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.

As Jon Ronson’s influential 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed explores, people who become the focus of Twitter’s ire usually get little more than deep humiliation, a lost livelihood and untold sleepless nights to show for it. But Calloway’s own narrative took a different turn.

As she explains in Scammer, her rampaging Adderall addiction meant she had no hope of fulfilling her original book deal, even if she hadn’t already fallen out of love with the idea of writing a sanitised Cambridge University love story. Her cancellation put the nail in the coffin of that book. So she paid back the $100,000 advance by exploiting her reputation: she ran five-hour workshops called “The Scam”, sold a beauty potion called “snake oil”, and made a fortune on OnlyFans by costuming herself as literary heroines to make porn that people would feel “intellectually superior about consuming... a lucrative antidote to the shame some people feel about sex”.

Now, three years after she first promised it to her fans, Calloway has self-published her memoir Scammer, a demonically gripping pageturner that charts her relentless efforts to claw her way into a literary elite. It’s a book that definitively proves she has no need for a ghostwriter. It’s an exhilarating victory for everyone who’s ever f***ed up, overpromised, struggled to finish; a talisman of hope with marbled endpapers. It’s also typo-ridden, exclamation point-infested, salesman-like in its relentless urgings to buy her next book, and not as self-aware as it thinks it is. The Washington Post and Stylist have rushed to declare Scammer a “masterpiece” – but prestigious literary organs like the London Review of Books have maintained a dignified silence.

In some senses, Calloway is a publisher’s nightmare: in Scammer, she describes wasting her advance on cocaine, partying and chic little outfits, leaving the actual book unwritten. But currently, as she drops coy hints on Instagram about the legitimate publishing houses now sniffing round her self-published opus, she’s also a publisher’s dream. “The right time to start marketing your book is five years before it actually comes out. Trust me,” she writes in Scammer, as part of a dogged, only partially convincing mission to reframe all her actions (from relentless partying to not paying rent until she was sued by her landlord) as a calculated bid for literary stardom.

The market for the kind of literary fiction Calloway spent her girlhood dreaming of writing has collapsed. Annual surveys from US body National Endowment for the Arts show that fewer people read for pleasure each year, and those that do read fewer books than they used to. But people’s hunger for celebrity remains strong, with publishers desperately shoring up their finances with books by established names from Pamela Anderson to Elliot Page to Morrissey (who leveraged his fame to have his mouldering word salad of a memoir badged as a Penguin Classic). Prince Harry’s memoir Spare had the highest first day sales of any nonfiction book published by Penguin Random House, with millions poring over its toe-curling anecdotes about the royal magic mushroom trip. In this climate, new, unknown authors are required to market their books as though they’re already famous, posting cringe-worthy TikToks of themselves clutching their freshly-printed works, or baring their souls on Twitter, perhaps wishing that – like Calloway – they’d started five years sooner.

The underlying dynamic behind this shift is twofold. Firstly, the move to online bookbuying means that people are likely to type names they already know into search bars, rather than browsing shelves for an appealing title as they would in days of yore. And secondly, and harder to prove, is the possibility that we’re living in an era of unusually intense nosiness into the unedited private lives of strangers, typed directly into Reddit’s AITA (“Am I the Asshole?”) forum, Mumsnet’s AIBU (“Am I Being Unreasonable?”) message board, or laid bare in advice columns and cancellation scandals spooled messily across social media.

In Scammer, nothing is off limits. In between sweet, giddy evocations of Cambridge balls or Yale parties, Calloway gluts herself on trauma, comparing herself to one of the maggots she found feeding on the mattress her father died on. Disturbingly, she describes being turned on while her friend describes a sexual assault, then talks about using drugs and men to blot out her own pain.

These ugly realities of addiction, death, sex, and shame are things we don’t often see in the current timid media landscape. Authors and influencers alike tread carefully around controversial topics, petrified of being cancelled or losing brand collabs. In comparison, Calloway’s shamelessness has a lurid pull. Who could resist being drawn in?