If you Google the words “caroline calloway scammer”, you’ll find articles, opinion pieces, interviews, exaltations, documentaries, polemics, and diatribes in publications ranging from The New York Post to The Atlantic. Until very recently, all the content about Caroline, the inscrutable and controversial 31-year-old whose Wikipedia entry pithily describes her as an “American internet celebrity”, is missing something crucial: discussion about her long-awaited book, Scammer. For a woman whose business model centres around her hyper-curated image, the intentionality of the book’s poor SEO performance is uncharacteristically unclear; is she leveraging her epithet in hopes of promoting her literary career, or has its name just been buried under the mythos of her presence, another plot point in the Caroline Calloway Variety Show? I could preface a review with a laundry list of Caroline’s controversies. I could detail our brief text conversations down to the emojis she used. In fact, I am drawn to do these things in snarky parentheticals, but I think that’s the wrong way to go about Scammer.
Parts of Caroline’s life feel eerily similar to my own; my public career on the internet really started around the time I moved to England to get a Master’s Degree in cultural and critical studies, writing longform essays with that markedly American sense of delusion about art and sex and my feelings for no one in particular, full of romance and pain and pretentious affects and Adderall, mailed in unmarked envelopes by friends from the United States, buried in a mountain of credit card and student loan debt. I try to be acutely aware of the inevitability of projection – whatever feelings I have about Caroline are, most likely, also feelings I have about myself – nonetheless, I also try to be acutely aware of the fact that I don’t know Caroline or anything about her beyond what exists on the internet, and now, in my hands.
Early in Scammer, Caroline shares that since childhood, it has been her dream to be a “famous memoirist”, a fascinating aspiration given that people usually write memoirs based on Grand Events and not simply to write memoirs. Her childhood aspirations were the ends, and not the means, making her calculated rise to fame adaptable, malleable and shrewd. Scammer is a fascinating, compelling book from someone whose writing has previously been confined to Instagram captions: to use the language from Scammer, Caroline’s debut deserves a double-barrelled review. It is a dazzling piece from an author whose legacy precedes her. Taken out of the shadow of this legacy, it is a book that is very good at the beginning, very good at the end, and fatally mediocre in the middle.
One of the first delicious aspects of Scammer is Caroline’s true sense of place. Her hometown in Virginia is crisp, hot and perfectly still. Her new home in Florida is sleazy, anonymous, regenerative. New York is expensive, in every single sense of the word, and Caroline has earned, spent and overspent her capital. One of my very first notes about Scammer was that it reads like a campus novel, set at Andover, NYU, and Cambridge: 60 pages in, Caroline reveals that this is not her campus novel… that will come next.
Her prose is rich, descriptive, heavy in atmosphere and tone, saturated with adjectives in a way that could only remind me of Goethe’s writings about his brief, intense, all-consuming relationship with Friederike Brion whom he eventually abandoned for seemingly no reason at all. It is filled with metaphors and similes, often straddling the line between the hazy, modernist writing of the authors she cites in the book and at times meandering too far off the course into the forest of cliche and artistic overconfidence (at one of Scammer’s weaker points, she compares struggling to pick between two lovers to trying to pick between Cambridge and New York).
The book’s non-linear structure allows us to see Caroline’s childhood next to her collegiate years and her life post-infamy; a fitting structure for an author who is living out a kind of non-linear existence. She spent years spacing out Instagram posts about only a handful of days at Cambridge. She sold a non-existent book for half a million dollars. She notes that our kneecaps are the only bones we aren’t born with, but due to a birth defect she required childhood surgery to remove the too-small kneecaps of hers that didn’t develop, a medical metaphorical return to infancy. Her hypershort chapter lengths feel too-trendy and played out (having been done well in Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed and tediously in Prince Harry’s Spare), but Scammer is a book of befores and afters – and Caroline proves herself to be a master of her own timeline.
