Calloway might be a child of Instagram, but her book captures the feeling of a photo album uploaded to Facebook after a drunken night out—loads of fun, but noticeably uncurated and occasionally ill-advised. Instead of a blurry picture of a Solo cup being used as an ashtray, we get a two-sentence “vignette” that reads: “The worst scams I ever perpetrated were the ones for which I was never caught. I lied on my application to Cambridge.” (She had inflated her A.P. test scores and Photoshopped her Exeter transcript, changing her D-plus in Ancient Greek to an A-minus.) The book is full of head-spinning lines that swerve from poignant to nonsensical. I spent far too long trying to parse the meaning of the following passage: “I swear to you I feared that specific scandal even then. I feared the day it would find me like a murmuration of darklings, feathered and murderous, ink blooming black in water, wings beating a drum’s tattoo, heartbeat behind glass, a purr.” Other sentences I admired, such as Calloway’s description of Sarasota, Florida, where she wrote much of the book. Sometimes, Calloway writes, “the rainclouds churn so thick that the view outside blanches blank as if someone forgot to download the world that day.” (She is at her best when she’s writing about the Internet, even in passing.)
Much of the book is about Beach, whom Calloway writes about with a fascinating and callous pettiness. The author takes an obvious joy in fact-checking her former friend’s version of the story, while also claiming to understand, as a fellow-writer, why Beach made certain authorial decisions. She accuses Beach, the child of local journalists in New Haven and the niece of O magazine’s former editor-in-chief, of being a “writer-nepo-baby in both denial and disguise,” who played up her financial need because readers tend to root for the underdog. (“I don’t know what Caroline thinks the New Haven Register pays,” Beach told The New Yorker, “but I suspect she’s overestimating.”) Beach was sexually assaulted, and, according to Calloway, “fudges the timeline in her essay for emotional impact,” so that she’s assaulted the night before she’s asked to clean the period blood off of Calloway’s sheets. “I don’t ever blame her for lying about the timeline of her assault to make me look worse,” Calloway writes. “She just wanted to be heard.” Later, Calloway reveals that when Beach first told her about the assault, the morning after it happened, she remembers “weeping for Nat,” but she also remembers feeling turned on by the idea of her friend’s “topless and abused body.” Beach describes the morning after the assault as one of the worst days of her life. “I only wish my description was a manipulation or exaggeration,” she said, in response to Calloway’s claims. “That years later it would appear that Caroline is not only questioning my account but publicly eroticizing the violence is unfathomably cruel.”
Calloway shipped the first copies of “Scammer” to journalists the week of June 12th. On June 20th, Beach published “Adult Drama,” an essay collection that includes her original article about Calloway and a newer piece about the saga, which was recently excerpted by The Cut. Beach’s book is less meandering than Calloway’s, and yet it is also slower and more unsure of itself. The best essays are the ones about Calloway—which is to say, the ones that we’ve already read. In “Scammer,” Calloway uses honesty as a provocation, telling readers to brace themselves for what’s coming next. In “Adult Drama,” Beach writes with the careful honesty of someone who understands how easily the truth can be distorted. “In an attention marketplace that has made a memoirist out of almost all of us, and if all memoirists are duplicitous, can we trust any relationship?” she asks. “But there I go again, hiding behind the first-person plural. What I mean is, can I trust myself?” On the inside cover flap, there’s a photo of the author, facing the camera but not looking directly at it. “Natalie Beach is a writer and producer for film and television,” her bio reads. “She lives with her husband in the shadow of Dodger Stadium.” In whose shadow?
If “Scammer” is an authoritative account of the Instagram era, then the Calloway-Beach feud is a throwback to a moment in that period when the personal essay was king. The women met at N.Y.U., in a creative-nonfiction seminar taught by the journalist David Lipsky, known for his book about David Foster Wallace, “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.” Both women developed a crush on the professor, and their first “collaboration” involved fantasizing aloud about him together: Calloway described what she imagined might happen during office hours, and Beach elaborated, shaping these details into an erotic story. “She liked to use my body in proxy for her own,” Calloway writes. “It pleased Natalie, I think, the pleasure she gave me, indulging both of our sexual fantasies at once.”
The class seems to have imbued both with an early form of “main-character syndrome.” Calloway had already changed her name from Caroline Calloway Gotschall to Caroline Gotschall Calloway, because she thought it “would look better on the covers of books someday,” and she was majoring in art history, because it “just seemed like the sort of subject the character of Caroline Calloway would major in.” Beach arrived at college as a “virgin with a meek ponytail.” But, according to Calloway, the class was “sublimely interesting because Lipsky favored us so openly over the other students.” (“That’s not how I remember the class,” Lipsky told me, over e-mail, though he added that, “in any workshop, any good writer will feel they’re being called upon to the exclusion of other writers, which is as it should be.”) Beach wrote an essay about buying her first vibrator, in which every line of the piece was an opening sentence. To Calloway, who had not yet read Janet Malcolm, the idea was groundbreaking.
“Caroline and Natalie were very strong writers—you could tell from the class’s start,” Lipsky wrote in his e-mail. Beach recalls some feedback she received from Lipsky: “you’re limited by your itinerary,” he told her, or restricted by the narrowness of her own lived experiences. Ghostwriting Calloway’s book proposal opened new doors; it “was like writing in a new tense—first person beautiful,” Beach recalls. The two women created a new version of Calloway, based on details from both of their lives, in what Calloway describes as “a kind of literary black magic.” This version of Calloway did drugs at Cambridge, like the real Calloway—though not nearly as many. But she had also grown up in a house that was more reminiscent of Beach’s, “a warren of paper-back books and half-drunk mugs of tea.” (In “Scammer,” Calloway describes growing up with a father who was a hoarder, and who dealt with serious mental illness. “Our possessions owned us, and they let us use the good furniture never,” Calloway writes, a sentence that is delightfully childlike.) Once “School Girl” grew too distant from her actual life, though, Calloway became determined to destroy it. Despite building her brand on lies, she wanted to write true nonfiction after all. “I don’t know what, as a child, made me believe that being a famous memoirist was going to solve all my problems,” she writes, in “Scammer.” “But I latched onto a vision of myself in a ball gown, with fresh flowers in my hair, inside a castle, inside of a story that was true.”
Calloway has long conflated being a memoirist with having a vaguely artsy aesthetic. And yet her adoption of the latter somehow succeeded in facilitating the former, in the same way that her bot followers eventually led to real fame. She successfully invented, and then lived, a life worth writing about. But her romanticism, flair for embellishment, distaste for chronology, and puzzling insistence on using pseudonyms for people whose names have been widely publicized still make “Scammer” feel like a work of autofiction. Calloway has already been accused of fabricating details. In one vignette, she explains that she was the inspiration for Julien Calloway, an influencer-character in the “Gossip Girl” reboot. “A photo of my face was actually thumb-tacked to a mood-board in the LA HBO writers’ room,” she writes. Joshua Safran, the series’ creator, recently tweeted, “I couldn’t even pick this person out of a lineup of two people if my life depended on it. Does she think Blair Waldorf was named after a salad?” In her book, Calloway asks, “If you build a life around an identity that springs from your own imagination, is it ever inauthentic?” Maybe not, but it sounds like an awful lot of work just so you can write a “memoir” in which you reflect on such questions.
The “Scammer” and the Scammed
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