Caroline Calloway’s ‘Scammer’ and Natalie Beach’s ‘Adult Drama’

Calloway made her name on Instagram in 2013, when she was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. “A normal Instagram post in 2013 was an aerial shot of cappuccino art,” accompanied by a caption like “#Valencia,” she would later recall. But Calloway’s posts were not normal. The images — of Caroline twirling in a gown, Caroline gaping at an ivied trellis — were secondary to the multi-paragraph captions that conjured up a fairy tale of spires and garden parties.

The Cambridge Captions, as Calloway now calls her juvenilia, were effectively serialized installments of a novel for “young adults” (read: teenagers). They were twee, but they were also impressively readable. Calloway amassed about 300,000 followers during her final year of college, and in 2014, she sold a proposal for a memoir called “School Girl” for a hefty six-figure sum.

But instead of becoming a professional writer, she became infamous. Her reign of chaos commenced in 2017, when she withdrew from her book deal, citing concerns about the way she had simplified and silly-fied herself in the proposal. She graduated from garden-variety influencer to all-caps PHENOMENON when she deleted her cutesy Cambridge posts and confessed to suffering from a debilitating Adderall addiction.

The downward spiral kept swirling, and the internet kept watching. In 2019 came the next turn of the screw. Calloway announced that she was charging $165 for “creativity workshops” that began to disintegrate before they even took place. She failed to book venues and, most notoriously, promised attendees Mason jars and garden seeds, then realized she had nowhere to store the 1,200 jars she had ordered to her tiny West Village apartment. To longtime followers, these snafus were charming. To the internet writ large, Calloway become a joke, a snake, a con artist, a scammer. And during the weeks when her failed workshops were all anyone could gripe about online, Natalie Beach struck.

“I Was Caroline Calloway” appeared in New York magazine in September 2019 and immediately went viral. It was part personal essay, part vicious exposé. Beach and Calloway, Beach recounted, met in a creative-nonfiction class in their 20s and immediately toppled into a mutual dependency too tortured to call a friendship. Beach lusted after Calloway’s glamour, while Calloway blithely enlisted her adoring accomplice to play the role of sidekick, then to collaborate on a few of her captions and finally to co-write the proposal for “School Girl.”

Truth be told, the ghostwriting revelations in “I Was Caroline Calloway” are not all that scandalous: It is common practice for celebrities to hire writers for help with longer projects, and Beach had no hand in authoring the captions that made Calloway really famous. But the envy, the gleam of homoeroticism, the potent tincture of longing and resentment — this is the stuff of soap opera in the wrong hands and great literature in the right ones. Beach’s hands were good enough. Filmmakers vied to adapt her essay. Explainers appeared in the New York Times. BuzzFeed published a quiz, “Are You A Caroline Or A Natalie?” (I am a proud Caroline). And Beach secured a book deal for an essay collection, “Adult Drama,” which no one doubted she would submit on time.

And the deliciously capricious Calloway? Days after Beach’s essay came out, she learned that her chronically depressed father had killed himself. First, she mourned. Then, she spent several years paying off her $100,000 debt to her publisher by selling a skin-care product that she winkingly branded “Snake Oil” and making what she has since described as “cerebral softcore porn” (videos in which she went topless and impersonated literary heroines). She left New York for Sarasota, Fla., after racking up $40,000 in back rent. “At a certain point, I realized I could either live luxuriously or pay my rent,” she told an interviewer. I know I should condemn this statement as childish or entitled, but I will never be able to regard it as anything other than inspired. And after the snake oil and the porn, Calloway finally wrote the book that she had promised the world.

“Adult Drama” came out this week, and on its heels was Calloway’s self-published memoir, “Scammer,” available for purchase for a whopping (but worth it?) $65 on her website. For a while, I wondered if Calloway’s opus actually existed. My anxiety was not assuaged when she referred to me as “my queen” and inserted a flutter of butterfly emoji in her responses to my increasingly frantic emails about an advance copy. Reading her replies, I was tempted to marvel at the extent to which she is irrepressibly herself, but I knew there was nothing irrepressible about the whole performance. It takes effort and gumption to be so exactly and so extravagantly who one is. Calloway was in character when she sent “Scammer” fashionably late; she was in character when she enclosed a small Mason jar in the package; and she was in character in the scene in the book in which she asks her old writing professor (and implicitly, the reviewer): “If you had to choose between me and Natalie, who is the better writer?”

As a committed Calloway apologist, I wanted to dislike “Adult Drama,” but I could not manage it. Sure, Beach’s debut is sometimes stiff and dutiful. A meditation on her stint as a cashier is interrupted by a needless lecture on the history of shopping, seemingly only because “braided essays” are in fashion. And admittedly, “I Was Caroline Calloway,” nominally the book’s central attraction, is sensational as a story though middling as a piece of prose.

