Courtesy of @carolinecalloway.
How do I even begin to explain Caroline Calloway? In the past few years, the all-American-girl-turned-Cambridge-student Calloway garnered a sizeable Instagram following for her rambling captions and sugary documentation of an expat scholar’s life. In the past few months, the influencer-turned-scammer Calloway watched that all steadily fall apart, as a journalist writing for Pajiba loudly picked apart the con-artistry behind her work. In the past week, Calloway became the subject of a viral exposé on The Cut, titled “I Was Caroline Calloway”, written by her once-best-friend (and uncredited ghostwriter) Natalie Beach. And, in the past few days, the only-27-year-old Calloway announced the death of her father, prompting her to grieve, in real-time, on Instagram.
Of all the terrible and extraordinary things surrounding Calloway, Beach’s searing “I Was Caroline Calloway” is the most fascinating. Cruelly exacted and neatly executed, its genre may fall under ‘personal essay’, but its style flits incredibly between ‘thriller’ and ‘romance’. The article does more than just expose Calloway as an artistic-fraud (according to Beach, she co-wrote Calloway’s famous Instagram captions, and infamous book proposal without any recognition), it shows her as entitled, manipulative, unreliable, cocky, callous, charming, entrancing, talented—the list goes on. After the publication of Beach’s piece, Calloway became more than just a scammer, she was now, also, a terrible friend.
In the past few days I’ve found myself questioning the ethics of it all. A quick perusal of Caroline Calloway’s IG reveals a woman who is clearly spiralling out of control. And yet here we all are, popcorn at the ready, manically refreshing The Cut to delight in her downfall. “It’s pure schadenfreude,” proclaimed English journalist Pandora Sykes of Calloway-gate on Twitter. “Enjoying the takedown of a young narcissistic woman is a tale as old as time.” Sykes is right that as a society we revel in watching the mighty topple, but Beach’s essay plays into a much larger, more tangled, cultural phenomenon than simple schadenfreude—the notoriously complicated dynamics of female friendship.
Historically, society has taken an unpleasant fascination in watching female-friendships unravel: we publicise Sex and the City feuds and we make films like Bride Wars. It is for this reason that the easy and lazy misreading of Beach’s article is to pit her and Calloway against one another. A recent interview in The Times was clumsily titled, “Caroline Calloway: How my best friend made me an internet pariah”—a brash attempt to market Calloway and Beach as sworn-enemies. “Jesus f*cking Christ. I don’t agree with this headline AT ALL,” moaned Calloway on her Instagram, reminding onlookers that the relationship extended far beyond simple rivalry.
Yes, the very notion of Beach’s tell-all exposé was vindictive, but beneath her efforts to out Calloway, the writing bubbles with an undercurrent of sisterly longing and loss. Shaming Caroline Calloway may have been the essay’s result, but it does not feel like its intention. And no matter how closely Beach’s depiction of Calloway drifts into malice, there is a persistent sense of tenderness and care in her presentation. Similarly, Calloway’s response to the article has been to praise and publicise Beach. “WHO IS GIVING NATALIE A BOOK DEAL?” she questioned on her Instagram, “She deserves these jobs because she’s the best writer I know.”
At its core, “I Was Caroline Calloway” is a distillation of the complexities of female friendship—a subject we have culturally marvelled at for decades. Unsurprisingly, comparisons between Beach’s work and previous famous-accounts of female friendship arrived thick and fast. “Reading [“I Was Caroline Calloway”] was like boiling six seasons of HBO’s Girls into a teaspoon, and injecting it into your veins,” wrote Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse. “If nothing else, this piece is really great Elena Ferrante fan fic,” tweeted The Cut’s senior editor Anna Silman. For me, the whole article smacks of Sally Rooney’s mesmerisingly messy female-friendship-driven novel, Conversations With Friends.
Like Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Dunham’s Girls, and Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, Beach’s essay basks in ambivalence: tiresome black and white presentations of female bitchiness are swapped out for far murkier, more challenging, and authentic depictions of women. There are no heroes in these stories, and no villains either. Where Calloway is portrayed as manipulative and chaotic, Beach is equally calculating and self-pitying. When I take BuzzFeed’s “Are you a Caroline or a Natalie” quiz, I am told I am a Caroline, and I am unsure whether I should feel happy or sad at the diagnosis.
By the time I finished “I Was Caroline Calloway”, I was a little exhausted. Beach’s essay makes for riveting and confronting reading, forcing its consumer to identify the uglier aspects of themselves. I might not have gone so far as to lock someone out on a cold Amsterdam street (as Calloway did to Beach) but I have let friends down, and, in turn, been let down by friends. And, like Calloway and Beach, the ramifications of these transgressions are rarely clear-cut. Female friendships are some of the most steadfast and loving relationships we know, while at the same time being some of the most puzzling and nuanced. It is no surprise then, that they make for such good art.