Who is Caroline Calloway: her disastrous tour and ex-best friend Natalie, explained

Tuesday night, the Internet exploded during a test. Specifically, the internet exploded following a confessional personal essay written by a non-famous woman, as if it was still 2014.

The essay in question was published by The Cut, New York Magazine. Its author is an independent writer named Natalie Beach. He describes Beach's friendship with the influential Instagram, Caroline Calloway, turned viral earlier this year when her planned tour became a debacle in the Fyre Fest style. And although nothing in this sentence may seem to deserve a ton of attention, as soon as Beach's essay was dropped, many people online sat down and took note.

Fans and hate enthusiasts have taken sides with Reddit and the legends of Calloway's own Instagram posts. "Caroline Calloway" tended on Twitter. The news has made Jezebel and Cosmo. "It was … a pretty white trip for girls," famous author noted Roxane Gay. Feminist writer Lara Witt used this essay as a basis for a Twitter feed on racial beauty standards.

That's because Beach's test is not about itself. This is the last chapter of a story that is probably built since 2013, when Caroline Calloway began to become famous on the Internet. And this story works with all of the Internet's favorite tropes: images of fairy tales hiding dark realities, identities played and scams galore.

Now, with Natalie Beach's essay, this story has reached its peak. The essay recounts Beach's past with Calloway both before and after the viral celebrity and demonstrates that Beach was herself responsible for building the Calloway brand. This adds a deeply human element to Calloway's already juicy story.

Here's all you need to know to understand Caroline Calloway, Natalie Beach, and why on Earth, we care so much about one or the other.

Who is Caroline Calloway?

Explaining how Caroline Calloway became famous on the Internet is a little tricky because she is not a classic celebrity. She is not even a classic influencer on Instagram, although her story begins on Instagram.

Caroline Calloway first met an audience on Instagram in 2013. She was an American student who attended Cambridge University and she regularly published pictures of her fairy-tale life: Studying the University of Cambridge 39, history of art in a chapel, drinking champagne on the roof of a castle, going to the ball and flirting with incredibly charming boys. These photos may not have been extremely accurate because they reflected life in Cambridge, but as an ambitious Instagram fantasy, they were deeply amusing.

Calloway's biggest selling point was not his photos, it was: they were their legends. They were all paragraphs long and, taken together, formed a kind of memory, a story of Calloway's life in Cambridge, his coming of age and his relationship with his ex-boyfriend Oscar.

In 2015, Calloway had more than 300,000 followers on Instagram. She announced that she had always planned to write a book and that she wanted to use her Instagram memoirs as a basis. The literary agent Byrd Leavell is committed to representing her. Calloway's book proposal was sold at auction. It was sold to Flatiron Books as part of the "Publishers Marketplace" magazine's "significant" agreement, which meant it was between $ 251,000 and $ 499,000. Calloway told the press that his advance was half a million dollars.

But the promised book never materialized. Leavell, whose career credits include the successful release of books on charismatic train wrecks (his client list contains writers on drugs and beauty, Cat Marnell, professional brother Tucker Max and Donald Trump) did not seem to be able to shoot a book from Calloway. Calloway began worryingly publishing on Instagram information about his drug use and his self-destructive habits. "I will teach you to negotiate a book in the most damaging and irresponsible way a twenty-three-year-old can have," she wrote.

Finally, in September 2017, Calloway announced that the book proposal she had sold was too sexist, too boy-centered, and that she was no longer interested in writing it. "From now on, this love story I told you on Instagram will also be a true story, in every respect, not just the ones the publishers will buy," she wrote. "It's a love story about a girl and her creativity."

Meanwhile, she wrote in Instagram Stories, that she owed her publisher the $ 100,000 of her advance that she had already been paid for – but she had already spent everything. The publisher was super understanding, she said. She put her book proposal on sale in her Etsy store.

