as if we know her. When she hurts, we hurt, as cohorts. When she wins, we win.

Vol. 1 Brooklyn

PRAISE FOR W OMEN

A writer like Caldwell doesnt need to follow elementary rules. Fanciful language would only distract from her narrators candor, one of the books greatest assets.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Chloe Caldwells slim and sensual new 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 others lives during an illicit whirlwind romance.