By Emma Chance | Celebrity | January 14, 2025 |
Caroline Calloway has been canceled countless times. At this point, she’s actively courting cancelation and “scammer” is an essential part of her brand. Her most recent scheme is an advice book inspired by a literary hero of hers, Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of the infamous memoir Prozac Nation.
Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life is, ostensibly, a tribute to Wurtzel’s lesser-known work, The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Woman. According to Juliette Jeffers of Interview, Calloway’s tribute is “part biography, part memoir, holding up Wurtzel’s life as a mirror for Calloway’s own.” As she does with all her work, Calloway has self-published the book, which is exclusively available on her website for a cool $45. She describes it as “an instant internet heirloom” and “not just the first book about Elizabeth Wurtzel since her death in 2020,” but the “first book about Elizabeth Wurtzel…ever.”
So, she’s a big fan. So big, she refers to herself as “Elizbeth Wurtzel’s publicist.”
“We need more sad girls to publicize the other forgotten women from history, so that these great writers don’t slip away,” she explains. “It’s a call to action, because I can’t do it all myself.”
Jeffers humors her, pointing out that “the interest is clearly there” for revisiting the work of lesser-known women writers of the not-so-distant past. A book like Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz, she says, “suggests an ongoing interest in the literary ‘it-girl’ as a type.”
“I love that the term ‘lit girl’ is really entering the modern dictionary,” Calloway responds, adding that she’s starting a podcast called Lit Girls in which she will interview contemporary “lit girls” like Cat Cohen and Lena Dunham talking about their “lit girl” foremothers.
But if I know Caroline Calloway, I know this is all talk. This literary it-girl persona she’s cultivating and her admiration of the dead women who can’t speak for themselves, whom she uses to prop herself up, is only skin deep. It, and the book that has come out of it, are just another cash grab. Calloway is not the independent feminist powerhouse she wants you to think she is—there’s treacherous machinery operating behind her to keep this all running, and the man at the wheel is her publicist and a certified creep, Mitchell Jackson.
Mitchell Jackson used to be Mitchell Sutherland, who was Wurtzel’s editor when she wrote for Vice. Jackson was “famously fired from Vice in 2017 after his emails to then-Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos were leaked to BuzzFeed.” (Blocked and Reported) Jackson and his misdeeds are meager few in a culture of abuse at Vice that I won’t get into here, but this is the guy representing Calloway and the man we have to thank for her recent media exposure.
“They work in similar ways,” Jackson told NYLON of Wurtzel and Calloway. He described Wurtzel as “a perfectionist who fought him over every comma” and recalled how she once “attempted to serve him a moldy Edible Arrangement he himself had sent her weeks prior.”
“Similarly, at a business meeting, Caroline fed me a salad consisting of Whole Foods arugula and weeds she pulled from the side of the highway,” he says.
Calloway insists she’s a lifelong fan of Wurtzel and that she had multiple dogeared copies of her books scattered about her college dorm, but I think the truth is a whole lot simpler and much sadder: she hired a publicist to bring her back from cancellation without bothering to question his ethics, and that guy just so happened to have worked with a writer of a similar bent at one point in his life, ipso-facto, you’re not canceled, you’re a “messy lit-girl.” It’s classic crisis management, it’s insincere, and it’s just plain bad writing.
But the sinister part is that Jackson is the one doing it. Those leaked emails he was fired for? He was asking a known neo-Nazi to “please mock this fat feminist,” referring to writer Lindy West. This is the man we want inventing character tropes for women?
This is not to say that revisiting the works of Elizabeth Wurtzel and other forgotten women writers is a bad thing. You should absolutely do that, but you should check out Prozac Nation from your local library or purchase it at an independently owned bookstore near you. Just don’t give Caroline Calloway any more of your money.