Caroline Calloway’s shamelessness shocked the internet. Her memoir shows you can cash in on cancellation

It’s almost a decade since Jon Ronson first described the life-destroying phenomenon of online ‘public shaming’. Now, internet celebrity Caroline Calloway has found a way to subvert that narrative with a self-published memoir that feeds our addiction to the messy, unedited lives of strangers, writes Alice Saville

Caroline Calloway, pictured in 2019 (Getty Images for Shorty Awards)

As a teenager, I realised a simple truth: humiliation loses its sting if you turn it into a good story. By the time I was back from a beach holiday where a waterslide had torn my bobbly old swimsuit, I’d embroidered the anecdote into one of full, shivering, pasty nudity in front of a jeering horde of French teenagers. The resulting rush of turning pain into triumph is one that’ll be familiar to writers, comedians, raconteurs, or anyone who’s written into teen magazine Mizz’s legendary “cringe” pages with gory tales of tampon mishaps.

As beloved screenwriter and autobiographical essayist Nora Ephron put it, “everything is copy”. But notorious influencer-turned-anti-hero Caroline Calloway has taken this theory to new levels with her self-published book Scammer, a work she loftily describes as a “daybook”, made of loosely connected vignettes leading from her dysfunctional childhood right up to her traumatic cancellation. Bizarre as it often is, it’s impossible to look away.

To recap: in her unproblematic golden years, Calloway was an Instagram influencer famed for beaming an idealised image of Cambridge University life to her legions of followers, wearing orchids in her hair and a $500,000 book deal like a badge of honour. But then, in 2019, Calloway’s pastel-tinted universe assumed nightmarish hues. Her former best friend Natalie Beach wrote a fluent, merciless expose called “I Was Caroline Calloway” for American website The Cut, where she told the world how she’d ghostwritten Calloway’s famously lyrical Instagram captions and subsequent book proposal, while suffering endless small indignities at the hands of her prettier, more popular friend. The day after the essay’s publication, Calloway’s dad died. As she wrote his eulogy, the internet ripped her to shreds, and she assembled an unlikely new look from the tattered pieces of her carefully-curated image.