Excerpt: We have always been defined by our thingness, our places in different economies, different kinds of circulation of value. We’ve only just learned how to make our thingnesses visible to each other.
Background: The Caroline Calloway story blew up around the same time that Whole Foods announced that its part-timers would no longer get medical benefits. The publishing industry—whether media or the book industry or innumerable sites, like this one, where commentary and cultural criticism are widespread—was instantly obsessed with this latest tale of a supposed scammer. Many of the responses to Calloway are rife with intense hatred and envy, even as they pretend to be offering up level-headed analyses. And nearly all of these are about what Calloway’s story signifies about “our times.”
What struck me was that these two events occurred at a time of deep economic desperation, a time that has lingered on for several decades in what is frequently referred to as the richest country in the world. The piece I wrote, below, is not sympathetic to either Calloway or her self-described ghostwriter Natalie Beach; I find both of them to be beside the point, symptoms of a larger problem with Instafame. But it offers a way to think about issues like money, fame, and success outside of the usual frameworks of envy, animosity, and hatred. I also wanted to write about the publishing world, a topic I’ll be exploring more in future pieces.
There are these two matters, seemingly disparate and unequal, two planets in different galaxies.
One concerns someone—-or perhaps, we might say, more accurately, a thing—named Caroline Calloway, an Instagrammer once famous for her long narrative captions about being an American student at Cambridge and a $375,000 advance for a book based on the promise she apparently showed as a writer. She was recently the subject of a long piece by an old and perhaps former friend Natalie Beach who revealed that she had been a ghostwriter for Calloway and that the latter’s internet fame rested on having bought followers on Instagram. The other matter is also a thing, Whole Foods, now owned by Amazon, which recently announced that it would be cutting medical benefits for part-time workers. Both stories have generated much ire and outrage and there is a lot of huffing and puffing about truth and fairness and justice.
Calloway and Amazon are phenomena, cultural events, things that generated effects and ripples of attention. We live in a time where everything and everyone is a thing, a dull accretion of happenings and eventness quantified by likes and hearts and retweets and shares and numbers of followers. This is not to mourn a time when people were people because, let us face it, people have always been things to each other in one way or another: a wife is a thing, as is a husband as is a child as is a lover as is a servant as is a king as is a worker. We have always been defined by our thingness, our places in different economies, different kinds of circulation of value. We’ve only just learned how to make our thingnesses visible to each other.
Caroline Calloway was and is a thing, an “influencer.” The word is meaningless. One might furrow one’s brow and ask, “What is an influencer?” and “What or whom does she influence?” And the answer might literally be: everything and nothing. You might also ask, “What or who is a Caroline Calloway?” and the answer will, similarly, be: everything and nothing. She is all that everyone is talking about this week, or was that last week? And she will be forgotten next week, or is that this week? She has prompted pieces in The New York Times and The Washington Post and nearly all the minor and major outlets, all of whom insist that they are writing about her to illuminate why she is ultimately nothing to them, nothing at all, nothing, we tell, you, nothing. They write, in essence: “We don’t think you should care about Caroline Calloway, and here are 3000 words to tell you why. And another 5000. All of which prove that everything about her is meaningless and unworthy of our attention.”
Beach’s piece for The Cut, published on September 10, is titled “I Was Caroline Calloway. Seven Years after I Met the Infamous Instagram Star, I’m Ready to Tell My Side of the Story.” As Beach tells it: The two met at New York University in 2012, when they were both enrolled in a creative writing program. She was instantly enamoured of Calloway, who breezed in seemingly wealthy and glamorous and able to sleep with gorgeous men at will while Beach landed at NYU with her virginity intact and struggled to lose it. The two were inseparable and Beach became both maid and general factotum, following Calloway as she zipped around the world. At some point in 2013, around the time Calloway entered Cambridge University, she discovered the power of Instagram, and became mildly famous there by playing up her fish-out-of-water schtick (which is, actually, an old schtick, but people seem to love that schtick). I haven’t had the patience to read more than a few of them. The vapid writing of the posts, designed to be Insta-famous, bears the imprint of its medium: its unspooling over real time might give it an air of immediacy and importance on the day each one is published, but they fail to cohere into much more than an angsty diary.
In 2015, Calloway asked Beach to help her write a book proposal that was due the next week. The weeks dragged into months as the two sent drafts back and forth. Beach represents the process as one in which she turned Calloway’s notes into actual paragraphs, but let us admit that the writing process between co-writers is hard to dissect and that origins and finitudes are often impossible to discern. Her payment was to be thirty-five percent of whatever Calloway made, according to a verbal agreement between them.
