Caroline Calloway, Everywoman?

In my book review era

If you’re not familiar with Caroline Calloway, and by extension, Natalie Beach, you have three options, because it would take too long for me to explain:

1. Delete this email and close your browser, knowing you have protected your mental health on this fine day. Maybe take a walk!

2. Study up. I’d start with some kind of an explainer, followed by The Cut article, then the recent Vanity Fair profile. For a truly thorough understanding, here’s a thread with dirt.

3. Read on, knowing this will make basically no sense.

Because I wore tight shoes to that Taylor Swift concert in fucking MARCH, I bruised both of my big toes and ended up with dried blood under the nails, which I have spent the last week picking at with tweezers. As of this writing, my toes are in pretty good shape, but to keep myself from ripping them apart any further, I had to find something to occupy my attention that, crucially, also occupied my hands. Hence, reading books: Scammer and Adult Drama.

Scammer wins. The Washington Post agrees, which Caroline posted about in an epically bitchy caption. In fact, if Scammer has a main flaw, it’s that it is too focused on being bitchy to Natalie. More than once, Caroline describes selflessly (condescendingly) dimming her own light so that Natalie can shine in the presence of a man. Natalie is depicted as a snake in the grass, watching, waiting for her chance to attack, and when she does, with her Cut piece, it’s entirely devoid of empathy. I recently re-read the Cut piece (it’s in Adult Drama) and it’s not as mean as Caroline makes it out to be — she conflates online abuse with the essay that generated it — but then again, I’m not the subject of a viral hate campaign.

Caroline Calloway

Caroline Calloway on Instagram: ”“Karma’s a bitch, but you don’t have to be,” is what my mother told me when I said that I’d include passages of the Washington Post article trashing Natalie’s book in my press-post. The WaPo article covers both of us, after all—reviews our books side by side. Quoting those passages disparaging her book would also be quoting an article about me. “Think about how she must feel right now,” my Mom said. “You don’t have to rub it in.” But here’s the thing: my Mom’s a better person than I am. I’m petty and flawed and still sickened that—for a several years—the world rewarded a person with money and praise for taking credit for my work. That last time I spoke to Natalie was the day my father’s body was found. It was two days after her Cut piece had dropped. The media frenzy was in full force. After consoling me about his suicide, she said that if I signed my life rights over to her Netflix deal, I’d get $15,000 and more importantly: absolution. She’d forgive me. All I had to do was sign. At the time I didn’t know that Natalie’s paycheck was largely dependent on my participation. If I “bundled” my life rights with her article’s “option”, she’d get one million dollars. If I didn’t let them use my name—she’d only get $100,000. Karma’s a bitch and I’m only slightly less vindictive. I’m so human and imperfect, but I’m trying to be better and honest about where I am. I won’t quote the negative things the Washington Post said about Natalie, but I’m not saintly enough to refrain from quoting this passage about both of us: “[Caroline] asks her old writing professor (and implicitly, the reviewer): ‘If you had to choose between me and Natalie, who is the better writer?’ …Still, the answer to Calloway’s question is clear. Beach is a talented essayist with a promising career ahead of her. Calloway is a lunatic who has already written a masterpiece.” Natalie’s talented! She’s “good enough,” as The Washington Post says. She’s cute, but no artistic genius. May this be a lesson about karma to all snakey friends. You can kick people when they’re down—sell a tell-all when they go viral; use their father’s suicide as an opportunity to strike a deal. But it’s coming back around.”

June 26, 2023

I don’t think they ever want or need to be friends again, but I do hope they can someday, cordially, come to an understanding. For the record: Natalie doesn’t take credit for your Cambridge Captions, Caroline! And Natalie, Caroline acknowledged your input way back in the day!

The crossover in their narratives provides a Rashomon-style double perspective on the same friendship. Caroline recalls Natalie “begging” to resume co-writing in order to glom onto her newfound fame. To Natalie, those pleas were an attempt to reconnect with a friend via the one project that still linked them.

But the twist is that everything Natalie did helped Caroline, eventually, in the end. Without the Cut piece elevating Caroline’s mess from Online Spectacle to Literary Debate Topic, I don’t think serious publications would be reviewing her book. And the book wouldn’t even exist.