Calloway spent the next year in relative obscurity as a minor influencer for Instagram, selling products in his Etsy store, giving occasional interviews and posting mainly on Instagram Stories rather than in his main thread. (In the messages now deleted, she offered to create sponsored content – although she seems to have had little success with this.) But all this changed in December 2018, when Calloway started advertising for what she called a world tour of 39 "creativity workshops". Kayleigh Donaldson, Cultural Writer, has written a Twitter feed on this topic.

According to Calloway's description of the event (now deleted, but preserved in an article on The Cut), the workshop would be a place where his fans could talk about creativity, artistic creation and building an Instagram brand. Each workshop would last four hours, although Calloway is only present for three hours (the first hour would be an opportunity for participants to make new friends). Participants would receive personalized diaries, vegan lunches, and personalized treatment packages specifically for them, which would include jar gardens. They drink coffee or tea with oatmeal. They made fresh orchid wreaths to wear in their hair. The tour would visit 10 American cities before moving to Europe. Attending a workshop would cost $ 165 per ticket.

But Calloway started selling tickets a month before the planned start of the tour, without having yet done any organizational work. She had no place to stay. In a moment that became emblematic of the whole debacle, she ordered 1200 Mason jars from which she planned to create these Mason jar gardens, only to find that she had nowhere to place them a once arrived on a giant palette of his apartment.

Calloway finally announced plans to hold all her workshops in New York, and then canceled those plans after fans who had already purchased tickets for events in other cities begged her to join her. And she had no clear mechanism in place to offer refunds.

"This woman is a flagrant hustler who is now organizing a tour around the world with this" workshop "that she wrote in one day", Donaldson tweeted. "I think these are categorical bullshit that nobody talks about and that we glorify this nonsense of" influence "."

At the beginning of the tour, in January 2019, Donaldson's thread had become viral – which meant that viewers on the Internet were looking with delight at the end of the tour.

At the workshops organized by Calloway, fans were sitting on the floor and eating salad (which would be "well done" according to one participant, although another said it was terrible and too salty). Instead of making orchid wreaths, they had the opportunity to put a single flower in their hair for a photo shoot. They then had to return the flower.

"Caroline Calloway's creativity workshop has entered the paradise of influential events," wrote Madison Malone Kircher for The Cut. "I imagine that the ghost of Fyre Festival met him at the gates."

In the midst of a deafening Internet network, Calloway canceled the visit and announced that it would reimburse all participants. Several fans said they had trouble getting their money back from Calloway after this announcement.

"Seeing the absolute disdain with which Calloway blames her fans for wanting the bare minimum that she had promised them was not nice to see," Donaldson wrote to Pajiba. "Watching Calloway turn out unfulfilled promises, gas lighting and the complete lack of concern of his fans and his" business "as a sign of his" authenticity "says a lot about how we made this word totally meaningless. "

The visit to the Creativity Workshop was an infamous wreck of an event – but Calloway, undeterred, turned it into a new online identity for herself.

"I bent over my scarlet scam," she told Refinery29, citing ReputationTaylor Swift as his inspiration. She started a new tour and called it "The Scam". She created anti-scam brand products for fans, including a short t-shirt with the inscription "Stop following me, Kayleigh. "(Calloway will later assert that she removed the t-shirt for the sake of Donaldson's sanity, but in reality Threadless fired for violating their targeted harassment policy.) She started posting more and more on the main stream of her Instagram account again.

It was at this time that Caroline Calloway became unavoidable in some corners of the Internet, including in the corners where New York journalists post. While I never follow Calloway or anyone else who connects to her, during this year my various social media feeds began to fill with periodic updates on her life. A journalist was discovered under cover during Calloway's new tour! Calloway was starting to sell hand-painted posters! Cat Marnell thought Calloway was still on Adderall!

It's as if, for nine months, all the New York media were unable to turn a blind eye to Caroline Calloway's show, pierced in half in hate and half in admiration. And she was unable to come to a common understanding on one fundamental question: is Caroline Calloway a well-intentioned girl who has ruined everything, who just wanted to support herself through social media and who escaped her? ? Or is she a malicious scammer who deliberately exploited the good faith of her fans for easy money?