Eventually the book proposal was accepted at Flatiron, an imprint of Macmillan, for a $375,000 advance (in an interview, Calloway claimed she received $500,000). At some point, Calloway panicked and revealed to Beach that her Instagram fame was in fact based on a lie (of sorts): that she had bought “tens of thousands of followers.” This particular move is not exactly uncommon on Instagram, and its legality remains a matter of debate. Calloway currently has 800,000 followers which, you might think, is a large number but the New York Times sniffs that it’s not as much as the major players on Instagram, and it’s right: the football player Cristiano Ronaldo has 185 million, and Ariana Grande 165 million. On Instagram, your number of followers is followed as earnestly as the Dow in other quarters.
Calloway has since backed out of the book contract and is, according to Beach, supposed to return around $100,000. Beach claims she has not seen any of the thirty-five percent cut she was promised.
Beach provides what she and many others believe to be unsavoury details, like the ghostwriting and Calloway’s addiction to Adderall. Her writing is as bad as Calloway’s, and reads like a vomiting of a summer journal that should be titled Things That Happened to Me When I Desperately Wanted to Be Cool, edited to look like a journalistic exposé—much as a miserable trip to a rain-sodden and shit-filled hell-hole is Instagrammed to look like a vacation in a tropical paradise. As is the case with so much truly bad writing these days, Beach’s article is being hailed as a work of literary genius and there is talk of a book deal, movie rights, and more.
But her revelations are quite banal. Many writers employ ghostwriters, with varying degrees of transparency: such arrangements are not illegal and usually involve written agreements between both parties. Beach wanted to be someone else: attractive, wealthy, well-travelled, and glamorous. When she realised that Calloway was in fact unable even to pay rent, she turned her experience into a narrative where she was willfully deceived and Calloway was an ogre. But hers is in fact a familiar tale of a longing for symbiosis, of a desire for an Other intermixed with loathing. From Franz Fanon to Sigmund Freud to Michel Foucault: surely we have read enough to understand the underlying tensions here. It’s one part All About Eve, the 1951 film about a stage actress who tries to take over the life of the woman she claims is her idol, and many parts Ingrid Goes West, the 2017 movie about a fan who stalks her favourite Instagrammer only to discover that both their lives are fake.
What Beach and others describe as Calloway’s “addiction” to Adderall is equally and sadly banal. Only two years ago, the Times published “Generation Adderall,” confirming what was by then common knowledge: that an entire generation (that would be Calloway’s—and Beach’s ) is addicted to the drug. Many more are placed on drugs like Ritalin at ages as young as six. What is being decried as Calloway’s “addiction” is the same chemical dependency that, in specific circumstances, is referred to, sympathetically, as a crisis and described as a result of massive amounts of manipulation by the medical industrial complex.
The prices Calloway charged for workshops, $165 for one, have also generated much shock and horror and hand-wringing. But $165 for a workshop is hardly an outrageous fee: most writing and wellness workshops cost much more. TED talks, those inane and useless babblings by people eager to monetise their presence, cost a minimum of $5000 and prices go all the way up to $250,000 — just to attend: speakers don’t get paid fees, thus ensuring a class hierarchy that dictates whose wisdom is imparted or, really, who is even considered wise because they can afford to fly in to make an eighteen-minute presentation for nothing. But everyone wants to do a TED talk, which has become a sign of Being Taken Seriously, so no one wants to be critical of them.
As for the matter of her being an Instascammer: Instagram makes about $10 billion a year and depends entirely on the hopes of dreams of millions of people that their images will magically garner them fame and fortune. Which is to say: it depends on people like Caroline Calloway to keep it running. On the matter of buying followers, both Instagram and “experts” are vague on the legality of the move. After all, who wants to admit that the distinction between luring “real” followers to your page and paying others to do the same thing amounts to very little when the very premise of being an Instagram “influencer” is that you produce a fake version of yourself that gets “monetised” with sponsorship deals? Pot, kettle.
And yet, suddenly, a woman who makes $375,000 plus some more through useless workshops, who capitalises on a platform that capitalises on people like her and who sells stupid shit like flower crowns to stupid people who literally and at length admit they were willing to go to great trouble to meet their “hero” (the exact word used in this puerile Vice piece) is now being demonised for doing everything that the system wants her to do.
Calloway was once fêted for being successful: one interview coos about her book deal and her ridiculous little Martinelli bottle vases (the labels are left on to remind you that these are in fact Martinelli bottles repurposed as vases: how adorable!) with the same ardour. She is now mocked and scorned for becoming, apparently, a failure. The New York Times goes so far as to assure readers that Calloway is not famous. And yet, this assertion appears in an article of 1,700 words in the The New York Times, which used up another 2,723 in an interview with Beach. Even putting aside the fact that, these days, the storied newspaper reads mostly like a collection of op-eds and blogs, surely we can admit that the mere fact of having that number of words expended on you in The New York bloody Times automatically renders you famous.
