Red Emma’s

Moderated by the magnificent China Martens!

Ariel Gore's Rehearsals for Dying (The Feminist Press, March, 2025)_ _is queer love versus the cancer industrial complex.

Chloé Caldwell's Trying (Greywolf Press, August, 2025) asks, "If you’re writing about your life in real time, are you inherently fucked?"

These new memoirs—both written in real time as the stories were unfolding—chronicle the years-long medical crises that redefine their authors' lives and marriages. Caldwell writes about unexplained infertility and the endless cycle of fertility treatments; Gore documents her wife's four-years living with Stage 4 breast cancer.

Both books reject traditional recovery narratives—exploring instead what Jack Halberstam called “the queer art of failure.” Gore’s marriage deepens, but her wife dies. Caldwell’s husband had been living the double life of an addict and that came to light after she was deep in my book. She'd also been struggling with her queerness. So her marriage ends and yet she's happiest she's ever been—free and gay.

Together, these authors could offer a powerful conversation about writing through ongoing crisis, challenging medical systems that often fail women, and finding meaning without conventional happy endings.

Hear two acclaimed memoirists discuss the ethics and craft of real-time life writing, the ways medical uncertainty reshapes identity and relationships, and how to radically redefine what it means to "succeed" when facing the limits of what medicine—and life—can promise.

On "Rehearsals for Dying": An expansive, darkly funny, and deeply personal reflection on the reality of living with—and dying from—metastatic breast cancer. Deena stepped out of the shower and opened her towel in the steam. “Does my breast look weird?” These words irrevocably change the lives of writer Ariel Gore and her wife. As they descend into a world of doctors and tests, medications and insurance, sickness and treatments and hope and pain and more, they discover just how little they truly knew—despite the awareness campaigns and hyper-visible pink ribbons—about the reality of breast cancer. Over the four years following Deena’s terminal diagnosis, Gore does what she always does, no matter how difficult or personal the subject: she writes about it.

With keen insights, empathy, and humor, Ariel Gore braids together the story of Deena’s experience, her own role as a caretaker, narratives from others living with breast cancer, literary reflections on illness, and reportage on the history of breast cancer and the $200 billion industry that capitalizes on and profits from breast cancer screenings and treatments. _Rehearsals for Dying _investigates and challenges everything we think we know about breast cancer. It goes beyond awareness to knowledge, presenting a rich, nuanced, heartbreaking, and hopeful portrait of what it is to be diagnosed with, treat, and live with breast cancer in the twenty-first century.

On "Trying": If you’re writing about your life in real time, are you inherently fucked?

Over the years that Chloé Caldwell had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected her experience; for one thing, most stories ended with in vitro fertilization, a baby, or both. She wanted to offer something different.

Caldwell began a book. She imagined a selective journal about her experience coping with stasis and uncertainty. Is it time to quit coffee, find a new acupuncturist, get another blood test? Her questions extended to her job at a clothing boutique and to her teaching and writing practice. Why do people love equating publishing books with giving birth? What is the right amount of money to spend on pants or fertility treatments? How much trying is enough? She ignored the sense that something else in her life was wrong that was not on the page . . . until she extracted a confession from her husband.

Broken by betrayal but freed from domesticity, Caldwell felt reawakened, to long-buried desires, to her queer identity, to pleasure and possibility. She kept writing, making sense of her new reality as it took shape. With the candor, irreverence, and heart that have made Caldwell’s work beloved, Trying intimately captures a self in a continuous process of becoming—and the mysterious ways that writing informs that process.

Ariel Gore makes books, zines, coloring books, and tarot cards. She is the founding editor and publisher of the Alternative Press Award–winning magazine Hip Mama and the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including Hexing the Patriarchy and The End of Eve. Her shameless novel/memoir, We Were Witches, was published by the Feminist Press, and her anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City won the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology. She teaches writing online at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers at the Literary Kitchen. She currently splits her time between Santa Fe and New York.

Chloé Caldwell is the author of Women, the memoir The Red Zone, and the essay collections I’ll Tell You in Person _and _Legs Get Led Astray. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Bon Appétit, the Cut, Autostraddle, Longreads, and Nylon.

China Martens is a zinestress extraordinaire born in Baltimore. Her first book, The Future Generation, is a compilation of 16 years of her first zine that was reissued in March 2017. She is also the co-editor of Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways To Support Families In Social Justice Movements & Communities (PM Press, 2012) and Revolutionary Mothering: Love On The Front Lines (PM Press, 2016), an anthology which centers mothers of color and marginalized mothers voices, which Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker called “Juicy, gutsy, vulnerable, and brave.” Her first novel The Avenue comes out September 2025 as a Literary Kitchen imprint.