The Memoirist is Present
Emma Burger reviews Caroline Calloway’s SCAMMER.
Scammer and I grew up together. I was 23 when I first entered Caroline world. I was 24 when I placed my pre-order for her work in progress. I was, and am, 27 when I finally received my long-awaited luxury first edition copy this summer, replete with Italian endpapers, a custom bookplate featuring Caroline’s cat Matisse, a postcard, and a bookmark decorated with signature artifacts: a Cambridge castle, the Chrysler Building, a love letter sealed with a kiss, a palm tree, her beloved blue butterfly emoji, and a prescription bottle labeled “Anti-Depressants Not Adderall.” Although I was admittedly skeptical I would ever receive my copy, the wait made me want it more. I wielded the fact that I still cared about this release that the rest of the world had long forgotten about like some kind of fan credential. Anyone could stick around for a viral moment. A brief blip of internet hysteria. But who was still genuinely waiting around for the book that might never come? Maybe I was pathologically obsessed.
The story of Caroline’s life, as told in Scammer over 67 vignettes, jumps around in time and space. Each chapter is one or two pages at most. Delicious morsels, easy to binge. It’s a collage of her father’s debilitating mental illness and eventual suicide. Her gradual recovery from amphetamine addiction. Her wayward youth spent gallivanting around Oxbridge with the lower ranks of the British aristocracy. Summer nights in New York City, living off Aperol spritzes and takeout sushi. She tells and retells the stories we’ve been hearing for the last near decade of her public life. The information revealed between those hand-pressed covers isn’t anything new, which makes her literary accomplishment all the more impressive.
Even though these stories have been shared repeatedly on the internet (and discussed ad nauseam on the Caroline Calloway hate subreddit, r/smolbeansnark), none feel tepid or warmed over. Her prose is sharp and fresh. It flits. It glitters. It’s as if she’s sitting you down on the floor of her West Village apartment to tell you her life story in fits and starts, unclear what stage of intoxication she might be in, if any. She never apologizes for repeating herself or going low. She takes ample cheap shots at Natalie Beach (her writing, her looks, her nepobaby connections) and name drops liberally. The acknowledgments section is fourteen pages long and includes Julia Fox, Cat Marnell, Taylor Swift, and Lena Dunham, to whom the book is dedicated. In 2019, Lena Dunham bought Caroline’s life rights, though the film has yet to be made.
“Printing these sentences and dedicating Scammer to Lena is really the most I can do to influence any outcomes,” Caroline admits.
We both believe our lives are inherently worth reading about, so we try to live them in a way that makes them worth writing about.
Caroline and I have a lot in common. We both find our own inner lives too compelling not to externalize and serve up to anyone who will bite. We’re both privileged, college-educated white girls from the east coast. We’re both addicts, of one type or another, in recovery, of one type or another. We feel the same desperation to be seen and heard and known. Evidently, we both think our words should live on without us, unable to accept a world on which we haven’t made some small indelible mark. As if going through life without going on the record would be pointless. We both believe our lives are inherently worth reading about, so we try to live them in a way that makes them worth writing about.
Caroline and I are not the same though. The disparity between us is the reason I can admire her without reservation. It’s easy for me to romanticize a person’s character defects when they don’t overlap with mine. I can explain them away. Leap to her defense. She was young. She was an addict. I don’t know her, so I forgive her. It’s people exactly like me I have a harder time forgiving.
In her work and in her persona, there is a total lack of neuroticism and self-consciousness that is attractive and refreshing. As a reader, I’m thrilled. As a writer, I feel secondhand embarrassment for how well-trodden this territory of hers already is. I’m not embarrassed on her behalf because I think it’s bad, but because I’m fearful of being so naked on the page myself. My own memories and compulsions grip me as hard as hers do, except my inner critic stops me from obsessing over them so publicly. My instinct is to apologize to the reader who’s read this before. My first novel was about alcoholism and anorexia. If I could shed my own anxiety around repeating myself, I too would probably write variations on those same themes over and over again, breathless each time like the first.
