ONLINE: Chloe Caldwell

media release: A Room of One's Own welcomes Chloe Caldwell, author of The Red Zone: A Love Story, for a conversation on Crowdcast with Ashley C. Ford!

The Red Zone is a candid, revelatory memoir for anyone grappling with controversial medical diagnoses and labels of all kinds. It’s about coming to terms with the fact that—along with proper treatment—self-acceptance, self-compassion, and transcending shame are the ultimate keys to relief. It’s also about love: how challenging it can be, how it reveals your weaknesses and wounds, and how, if you allow it, it will push you to grow and change.

Chloe Caldwell’s period has often felt inconvenient, uncomfortable, or even painful. It’s only once she’s in her thirties, as she’s falling in love with Tony, a musician and single dad, that its effects on her mood start to dominate her life. Spurred by the intensity and seriousness of her new relationship, it strikes her: her outbursts of anxiety and rage match her hormonal cycle. Compelled to understand the truth of what’s happening to her, Chloe documents attitudes toward menstruation among her peers and family, reads Reddit threads about PMS, attends a conference called Break the Cycle, and learns about premenstrual dysphoric disorder, PMDD, which helps her name what she’s been going through. For Chloe, healing isn’t about finding a single cure. It means reflecting on underlying patterns in her life: her feelings about her queer identity and writing persona in the context of a heterosexual relationship; how her parents’ divorce contributed to her issues with trust; and what it means to blend a family. 

Chloe Caldwell is the author of three previous books: I’ll Tell You in Person, Women, and Legs Get Led Astray. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Bon Appétit, The Cut, The Strategist, BuzzFeed, NYLON, VICE, Longreads, and many anthologies. Her essay “Hungry Ghost” was listed as Notable in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017. She lives in Hudson, New York, and teaches creative writing online at Writing Workshops, LitReactor, and the Fine Arts Work Center. 

Ashley C. Ford’s New York Times best-selling memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, was published by Flatiron Books in June 2021. Ford is the former host of The Chronicles of Now podcast, co-host of The HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio. She currently lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband, poet and fiction writer Kelly Stacy, and their chocolate lab Astro Renegade Ford-Stacy.