Yet a more self-effacing brand of charisma emerges over the course of the collection. Beach may be a more conscientious character than Calloway, and her path to publication may be more conventional, but she, too, is transforming her life into theater as fast as she can live it. Eclectic essays about estate sales, abortion clinics and Abercrombie & Fitch are as trenchant as they are tender. Recounting her summer working as a landscaper, Beach reflects: “It struck me that I didn’t have the slightest idea how anything worked, or was made, or cared for.”

Despite its title, “Adult Drama” is a decidedly adolescent book — sometimes in an irksome way, but mostly in a touching way. Its subject, after all, is the searching tremulousness of youth, and Beach is sublime on the horrors of mirrors in middle school (“there are no atheists in an Abercrombie dressing room”) and gutting on the purgatorial provisionality of the odd jobs she took out of college (“it was just supposed to be a day job, but the day never seemed to end”).

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.

At least once a week, I find myself explaining emphatically to no one that Caroline Calloway is innocent. Overcharging people for an underwhelming workshop is not a crime! Disorganization is not deception! But none of this would matter, even to an imagined accuser, if Calloway’s work were not compelling. Woe to controversial internet personalities who cannot write, but all is forgiven if the eventual book succeeds.

The important thing is that “Scammer” is good: outrageous, turbulent and as raw as a wound, but good, the kind of book you read in a single shudder. Like “Adult Drama,” it is electric with the urgency of adolescence. I might not want to be Calloway’s friend, much less her publisher, but we don’t want the same things from our intimates or associates that we crave in our fictions — and Calloway is, by her own admission, first and foremost an invention.

Both the person and the persona came of age in the affluent enclave of Falls Church, Va. Calloway’s mother was “flannel-wearing, even-keeled on hikes.” Her father, in contrast, was a mad genius, a prodigy who graduated from Harvard in his teens, only to become a reclusive hoarder. The pair divorced when the would-be starlet was young. Growing up between her mother’s stable home and her father’s “tyranny of tchotchkes,” Calloway clutched instinctively at recognition. Internet celebrity was not yet an option, so she settled for an abortive run as a child actress. In high school, she began to pant for a more exalted sort of prestige. She craved heraldic crests and secret societies, but she was rejected by Oxbridge and the Ivies, so she studied art history at New York University because it “seemed like the sort of subject the character of Caroline Calloway would major in.”

The character of Caroline Calloway would also attend a school with castles for dormitories, and the actual Calloway would settle for nothing less. While her psychodrama with Beach simmered in the West Village, Calloway fudged her transcript and applied to Cambridge again. This time, she was accepted. And with an appropriately turreted backdrop in place at last, she began scheming to become — what? “Influencer” was just entering the lexicon, and we still lack a term for a person whose life is an exercise in self-making. There was no precedent for what she wanted to be.

The plot of “Scammer” was bound to be mesmerizing, but the writing did not have to be so gloriously opulent. Calloway is as disarmingly self-aware as devotees of her Instagram would expect, but she is also surprisingly lyrical. “My Adderall usage had now become a closed circuit,” she writes wrenchingly of her addiction. “I didn’t do drugs to do other things anymore — I did the drugs to feel the drugs.” The days slowed down, then accelerated: “Time canters and then gallops on amphetamines. You blink, and it’s morning. Blink again, and: 3 PM.”

“Scammer” is as wildly immediate as an Adderall binge. It ricochets from the slow burn of the present to the all-at-once rush of the past. Blink and Calloway is in high school, pining for the preppy glitz of the Ivy League. Blink again, and her father’s body is so decayed that the police cannot “rule out murder.” Beach’s article has just come out, and Calloway is “trending internationally on Twitter.” The detectives at the scene of the suicide ask her, “Anyone out there you know who would like to see you hurt?”

Did this devastatingly tragicomic scene actually take place? Should we care? “I’ve rearranged the world,” Calloway writes, “to suit my vision for it.” Sticklers may grumble that this vision does not always match the facts. When Beach traveled to Cambridge in a last-ditch effort to help Calloway complete “School Girl,” she was horrified to witness “the gap widening between the story we told and the situation on the ground.” Calloway was a sparkling socialite online, but behind the scenes she was in the throes of addiction. She “rarely went to class, didn’t hang out with friends, and hadn’t started the dissertation she needed to graduate,” Beach writes. She had never been more desperate for the consolations of fiction. Call Calloway’s imaginative posturing scamming if you want to. I prefer to call it art.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.

Self-published. 158 pp. $65

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