Pot, pot.
It is hard to write about all this without sounding like your Cranky Marxist Uncle who yells at you for liking cute shoes and makeup and ignoring the needs of the working class (and who retires every night to the three-bedroom apartment he inherited, along with his trust fund, on the north side of Chicago). It is hard to write about all of this as a writer without sounding deeply envious. It is hard to write about all of this as someone who is not a millennial without seeming to wish nothing but ill upon younger people simply because they’re younger and because we furiously want them to suffer as much as we feel we have (which, in case I’m not clear, is a deeply fucked up way to be).
But we can and have to be critical of this ridiculous fake fracas without being any of that and without being unduly cynical and instead think of how to take this moment and use it to transform how we think of so many things: the construction and purpose of fame itself, the world of writing and publishing.
I don’t write this to advocate for either Calloway or Beach, both of whom seem like manipulative shits and whose machinations may well reveal, as some are speculating, that all of this is a giant collusion on their part (they are after all mirror images of each other). They may or may not be the case, and even if it were, it would not make either of them particularly interesting.
Calloway may never get another book deal but that may not actually even matter in the long run: she may well enjoy a long and prosperous life simply being Caroline Calloway. Just as Kim Kardashian transformed her sex tape into a lucrative life and family franchise, the trainwreck described by Beach will prove to be profitable for both of them: they are effectively colluding in an infinite loop of notoreity. If sex tapes, now so banal, were once the way to become famous, a life of public meltdowns and squabbles is today’s gateway to wealth and fortune. Calloway, who had been given a heads-up about the article by Beach before its publication, auto cannibalistically began milking the controversy even before it really began by posting about it on her Instagram account (Be Thine Own Troll, is the mantra), and the two are leading parallel lives of Instafame, finally together in the kind of symbiosis that Beach clearly longed for. Beach may get a book deal and more. Kristen Roupenian, the writer of “Cat People,” the inane and incredibly dull short story that hit the #MeToo zeitgeist at just the right moment and went viral, received a $1.2 million advance; her new book of stories will become an HBO special.
Such tales persuade several, perhaps at least many hundreds of thousands of eager wanna-be writers, that going viral in one way or another is the way to become a writer. But, and I say this with a keen sense of how it will be read as envy, spite, and old-fartiness: you don’t become a writer by going viral. You become a writer by writing a lot of really good and bad work that often isn’t read by even hundreds at first or even ever. It’s unlikely that Roupenian, who will spend the rest of her life trying to live up to the success of “Cat Person” and whose book has mostly disappeared without a trace, will ever have a chance to develop her craft. She will have the money and time to do so, but it’s damned hard to work on your writing as writing and not just as what people expect your writing to be once you’ve been caught up in a tsunami of expectations. It’s one thing to become Stephen King, after years of writing away. Stephen King wouldn’t be Stephen King today if he hadn’t had to figure out how to write without the glare of publicity on him from the start.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea for writers to get large advances (here I cough discreetly: you can’t see me, Dear Reader, but I’m pointing to myself), and I actually wish the system was set up to give all authors more money. It’s also not a bad thing for writers to be successful from the start—there is no reason to hold to the idea that they must “suffer for their craft” for years before gaining recognition. The problem is the creation of a system that depends so much, increasingly, on fetishising and literally valuing the kind of writing that isn’t particularly good, simply because it brings eyeballs to screens. The losers here? For one: Writing itself, to be grandiose about it, and writers everywhere learning how to write every painful paragraph one at a time in a damned lonely profession (that’s not a complaint: the isolation of writing is something most writers desire). What’s being valued in the massive deals being struck, the sort that only the likes of established (and very good and practised) writers like Stephen King can make good on, is not writing but the promise of miracles. The hard truth for inexperienced and not-very-good writers with this kind of a deal is: you’ll never recover that advance, and you may never get that kind of a deal or even any deal again (but listen, and seriously: if you get the money, take it and run, and buy yourself all the security you can get!).