An ongoing theme in Scammer is Caroline’s inability to finish (both projects and orgasmically), and she’s ultimately motivated to publish when she does because she wants to have a book out before Natalie does (even if only by four days). Sort of a lame reason to write a book, especially a book as good as Scammer, which you could justify by saying you wrote it for ART. But if merely the act of creation were enough for Caroline, she wouldn’t be Caroline Calloway. She needed a foil. Without the immovable deadline of Adult Drama hitting shelves, Caroline would still be retooling. So, thanks, Natalie!

Scammer will probably stand on its own once the memory of this girlish spat fades. But Adult Drama…it’s uh…it’s fine. As my friend Liz would say, “it’s competent.” Natalie is a good writer, but not good enough to make up for the fact that she hasn’t lived a very interesting life. She admits as much when she recounts an anxiety daydream of Billy Eichner asking her “for a dollar, name something that happened to you,” and her only response is “Caroline Calloway.” In the essays that don’t involve Caroline — the majority of the book — she fleshes out mundane experiences (coming of age in the 2000s, working a retail job) with historical context. She also includes quotes from other authors for literary context. If only I could play the Natalie to her Caroline! I’d tell her to knock that off; she’s only demonstrating that she isn’t as developed a writer in comparison. Babe, never put your sentences on grief side by side with Susan Sontag’s.

Even without the quotations, there is an obvious gap between the writer Natalie is and the writer she wants to be: Jia Tolentino, whose book came out first by far more than four days. Here they are employing the same simile when describing being a teen girl:

“As a teenager, I subsisted on pizza and queso and cinnamon rolls, trying to immunize myself with apathy and pleasure-seeking throughout the long stretch of time when girls, overwhelmed by sudden expectations of beauty, transmit anorexia and bulimia to one another like a virus.”

“Meanwhile, disordered eating was suddenly everywhere in my life like a stomach bug going around.”

I think you can guess which sentence is Jia’s and which is Natalie’s.

Then there is the gap between the book I personally want Natalie to write and the one she feels compelled to write. As a white girl, she’s anxious, so anxious, about her privilege (though she never fesses up to the plum post-grad magazine job that Caroline takes her to the cleaner for). In more than one essay, she stresses over being part of gentrification, which adds nothing to the narrative except to make us aware that she is aware. Also in more than one essay, she casually mentions experiencing gender dysphoria, then never digs into that. Which is her right, to be sure, but oh my god, that’s so much more interesting than the pros and cons of a summer job landscaping! Halfway through the collection is a piece titled, bluntly, Abortion Abortion Abortion, and I thought, finally, some of that Drama the title promised. Sex, a missed period, taking the test, coping with the aftermath… But no. It’s about how she was a clinic escort.

In the last chapter in the collection, she reckons with her decision to publish the Cut piece. That “writers are murderers” thing. But the part I guess no one told her is that memoirists are given a pass for revealing other people’s secrets as long as they also reveal their own. Her big “I can’t believe I’m telling you this” moment is about leaving a tampon in the woods. Who among us hasn’t? Natalie glosses over revealing her former best friend’s suicidal ideation but takes great pains to inform the reader that actually, when she pitched the essay, it was less of a tell-all and more of a critique of white feminism. Natalie doesn’t write about herself out of vanity but for politics and to make the world better.

Having been placed upon the moral high ground, she is understandably hesitant to get down in the muck with the rest of us. But it’s not just the hand-wringing over gentrification. She won’t tell us the reason a bunch of her other college friends stopped speaking to her (because they aren’t famous and therefore she can’t sell them out like she did Caroline?), and even breaks the fourth wall to apologize for bringing up another friend break-up. Know your audience! This isn’t the New Yorker. I want to hear about the friend break-ups. You’re my age; I don’t care what you think of the institution of marriage. Let’s gossip!

Caroline is heart; Natalie is head. Caroline is generous to her readers and deprecating to herself: she calls herself “a little slut” in the About The Typeface section and uses the Acknowledgments to beg her estranged family members to talk to her. Natalie’s Acknowledgments start with A LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT.

