I first learned about Chloe Caldwell after reading her indie-hit novella Women (Short Flight/Long Drive), which has been featured in The L Word: Generation Q, photographed in the hands of celebrities and influencers alike, and made its way onto a handful of queer recommended reading lists. Like most Caldwell fans, I was entranced by the way she wrote about identity, sexuality, love, and desire. She is the kind of writer that seems completely unafraid to write about topics many others would likely shy away from (this is true too of her newest book, The Red Zone). While Women made me an admirer of Chloe, what turned me into a true fan, was when she began writing about stepparenting.

I’ve been a stepmom for the last decade, and even though nearly 50% of American’s have at least one stepparent (uh, hello, our first lady and vice president are both stepmoms!), the overarching stereotypes of stepmoms still exists predominantly in the evil stepmom character of fairytales. So, when I came across Chloe and her social media pictures depicting a happy blended family that mirrored my own in some ways, I felt an odd sense of validation and kinship. I have this same feeling when I read Chloe’s work. Part of it, I think, is because she covers topics that often aren’t written about at all or are written in a way that feels intended to promote a certain commerciality (as many “women’s health” topics are often approached). More importantly though, what I think is so compelling about Chloe’s writing is her candor and how deeply personal she gets. Her writing is the kind that makes you think ouch, this had to hurt a little to write. She has written about acne, addiction, sexuality, sex, stepmomming, love, and menstruation, and always with a level of honesty that feels beyond generous.

Her newest book, The Red Zone (Softskull Press), is maybe her most generous and well-researched work yet. The Red Zone is a kaleidoscopic investigation into the complexities of PMDD (Premenstrual dysmorphic disorder) and Chloe approaches it from both personal and investigative angles. Often misdiagnosed, PMDD is a hormone-related disorder that results in both physical and emotional symptoms that can wreak havoc on a person’s mental health and relationships. Through reddit forums, collected stories of people’s first periods, reflections about doctors’ visits and her own personal experiences with menstruation and PMDD, Chloe has created a textured and comprehensive book about PMDD that will likely become a significant resource for people who menstruate. The Red Zone is also more than just a book about menstruation; it is also a love story, a tale of becoming a wife and stepmom, and how creativity, family, and mental health shape a life.

I spoke with Chloe via email about periods, being a stepmom, binge writing, and her new book The Red Zone.

Shelby Hinte: I usually balk at women’s writing being described as “brave,” but reading your work, especially The Red Zone, it really is the first word that comes to mind. I still sometimes cringe when I hear myself say PMS or period, so the fact that you wrote a whole book on it is pretty badass (maybe a better word than “brave”?). Can you talk a little bit about your experience writing the book? I am especially curious as to what it was like once you realized you were writing a book about PMDD and would be putting it out into the world. Were there any moments of hesitation?

Chloe Caldwell: My experience writing the book was incredibly challenging. Taking something like the menstrual cycle—which is both so specific and universal— felt like such a big undertaking. Writing about PMDD specifically felt even harder, because PMDD, when you’re in it, is so visceral and unwieldy out-of-body. Then when I’d come to writing, I wasn’t in that state anymore, so had to try to remember what it was like.

I wouldn’t say I realized I was writing a book about PMDD; I intentionally set out to write one. PMDD was fascinating to me as a topic and I’d never heard of it until I experienced it. I was up for the challenge of writing a first-person account of it because I hadn’t seen any. Most books on PMDD (there are a few, though not many) are from a scientific standpoint.

There weren’t any moments of hesitation. I find I don’t have shame around bleeding or my period, especially now. Where I felt self-conscious, though, is the scenes documenting my fights with my husband. I really didn’t want the book to come across as the crazy woman with the stable husband, because I see a lot of those and hate that trope.

SH: The Red Zone does feel like a gargantuan undertaking and one of the things I appreciated most about it was all the levels of research you did (maybe this is part of it feeling “kaleidoscopic”). The research ranges from scientific data to reddit threads. What was your research process like?

CC: My research is random. At some points when I was still conceptualizing the book, I considered making it more research-based. Like Esmé Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, or The Great Pretenders by Susannah Cahalan.