Publishers will be fine, and celebrity writers will be fine: the big houses are not going anywhere, and there are writers who literally spend their lives being famous writers without being particularly good at what they do. There’s an entire Book Review Industrial Complex atop which The New York Times sits, dispensing fawning reviews for every Voice of Her Generation celebrity, no matter how hackneyed and tired that Voice might be (see: nearly every review of Lena Dunham’s puffed up journal, Not That Kind of Girl). The machinery of fame generates its own peculiar economy, one that has nothing to do with how many people read your work but with how many people talk about it, and that has its pitfalls if you’re not, say, a Lena Dunham or a Mindy Kaling. A forthcoming piece of mine looks closely at a particular book that was written about everywhere, and yet failed to attract readers: even the people writing about it didn’t bother reading it. The writer, never a celebrity but simply someone who attracted attention for a millisecond, still struggles to make a living, period. There is a class hierarchy in publishing: Lena Dunham will continue to get multi-million dollar advances no matter how well or badly her books sell because her publishers are not making money off the books alone but on the celebrity assemblage that is Lena Dunham. A writer who lucks into a similar deal but who doesn’t have the multi-platform cachet of a Dunham is more likely to fall into obscurity after the first or, if she’s lucky, the second book.
But even the publishing world suffers as it keeps flushing itself down the toilet with ridiculous deals that are about nothing more than the desperate and futile hope that the virality of a single short story or the idea of one emerging into a very specific historical moment will somehow infect any other work produced. While we’re not losing the large publishers, we might be losing the middle ground in publishing in every other way: publishers that provide venues for writers who are not megawatt personalities and who want to write in order to keep writing. Which is to say: we’re losing the prospect of writing actually being treated like a profession.
It doesn’t help that most writers won’t admit that theirs is actually a profession and that they respond with horror at queries about money, as if asked to soil themselves in public. Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Drink, Pray fame and fortune, was a highly successful magazine and book writer in the 1990s, when magazines actually had the money to send writers on well-paid assignments. She didn’t luck into her contract for the book that would define her life and fame: she got an advance ($200,000) based on her long and distinguished career in writing. Yet, in her 2015 book Big Magic, Gilbert paints writing as some kind of creative mumbo-jumbo that just happens and, worse, berates those writers who would demand that they be paid and paid well: “From the volume of complaints that emerges from the professional creative class, you would think these people had been sentenced to their vocations by an evil dictator, rather than having chosen their work with a free will and an open heart.” Gilbert, like many other writers, erases the structural components (money, food, money, rent, money, travel) that go into the work of writing, along with its and her own history of writing as an actual profession. Instead, she embroiders a version of herself that all writers are to aspire to: a magical creator who farts out her words sometime after the first yoga session of the day and with a cup of herbal tea lightly scented with the desperate cries of the lesser beings who actually have to hustle for writing work and who dare to insist that it’s labour.
Which brings me to the Whole Foods workers.
There are links to be made between the rapaciousness of Instagram, of the publishing world, and Whole Foods, sure, but that’s almost beside the point.
Consider: The number affected by the recent move at Whole Foods amounts to roughly 1,900, less than 2% of the total Whole Foods workforce, a small number. Still, the issue is not how few of the workers are cut off but that a corporation that made $3.6 billion this first quarter is cutting such tiny, infinitesimal corners for no good reason. One worker whose family had so far been covered by the company healthcare plan said to a reporter: “I’ve worked here 15 years. This is why I keep the job—because of my benefits.”
Is Amazon/Whole Foods evil and rapacious? Of course it is. But can we agree that the most revolting part of this story is not what Whole Foods has done but what it tells us about living in a country where people hang on to jobs for decades just so they can keep their healthcare? Who now has the luxury of doing what they want without being tied to a job they may not even like just so they don’t die from a lack of what might ultimately even be inadequate and insufficient healthcare, so that they don’t incur crippling medical debts?
Caroline Calloway’s critics and the many trolls attacking her are furious because she shattered the illusion that Instafame is an easy portal to fame and fortune. For too many, these are the two options: Become famous for becoming famous or hang on to dead-end jobs for fear of death by debt.
***
Many, many thanks to Liz Baudler and Richard Hoffman Reinhardt for agreeing to read versions of this with very, very late notice, and for their invaluable input. Any errors and shortcomings are mine alone.
For further reading and viewing:
See my “‘Cat Person’ Will Never Die.”
For more on Elizabeth Gilbert’s ideas about the creative life and writing in particular, see my “Elizabeth Gilbert and the Pinterest Fantasy Life.”
See and hear Vanessa Bee of Current Affairs talk about her work experience at Amazon (starts at 18:30).
See Aimé Césaire’s idea of “thingification,” describing how the colonial encounter “requires a reinvention of the colonized, the deliberate destruction of her past,” as Robin D.G.Kelly puts it.
Here’s Lyta Gold, on what Jeff Bezo’s net worth of $137 billion could buy.
Updated on October 15: Here’s Nick Mamatas’s excellent piece, “Why Do Some Writers Get to Fail More Than Once?”
And if you’re really interested in diaries expressing youthful ennui and despair, written with brittle savagery and a hatred for Margaret Thatcher that transcends time, see The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, by Sue Townsend.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: “My own needle book,” collection of J. Megan Mays, featured here.