Caroline sells sensationalism when it is clear she has wanted to sell sensitivity. Some of Scammer’s most riveting commentary comes not from the details of her public scandals but from Caroline’s actually-embarrassing admissions: she is far more relatable in confessing that she is banned from applying to Yale after four rejections than when she is naval-gazing about adolescent loneliness or the pitfalls of fame. Her teenage struggle to discover her own sexuality – while certainly personally important – literarily feels too played-out for the word count (in this way, her writing truly is in the tradition of the millennial NYU alumnae that came before her), but her tales of Photoshopping her way into Cambridge feel fresh. These things aren’t powerful because they’re salacious, but because they feel far more sheepish: it’s easy to wax poetic about the existential, life-defining feelings of fame and legacy, but much harder to examine individual actions that are run-of-the-mill shitty or pathetic. It is here you feel closest to Caroline: she is sharp, scrappy, shrewd, and fundamentally ambitious.
Scammer depicts Caroline as someone who believes in her own self-constructed destiny. She explains her teenage decision to major in art history because “Art history just seemed like the sort of subject the character of Caroline Calloway would major in.” These admissions of ambition and ladder-climbing colour her lifelong desire for fame and praise, things plenty of us want for ourselves but dare not admit. However, at times it feels like she disguises her old-money aspirations as intellectualism. Scammer presents Caroline’s desire for external marginalisation, for struggle against something other than herself, that fails close observation because it seems so transparently constructed. She transparently acknowledges that audiences love an underdog, and it’s clear that Caroline has spent so long in spaces of the ultra-ultra wealthy, that it left her insecure as someone brought up as regular Rich. It is acknowledged directly in Scammer, when she writes, “I had a lot of shame about the fact that I was well-off, but wanted to be well-offer,” but is never truly rectified. Readers who do not aspire to the same old-money aesthetics as Caroline can feel pulled away when she describes a summer on Martha’s Vineyard “with my father, the only family member with enough money to take me” or a depicted struggle to afford monthly (monthly!) round-trip tickets from England to New York to refill her Adderall prescription.
The middle chapters about her time in Cambridge and her golden days with Carl (who longtime readers may know as Oscar) is one of the weaker points in the book. Her confessional tone is par for the course given the book’s subject matter, and affords her a humanity that formalism would not have allowed; this is taken to the extreme as she describes her beauty and popularity at Cambridge. If anything, it is exactly this informality of prose which weakens her descriptions of fundamentally formal spaces. She promises to divulge fully her Cambridge springtimes in her next book, offering instead loose descriptions of events and places with a tone that does not match the uptight nature of the spaces she inhabits.
Her descriptions and metaphors are indulgent, but her grammar is casual – this section would have benefited from a commitment in either direction to the Fitzgerald-esque writing she cites or the total confessional informality of her social media rather than attempting to negotiate between the two. A handful of scattered italics telling you when something is particularly profound, paragraphs you know were written not to be read but shared. It’s cheesy, but readers will find plenty of these paragraph-closers as funny and witty as you know Caroline imagined them to be: “Confidence takes courage, but you can always substitute self-delusion if that’s all you have in the pantry.”
There is the audience Caroline has and the audience Caroline wants. I’m sure some of these people are both of these things, I know I’d sure like to believe I am. In Scammer, Caroline must appease the large contingent of her audience composed of aspiring influencers, scandal-hungry suburbanites, media studies freshmen who will write essays about the Ontology of Caroline Calloway, saying nothing that hadn’t been said far better by Walter Benjamin a century ago. Throughout Scammer, Caroline’s attempts to clear her name against various allegations (the workshops, for example) are in part chum in the water for these uncritical audiences, and in part an earnest plea to set the record straight. These parts of the book are the least interesting – something Caroline herself admits. It would be compelling that she continues to write them anyways, if it weren’t for the fact that they are so unstimulating to read.
It is hard not to see myself in Caroline: ambitious, self-mythologising, precocious, delusional, literary. I think of Virgina Woolf’s Orlando, who despite a comfortable upbringing and a lifetime of wild experience desires nothing more than to be a true artist; not good, not great, but The Best. While reading her book I found myself physically aching to write my own, an entitling tightness in my chest screaming I deserve it. I have important things to say.
I know it is probably deeply gauche to talk so much about myself in a review of someone else’s book, but I also know it’s perfectly – perhaps necessarily – in the spirit of Caroline’s oeuvre to do so. I don’t know if I’m too close to the subject matter to review the book or one of the only people that can do it honestly; Caroline’s writing transported me back to college and grad school, taking sleeping pills to erase months of my life, getting straight As writing about ancient Greece and eroticism for my beloved professors and then drunkenly talking shit about my beautiful prep-school peers at perfectly pretentious themed parties. White wine and Catullus were my teenage tools as I lied, clawed, laughed, and fucked while trying to worm my way from upper-middle-class excellence towards the shining sun of institutional approval or, better yet, institutional controversy.