But that stressed me out, and wasn’t really my style. My style is more frantic, pulling from a text message, an NYT article, Reddit, books, friends, and family. Sort of like a collage.

SH: I have recently been transfixed with the idea of “kaleidoscope essays” which is not a term (phrase?category?) I’d heard until I came across a flier for one of your classes. The Red Zone feels very “kaleidoscopic” in the way it addresses PMDD/menstruation and I am sort of obsessed with this idea of writing into a single topic from so many different vantage points. It feels contradictory to the traditional essay which works to prove a specific thesis. What drew you to writing in this style?

CC: The kaleidoscope thing came from something my husband said when we were fighting. It was about how I’d keep coming back at everything with a new angle. Basically saying the same thing over and over again from different viewpoints and lenses. It’s something I do that’s helpful in writing an essay, but not so much when your partner wants to wrap up a fight or conflict.

It makes sense that the book feels kaleidoscop-y. I never set out with that intention, exactly, but it is the way I naturally think. Life looks different in each phase of the menstrual cycle: bleeding, the follicular phase, ovulation, and the luteal phase. I wanted to show how the mood rises and falls each month.

The chapter, “The Linen Closet,” feels kaleidoscopic to me, in a sense that I widened the lens and brought in other voices to include their experiences with their first periods.

SH: Mental health and menstruation can be pretty isolating, but a lot of your research also involved connecting with other people. What was it like opening yourself to receive so many personal stories?

CC: Hearing my aunts, cousins, and mom’s stories were really interesting to me. Almost all of my aunts mentioned the linen closet in their home that my Nana took them to when they got their period. This small detail that they all remembered. Some of the stories people told me were funny, but many of them bummed me out, and showed how little support most of us had for our periods.

SH: You’ve written about being a stepmom, both in The Red Zone and for other online journals. As a stepmom myself, I’m often terrified to write about this part of my life. Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a “right” and other times it feels like another iteration of imposter syndrome. There isn’t much writing out there about stepmoms (other than evil stepmoms in fairytales of course), so I always feel grateful when you publish work about the topic. What has it been like to write about your experience being a stepmom?

CC: I love how we’ve connected on both being stepmoms, and seeing your family photos on Insta makes me happy. We both have stepkids around tween (I loathe this word) age, and there’s something about seeing my own family unit reflected back to me in your photos. Is this weird?

Writing about being a stepparent is inherently somewhat a perfect topic for the personal essay, because there’s already conflict in the word “stepmom.” So, it’s sort of gold for someone like me who likes to riff on the complexities of things. I also think we need more stepparent stories, since there was one dominant story in our culture like you said. The evil stepmother story is a tale as old as time. That’s really unfortunate for stepparents because they’re actually so incredibly common. As I get older and more of my friends pair up in their late thirties, forties, and fifties, it has become the norm to meet someone who is divorced or has a kid from a previous relationship. Since I began the book, four of my friends either became stepparents through marriage, or are dating someone with children.

Here in hudson, one of my closest friends is a stepdad, and another friend, who isn’t married to her partner but has a 13-year-old in her life, calls herself a Stepnon. So once we all met up at a bar, and she called it Stepnon Anonymous.

SH: I don’t think it’s weird at all to seek a mirror. That is for sure part of how I connect with people. I often wonder if this is sort of a point of writing — like when I get frustrated with the work and ask myself why am I trying so hard, etc. etc. etc. — like maybe the point is because writing helps make me feel less alone. I don’t know, maybe that is tmi from the interviewer, but what do you think it is for yourself that keeps you writing?

CC: It’s taboo to say this, but I love writing. I love the challenge of creating meaning out of something. I love listening to music, writing, and thinking. It’s my favorite thing to do. Yes, it can be hard. But I don’t relate to all the griping and whining and moaning I always see on social media about it. I believe in it being fun. Things can be fun and hard. But yes, definitely my books, particularly Women and The Red Zone came out of a place of feeling like a certain book with the nuance I was looking for didn’t exist, and I figured if I was looking for it, then other people were too.