Who is Natalie Beach?

Natalie Beach appears on occasion in Instagram publications from Calloway's Cambridge era as Calloway's travel companion and as "editor-in-chief" who reads drafts of Calloway's current book. While Calloway was flying, between 2015 and 2017, Beach had disappeared from Calloway's lead – until last week, September 5, 2019, when Calloway entered a new position.

"This afternoon, I discovered that one of the two most affected people in the world will publish an essay on our friendship for The Cut," Calloway wrote. It set in motion a breathtaking and overwhelming hype cycle.

This sort of story, after all, is what Calloway nibbled. His outfit thing publishes fragmented fragments of memoirs about an emotional relationship and distributes them on a series of photos of an ambitious and inaccessible world. This is what she knows how to make her audience invest.

In 2013, the world chosen by Calloway was a fantastic version of Cambridge and the relationship was a story of love. Now it's the phantasmagorical and whimsical medium of social media influence – and with this new post on Natalie, the relationship is a better fractured friendship. Calloway's audience, whether she hates it or not, is deeply involved.

In a series of Instagram posts published in the week that followed, Calloway described Beach as a close friend she met during a NYU writing class prior to her transfer to Cambridge. Beach taught Calloway to write, says Calloway. Beach co-wrote and edited the Instagram captions for her; she also co-authored Calloway's book proposal. She was the best writer Calloway ever knew. And Calloway claimed to have deeply hurt Beach as an addict, and as a form of repayment, she wanted to make Beach's trial on their relationship the biggest deal possible.

Calloway was also deeply hurt by the idea of ​​an old best friend who betrayed her trust. But it was not serious. She deserved it.

"I did everything in my power to put the volleyball of this test to the net so Natalie could take it back," she wrote on Sept. 7. "Let's go fucking."

My Twitter feed has begun to fill with anticipatory messages. When will this fucking test fall?

Tuesday night – September 10 – he has finally arrived.

What does this essay say?

As advertised, Beach's essay covers the seven years of his friendship with Calloway and his subsequent disintegration.

The friendship comes first, at breakneck speed. The two meet at the age of 20 at the University of New York; they are quickly enchanted by each other and their power dynamics are defined early. Beach describes how to go out to dinner with Calloway and tell stories about what Calloway's life film will be like while Calloway eats it with expensive bar food and treats it with genius. Each seems to offer something the other wants: Beach falls in love with Calloway's wealth, glamor and charm – and Calloway falls in love with Beach's admiration and ability to tell stories in which Calloway is the hero .

A year after their friendship, Calloway begins to publish on Instagram and quickly attracts followers. Beach offers to help her edit her publications to reimburse Calloway for recovering Beach, which has had to deal with an expensive travel emergency, she says, and quickly falls in love with it.

"I thought Caroline and I were breaking the form of fiction," she wrote. "Instagram is a real-time memory. It's a memory without the act of remembering. It's the distance between the writer, the reader and the critic, which is why it's a true feminist narrative, I would argue with Caroline trying to convince her that a white girl who is learning to believe in herself could be the pinnacle of radicalism (practice, because I, too, was a white girl learning to believe in herself). part of the narrative built by Calloway around the power of her Instagram narrative when she got her sales contract.

And, according to Beach, when Calloway concluded this deal, it was essentially his writing: Calloway would send "rough notes" to Beach for a chapter, and Beach "would make a legible story". Calloway promised Beach 35% of the advance, but it was understood that Beach would keep his name on the finished product – until Calloway began to sink into his wife's addiction, and Beach eventually acknowledged that the book would never happen.

Since the release of the test, Calloway has updated the main feed of his Instagram account more than twenty times and shows no sign of stopping. It mainly releases screenshots of old messages Beach has been working on and adds Beach's name to legends. "It's a relief to give these captions [the credit] they deserve, "she wrote.