Natalie is a true journalist, observing and dissecting the world around her, carefully neutral. Caroline is a true memoirist, author of her own adventures whose personality shines through the page like the light of the damn sun.

Man I loved Scammer.

Let’s get this out of the way: being an ambitious, self-mythologizing, self-absorbed, pretty, privileged, young, bad-with-money, intelligent, erudite, rich, flaky girl who is kind of a bad friend, a social climber, unrepentant in her pursuit of wealth and status, who sells overpriced crap to her followers and occasionally posts about people without their consent, and lies a lot, is NOT A CRIME.

NOR SHOULD IT BE.

Earlier writing by Caroline, like the three-part manifesto she posted to her website in the wake of Nataliegate, were rawer, and scarier to read. As with anything by Cat Marnell, there was the stomach-tightening question of, “is this girl…gonna be okay? Am I reading something that is…actively damaging her life?” It was tragic/pathetic, a wreck you couldn’t take your eyes off.

Scammer is a work by a seemingly more “together” Caroline, a Caroline who can reveal her darkest moments not because of mania but for meaningful literary purposes. I had assumed, in a post-Lena Dunham world, that there was nothing a woman could write about her vagina that would qualify as “brave.” Reader, Caroline drops a line about hers that had my jaw on the floor.

Her original sin was that first missed book deadline. All the other stuff was material for said book; when she screwed up her contract is when she went from clumsy rom-com heroine to hot mess. Now, with the actual thing in my literal hands, I can enjoy her ups and downs because I know the happy-ish ending-ish: She did it. She came out the other side. She published a book like she always wanted. I’m like, proud of her.

For a while, I didn’t think Scammer was real. The Vanity Fair piece ends on a note of disbelief. Even when Caroline posted a picture of the many teal blue packages in her apartment waiting to be shipped out, I wondered if there was little more than a self-printed zine inside, or maybe they were empty, the ultimate scam, the ultimate joke. When she put out a call for media coverage, I DM’d her for a galley (Caroline, if you’re reading this, I really did try to place this essay somewhere more impressive than my Substack!), and I admit I got a thrill when she sent me a picture of her hand holding an envelope addressed to me. But I was still wary. When that package arrived, I saw that not only was the book real, but it was lovingly wrapped in ribbon with a hand-written note and came with a little jar and felt flower, all of which I will treasure.

Much of the book is strategic. She published before Natalie; she reclaimed the “scammer” label; she can now proudly put “published author” in her bio/obituary/headstone. And the brilliant trump card: Caroline reveals things in Scammer that are so damning, she’s scandalproof. There’s nothing you can say about her that’s worse than what she’s said about herself.

But beyond all the PR, she is — wait for it — a wonderful writer! Lucid, funny, flowery the way you’d expect from a woman who has made peonies and orchids the center of her aesthetic.

It’s the job of any memoirist to make the reader feel they know the author, and Calloway’s prose, developed via the immediacy of the Internet, accomplishes this easily. And obviously, any of us girls who write see a bit of ourselves in her, just like we are all Carrie Bradshaw. When I think about Caroline Calloway, who got so many of the things I once wanted (boarding school, European adventures, cute boyfriends, fame), I often think that she’s me if I were prettier, skinnier, richer, braver, less parented, less grounded, less concerned with Having A Job. Many of our similarities are superficial but foundational: childhood dreams of acting, only children of divorced parents, Taylor Swift fans, too loud for some, too sensitive for others. Looking at Caroline is like looking at myself in a funhouse mirror. No. Looking at myself in the flower crown filter.

I have many versions of this picture on my phone. But of me.

I also had the strange sensation, while reading Scammer, that I was waiting for me to arrive in the narrative. Like, me, Lizzie. As a side character. I do not get that feeling from other people’s memoirs.

To be totally clear, I have never met Caroline Calloway. But our paths have criss-crossed a number of times. She transferred from NYU to Cambridge just when I transferred from Columbia to NYU. We attended parties at the same secret society, ate at late-night dinners at the same West Village diners, cyber-stalked the same snarky bloggers. We are almost exactly the same age.

