Scammer Caroline Calloway Is Still Riding the Rage Baiting Gravy Train

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | September 19, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | September 19, 2024 |

What can I say about Caroline Calloway that hasn’t already been said by my colleagues? Not much. But I will add that I was an original follower way back when she was still posting charming little essays from Cambridge. At that point, she was amusingly annoying in a way you could only get away with in the early days of Instagram, and I enjoyed her Anglophilia and curated outfits. Eventually, I lost interest and rediscovered her during the scammer years, when everyone else did. When Natalie Beach wrote her now-infamous article exposing Calloway as a drug-fueled narcissist and definitely not the savant writer she claimed to be, I wasn’t surprised.

I went to graduate school for creative writing—more specifically, “creative nonfiction,” which is industry speak for memoir and personal essay writing. I know writers like Calloway, who use the medium to weaponize their trauma against their enemies in a desperate grab for attention.

Calloway has always done this, positioning herself as the woman scorned in a misogynistic society—and she’s not done. Her latest project is an “experimental memoir” that “combines new essays with heavily annotated excerpts” from the late Elizabeth Wurtzel’s 2001 advice book, The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Woman. Calloway describes it as “a never-before-seen type of conversation between two depressed downtown darlings across time and space.” She’s nothing if not confident. (Nylon)

The book is aptly titled Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life, and the “luxury first edition” is available for $45 on her website, seemingly the only place you can get it. (I highly recommend reading the full description of the book and Wurtzel; presumably, Calloway herself wrote it because I don’t even know what to say about it.)

So, it’s an advice book, but she admits she knows the idea of her giving advice will “bait rage online” (because that’s the point of everything she does). “Obviously, if you wanted to learn how to pole vault, you’d go to an Olympian. So if you want to be a manic pixie nightmare, you’re going to go to the world expert on that,” she explained.

“I just think it’s really nice to spend time on the page with women who have had it worse in their own ways and have come out the other side,” she added. This I agree with, and it’s kind of the whole point of memoirists. But this is always my experience with Calloway: she says something reasonably insightful, and then she ruins it with statements like this:

“We say that we like messy women, but we only act like it once they’re gone or dead.”

Anyway, there’s no word on whether she sought approval from whoever manages Wurtzel’s estate. The most they ever crossed paths was when Wurtzel tweeted asking who Calloway was after the Beach article. I guess Calloway ended up with some of her belongings when they were auctioned off after Wurtzel’s death and referred to her as “a bitch after my own heart” when she found letters from Wurtzel’s friends “urging her to pay her back taxes.”

So, yeah. I’m sure the book is super great.