I read Scammer in one day. The day before, I was in Sweden, the home country of Caroline’s first Cambridge lover. I can see why Caroline loved Sweden and all it represented; in this Scandinavian kingdom I felt all the things Caroline says she wants: wealth, beautiful design, tasteful cosmopolitanism, yet still utterly caucasian with the necessary liberal facade of acceptance. Scammer is a White Woman’s Tale. This is not a dismissive comment; plenty of great books are. Caroline makes no qualms about this, nor has she ever denied the privilege endemic to her story, she wants orchids, ball gowns, to write like Elizabeth Hardwicke and to live like Joanna Newsom.
For all the critiques of privilege, wealth and whiteness one can and ought to make of Caroline, there is a co-existing reality that she has been the subject of ridicule simply for being a woman. Caroline, at times, leans too heavy on this truth, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Her brand, which is the only word for what it is, has always been carefully curated, the product of deep authorial intent. She has been a villain on her own terms, over-the-top-ridiculous on her own terms, pathetic on her own terms, an underdog on her own terms. She has, of course, made genuine missteps. But what has allowed Caroline Calloway to thrive in our media culture is the assumption that women aren’t capable of this type of artistic manipulation, that we as audiences can control her narrative, that we can uncover or diagnose something in her posts or personality that in truth she has already buried and guided us to find.
There’s a Shakespearean irony to Caroline’s self-creation myth. She needed to create the character of Caroline Calloway to become famous enough to write a book that people wanted to read that was about nothing other than herself. Eventually, she wrote this book. But the most interesting, enjoyable, and immersive aspects of the text are not the sensational descriptions of her scandals nor her presence at fabulous old money parties. The most meaningful and well-written parts of Scammer are undoubtedly the chapters about her relationship with her late father, who died by suicide while The Cut was finalising their piece on Caroline. She would only learn of his death after its publication. Caroline stylises Dad as capitalised, like God. And not only her own father, but her old boarding school boyfriend’s father who informed Caroline of his death. Her writing on addiction, suicide and generational trauma are Scammer’s peak; raw and writhing except when they are painfully, brilliantly cold and detached.
The fundamental question that drives Scammer is a question of genre. Is this book non-fiction? The easiest, most tired, postmodern answer would be is anything? The truer, harder answer is: it depends on if you choose to believe her. I find it easy to believe the facts of Calloway’s life. I find it harder to believe some of her emotions. She finds it hard to believe some of her emotions, and plenty of the people around her. Caroline will lie to you and then confess the truth a hundred pages later, just like Caroline lied to herself during her period of Adderall addiction and withdrawal. What makes this book non-fiction is not the stories Caroline spins or the behind-the-scenes looks into the scandals readers already know, but her dedication to being a good writer.
One of the great triumphs of Scammer is that Caroline is not afraid of her audience. She is not afraid to make references to books they may not have read or art they may not have seen (for those that do know, her allusions are spot on and ripe, like the description of a woman with “a John Singer Sargent swoop of the neck”). She will be pretentious and childish, and I mean these things in the best possible way because they feel so natural and so real to the Caroline Calloway she attempts to depict. Caroline is unafraid to want things that we are not supposed to say we want: fame, thinness, adoration – and yet she never veers off into cheap shock value. Where Scammer really shines is in its descriptions of the quotidian. Caroline’s story is interesting, sure, it’s a life she’s lived to write this specific book. But where she proves herself to be an artist is in descriptions of her back-alley psychiatrist, an old friend living just outside of Boston, the electrical cords at the Harvard Lampoon house, or the fundamentally English aversion to sitting on the floor.
Scammer is a book for those of us who have imagined the eulogies our smartest friends will give us in the event of an untimely death. It is a book for recovering compulsive liars who justify their mistruths with pithy lines about subjectivism and autofiction. It is a book for people who are sometimes too loud or too brash at parties because hey, at least that’s one way to know exactly what people are thinking of you – as opposed to the ambiguity of sincerity. It was a book for me. Most of all, it’s a book for Caroline Calloway. You can love it or hate it, but she’ll be happy just as long as you’re talking about it at all.