Maybe I’m forcing the comparison because it’s flattering. On any number of levels, Caroline is cool, and I’m like, just like her, right? And maybe I’m pushing a contrast because, again, it’s flattering. We walked the same paths, but I did it better. Just like Caroline, I doctor-shopped for an Adderall prescription. But I didn’t get addicted. I’m a writer who doesn’t miss deadlines. I go viral without getting canceled. Point Lizzie!

But in my smugness and judgment, I was willfully looking past the parts of our stories that overlap in less adorable ways. When Caroline recounts the story of spending her twenty-first birthday applying to Cambridge for the third time, she’s owning up to desperation, but also showing off her dedication. And yet when I read that chapter, I felt so superior, thinking, isn’t that a little…old to be starting at a new school? You really wanna be twenty-one in classes with teenagers? Why not just finish up your degree at NYU and like, get an internship?

Then I remembered that at twenty-one I was on a fucking gap year and about to start classes with teenagers because I too applied to the same college three times. POINT CAROLINE.

Then there were the similarities I was aware of but hadn’t unpacked. Her friendship with Natalie: I know the feeling, but I’m the Natalie. I had a complicated, intense friendship in college with a girl I didn’t speak to for a year until, after seeing Frances Ha (duh!, I texted her and we just got over it and never talked about the fight. And now I write about this woman often, in my pilots, though I change her name and always get permission. Before you clap too loudly, I’ve also gotten in real trouble with friends (and lovers) for tweeting things they thought were stories shared in confidence but which I genuinely mistook for amusing anecdotes. My bad!

But I think the reason the Cut piece struck such a chord is that many of us have experienced something similar. For every Blair there is a Serena, for every Karlie a Taylor. We are all resentful, romantic, embittered, righteous. And some of us are writers.

It was when Caroline described reaching for her cat for comfort after an unfulfilling sexual encounter I thought, “that’s me! I love MY cat!” that I realized…we are all Caroline Calloway.

But the difference, the difference, of course, right, is that the rest of us would never air our and others’ dirty laundry on, of all places, social media, or the more high-brow New York magazine, or even the actually respectable venue of print, yeah? Right?

Caroline notes, accurately, that “overshare” is an accusation almost exclusively thrown at women (Karl Ove Knausgård certainly won’t shut the hell up about himself). And it’s true that writing about people who maybe don’t want to be material for your work is a thing men have been doing to women for…ever (the Fitzgeralds come to mind).

But STILL. It’s bad TASTE. It reveals a certain NARCISSISM and lack of TACT and weakness of CHARACTER, this constant posting and self-cannibalizing. Doesn’t it?

This, but not this.

Here’s a confession: when my package containing Scammer arrived, I was so excited that I immediately took my own version of the photo Caroline had sent me: my hand, holding the envelope. And without giving it any thought, I threw it up on Instagram Stories. Look at me, big-time media girl who got a galley of a hotly anticipated new title, hand-addressed by the controversial, some say notorious, author! Posting was both a reflex and a flex.

Have you spotted the issue yet?

Obviously, I kept the app open. I had to see who was paying attention to my latest get! And thankfully it only took a couple minutes before a friend kindly alerted me to the fact that I had just posted my fucking address on the fucking Internet via my completely fucking public social media.

THE ONE THING, THE ONLY THING, THAT YOU ARE NEVER, EVER SUPPOSED TO POST. POST A NUDE BEFORE YOU POST YOUR ADDRESS. POST FEET BEFORE YOU POST YOUR ADDRESS.

I WAS STONE COLD SOBER AND BEING A COMPLETE DUMB BITCH BECAUSE IT IS JUST THAT EASY TO PUT YOUR SHIT ONLINE.

(I quickly deleted it and, knock on wood, no one’s shown up to murder me yet!)

(More evidence that I am Team Overshare: I started this post with an update on my dead toenails.)

And so if you have made it this far, if you don’t hate reading this newsletter, the dashed-off ramblings of an over-eager over-sharer, I can almost guarantee that you will enjoy Caroline’s much more thoughtful and frankly, much more exciting book. Yes, it’s $65, but if it sells enough copies hopefully a publishing house will pick it up and pump out paperbacks. More importantly, if it’s successful I think she might actually end up writing the other two books she says she’s working on. And I really, really want those.

#adventuregrams #IYKYK,

Lizzie