Beach made some explosive statements about Calloway during his essay. In addition to convincingly asserting that Calloway's distinctive voice on which her brand was based was at least in part that of Beach, she also reveals that Calloway's lead was well below that previously claimed ( $ 375,000 instead of $ 500,000, although it starts). More dramatically, Beach says that Calloway's giant Instagram has not been the result of organic word-of-mouth. She built it in the manner of an old-fashioned influencer, buying followers, in order to be able to prove that she possessed the figures needed to obtain a book sales contract. Written Beach:

The real story, she told me, is that she had a series of meetings with literature professionals who informed her that no one would buy a memoir from her. An unassuming girl to fame and without a fan base. For example, Caroline created one online, removing ads designed to look like publications to promote her account and buying tens of thousands of subscribers. (Caroline says it was before the Federal Trade Commission published guides for influencers.)

While these claims undermine Caroline Calloway's mark of authenticity and vulnerability to the detriment of everything else, they are not at the center of the essay – nor of the discourse that has erupted around the essay.

Because Beach is talking about the experience of being the best friends of someone who seems to have everything you want, without effort, charming, handsome and rich, with professional success and does not seem you do not really have to work for it – as you work in their wake, panting with the effort to try and get what they have.

At the culmination of the test, Beach describes an outing for a drink with Calloway in Amsterdam and free drinks at the bartender who continues to make looks at Calloway. Beach says Calloway has always been good to the boys ("I mean, she's met a long-time boyfriend at Fucking Equinox"), while Beach herself has been less fortunate. But in a moment when she tries to live up to Calloway's example, Beach stays at the bar after Calloway returns and she tries to pick up the bartender.

She fails, then gets stuck in the Airbnb account she shares with Calloway. She ended up spending the night wandering the streets of Amsterdam, trying not to contact Calloway. When she finally returns to the apartment the next day at noon, she bursts into tears, shouting, "Men treat me differently than they treat you. Everyone does it."

Men are a metonymy. In this essay, men treat Beach differently from Calloway, but the rest of the world does it too. Calloway lives in a world where you can find a boyfriend at Equinox and buy enough Instagram followers for a major book deal. Beach lives in a world where strange men threaten you and you have to be content with ghostwriting with your friend's huge book contract. It's the dynamics of their friendship, and it's instantly recognizable.

Since 2013, Caroline Calloway's story has been aligned with some of the favorite questions of our culture and past. He gave us the chance to watch a stranger live a fairy-tale life while having the impression of being our friend, as we know it. He gave us the chance to watch a woman self-destruct before our eyes while feeling that we are superior to her. He gave us the chance to try to look through the bizarre constructed identities that social media teaches us to create, to determine if there is a real person.

Natalie Beach's essay is the culmination of this story, as it gives us our first outside look at Calloway, a look that promises to take off layers and layers of internet fireworks. It may or may not be exactly right, but it seems true – and it tells us that, yes, there is a real person here and that person is a character in a classic story of female friendship.

The dynamic Beach described in her essay is one that people who follow stories about relationships between women already know. It is a dynamic that can be intimate, resentful, toxic and intense enough to become romantic. It is such an archetypal relationship for so many women that it is one of the fundamental stories of female friendship. It manifests itself everywhere, from Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante to Gossip Girl.

Always, always, these stories seem to offer a possibility of redemption, a brief and brilliant moment during which the couple seems able to give itself all that it needs: an identity, a self, a value. Then, in the climax, comes a betrayal.

In one version of this story, betrayal is the moment in Amsterdam where Calloway abandons the faithful friend who supported her by a spiral of drugs and directs her professional success, leaving her alone in the streets. the night. In another version of this story, the betrayal is that Beach sees an old friend reach a certain level of internet notoriety and capitalize on that moment by writing an essay on some of the lowest moments of this friend's life. Both are true and both are sad.