Caroline insists that her life is uniquely interesting, and thus she makes it so. She replays her beef with Natalie not as a minor drama between two college friends but as an epic saga worthy of several books. Her writing is snappy, funny, sometimes petty, and often viscerally, profoundly sad. Toward the end, she tells the story of going back to her father’s house with her mother to clean up the bedroom where he’d died of an intentional painkiller overdose. “When we went back to Falls Church together a couple months later to sell his house and pay his debts, there was still a colony of maggots inside his mattress. Sometimes people say I’m like those bugs—feeding off of tragedy while the real victim’s dead. They say I shouldn’t write about him. The people who say this often have living fathers and are never, ever memoirists. I reached down and picked up a wriggling maggot, alive just like my father was not.”
“When we went back to Falls Church to sell his house and pay his debts, there was still a colony of maggots inside his mattress. Sometimes people say I’m like those bugs—feeding off of tragedy while the real victim’s dead.” — CC
She’s not afraid to write what’s ugly, as long as it’s true. Her father dealt with crippling agoraphobia until his final moments. Her mother also faced down her own mortality. Caroline explains: “Surgeons took out basically all of her abdominal organs, lopped off HALF of her intestines, sewed her torso shut, sewed her ass crack shut, too, and then doctors moved her asshole to the front of her stomach and gave her a stoma just above her belly-button. The next time the cancer comes back there will be nothing left to do.” And then there’s Caroline’s own addict brain, which tries incessantly to kill her. This is why the butterflies and flowers and sumptuous English parties must exist. This is why Caroline world must exist.
Caroline world is made up of dreams. And yet she finds a way to make them real in the world. It would be all too easy to dismiss this blind confidence as the effect of years on amphetamines. Her turbocharged ambition has long predated the Adderall though, and has long outlived it, too—it’s been there since she was a little girl. “I don’t know what, as a child, made me believe that being a famous memoirist was going to solve all my problems, since all anyone ever told me was to pick a different goal. 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.”
I’ll readily admit that I’m envious of Caroline. Deeply so. Our longings aren’t so different, hers and mine. And yet, she seems to have that fundamental self-belief that I still only aspire to. What she longs for will be hers, she proclaims. Her convictions are so strongly held that they inevitably become reality. She made it her mission to live inside a fairy tale, for instance, and actually did it for a little while. She’s fearless in putting her desires on the page and her pages out into the universe, even when the universe comes back at her with a deluge of negative attention and hate. Never mind, though. All press is good press, she seems to say. I have to remember that I too can trust that what I want will come, if only I can stay the course as she did, and believe.
“If you build a life around an identity that springs from your own imagination, is it ever inauthentic?” —CC
At her core, Caroline is a performance artist, and she never pretends to be otherwise. She opens Scammer with a Kurt Vonnegut quote: “We are only what we pretend to be. So we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Her entire adult life has been an exercise in pretending. Caroline doesn’t live in denial though. She’s the first to admit that she invented Caroline Calloway. “I am Caroline Calloway, but I wasn’t always,” she writes. “I switched my middle name with my last one because I thought that Caroline Calloway would look better on the covers of books someday. If you build a life around an identity that springs from your own imagination, is it ever inauthentic?”
We each can only ever be one person, and it’s our job to pass through this lifetime as the person we choose to be. To understand our specific coordinates. What it feels like to live as this individual in this body at this unique point in time and space. Sometimes this reality can feel like a limitation. It frustrates me. How is it that there are over seven billion of us alive right now, and the only consciousness I’ll ever get to access is my own?
But that’s the whole point. As people, our purpose is to make sense of the particular set of experiences we’re having. As writers, it’s to record that sensemaking so others might access an experience outside their own. Assuming that’s our goal, Caroline has done exactly that. For years now, she’s invented and performed herself. Fully embodying this persona who was once just a figment of her own imagination. She was an Instagram influencer before they even existed. She’s a publicity mastermind. A lesson in manifestation. A universe unto herself. Like all of us, she’s stuck at the center of her own little world, except she’s the one writing it, and we’re all invited.