SH: I recently heard an interview with Melissa Febos (who you quote in TRZ) mention the parts of her life as a pie chart. I am always curious about how writers' daily lives look with all the adult responsibilities they are tethered to. What does your work/writing/life pie chart look like?

CC: These questions are fun, and my answer sort of correlates with your stepmom question, because over the years I’ve begun to structure my work around the days my stepdaughter isn’t here. She is with us Thursday after school until Saturday evening every week (sometimes Wednesday nights as well). When she’s here, we like to hang out and watch movies, talk, and read. So I purposely make Monday through Wednesday my more hardcore work days. For meetings, I try not to have any past Thursday afternoon.

My work is different most days. I always wake up between 6:30am and 7:30am and go straight to the kettle to make tea. I sit at the computer and respond to emails, check the New York Times and New York Magazine. From there I usually have a bunch of student feedback to write. That takes up most of the day. I also meet one on one with my students via phone calls.

If I’m working on a book or an essay, I usually get up earlier to work on that first, especially if I have a deadline. I always do my own stuff before going over to student feedback. That way I don’t screw myself over, and also I’m most creative earlier in the day. I start fading by 3pm or so.

When I’m working on a book I like going away to a modest Airbnb to binge write. I did this quite a bit for TRZ, especially when I knew I had to go way deeper into chapters and thinking. I think I did an Airbnb in the woods once, and nondescript cheap hotels like Best Western twice. I’m a total weirdo and bring my own food to keep in the mini-fridge. They key is to choose a hotel that’s super boring. This was during peak COVID, so there weren’t even breakfast buffets, and the bars/restaurants weren’t open. You can’t get anything done if you stay at like, The Ace or some bougie boutique hotel. It’s gotta be boring as fuck so you can only read and write.

On Saturdays I work retail. Since I was a teenager, I’ve worked retail in some form, and I found when I went over completely to writing and teaching writing, I missed having a job to actually go to, where I could use my social skills. So last summer I worked at a Mara Hoffman pop-up, and now I work every Saturday at Loup.

SH: I think it’s great that you create your own writer’s retreats to get deep into the work. Why do you think the binge element is important to finishing a book?

CC: It’s not necessarily that daily writing time isn’t enough, it’s about getting away from your surroundings and distractions if you can. It gives you time to think, and out of the scramble of making food and doing the dishes and showering and the post office and grocery store. I love being in new, humble surroundings, where you create space and time to just think. I had to do this to deepen some of my chapters, especially Blended Family and Banana Splits. I usually bring a handful of books with me that will help me go deeper into those chapters. I just flip through them. Once, I bought an old phone with me and listened to tons of voice memos between Tony and I from when we’d began dating, and I was able to use some of those details. That voice memo thing is an example of something I likely wouldn’t do while juggling the day-to-day minutiae of life.

SH: I keep coming back to this idea of pie charts while chatting with you, and I think part of it is that so much of your book has to do with the delicate balance of maintaining mental and physical health, so I guess I am curious, if there were 3 or 5 things you really needed to maintain a meaningful creative practice, what would they be?

CC: Music, Nature, Books, Solitude, Connection.

CHLOE CALDWELL is the author of The Red Zone: A Love Story, and three books: the essay collection I’ll Tell You in Person, the critically acclaimed novella, WOMEN, and Legs Get Led Astray.

Chloe’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, Bon Appétit, New York Magazine’s The Cut, The Strategist, Buzzfeed, Longreads, Vice, Nylon, Salon.com, Medium, The Rumpus, Catapult, Hobart, The Sun, Men’s Health, The Nervous Breakdown, and half a dozen anthologies including Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NYC and Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class. Her essay “Hungry Ghost” was listed as Notable in 2017 Best American Non Required Reading.

She teaches creative writing online, offers mentorships, and hosts seasonal writing workshops and retreats upstate New York. She lives in Hudson, N.Y. with her family.

Chloe Caldwell: On Writing About Menstruation, Being a Stepmom, Creating Your Own Writer’s Retreat, and Her New Book “The Red Zone”

About the Interviewer

Chloe Caldwell: On Writing About Menstruation, Being a Stepmom, Creating Your Own Writer’s Retreat, and Her New Book “The Red Zone”

About the Interviewer

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