Caroline Calloway interview: ‘It was really painful to see my mental illness erased from the record. It helped to paint me as a villain’

Caroline Calloway has just told me she thinks my question is “dumb”. I asked whether she was affected by the backlash she faced last year when an essay written about her went viral, and she can’t stop laughing. “I am so glad that you have never been in the news,” she says pointedly.

If you have read about Calloway in the news, chances are you’ve read nothing good. The social media influencer, who has 716k followers on Instagram, became the subject of an internet frenzy last year after her former-friend Natalie Beach wrote about the dissolution of their relationship for The Cut.

In the essay, Calloway comes across as vapid and selfish, a drug-reliant charlatan who exploited Beach for talents she lacked. But it wasn’t just about the two women; the article found universal appeal with its astute observations on class, female friendship and the artifice of social media. It spawned countless online debates and think pieces. It was gripping.

“Everything in Natalie’s essay is true,” the 27-year-old tells me. “I found out [it was being published] because she [Beach] sent me an email to let me know that a fact-checker would be contacting me.” This isn’t the first time Calloway has shared her side of the story – she practically live-blogged her reaction on Instagram – but now she has had time to reflect. She admits that when she read it she was “really sad”. “I felt very guilty and ashamed,” she adds.

But Calloway wasn’t surprised when it went viral. “I’ve spent eight years working in the public eye, every PR bone in my body knew what was about to happen. I was a wreck that week.” It was difficult for her to revisit the behaviour Beach describes. In one anecdote, Beach recalls how Calloway locked her out of their apartment on a weekend trip to Amsterdam, leaving Beach to spend the night on the streets, where she was harassed by drunk teenagers and had to sleep in a public toilet.

“I of all people admit that I was such a s***ty friend,” she says, talking at length about her addiction to the amphetamine Adderall (she says she is now in recovery) and how it impacted her behaviour. “It is tragically the people who were closest to me that suffered the worst consequences of my addiction. I was such a monster.” Calloway insists things would have been different had she been sober. “I think a lot of people feel shame when they revisit their years of addiction,” she reflects.

We’re supposed to be discussing Calloway’s new book, Scammer, a mini-memoir recounting the past year. Normally, this is where I would describe the book, but I haven’t read it. Because despite the book being the reason this interview is taking place, it’s not finished. This will be a familiar theme to anyone familiar with Calloway’s literary history.

When Beach and Calloway were still working together, they co-wrote a 103-page proposal for a memoir titled And We Were Like, and Calloway reportedly made a verbal promise to give Beach a cut of the profits. But when Flatiron bought the book for £289,933 ($375,000) Beach received nothing. As time went on and Calloway missed her deadlines, Beach took on writing the book herself, producing more than a quarter of the manuscript. That did not sit well with Calloway, who Beach claimed “threatened suicide” if she continued. They fought, Beach severed ties, and Flatiron demanded Calloway return £78,000 ($100,000) of her advance when the book never surfaced.

Calloway tells me she is still writing the book, which is based on the years she spent studying history of art at the University of Cambridge. It will be different, though, to the book she sold based on the proposal written with Beach, which painted a glossier version of her life, one that excluded details about her addiction to Adderall. “Turns out that with all of the press around me, the interest in a memoir is higher than ever,” she says. “The proposal I had written with Natalie told a version of my life that had cut out hugely important things, and that’s not the author I want to be. The new book will include all the glamour plus all the darkness that I left out first time around.”

Following the breakdown of her friendship with Beach, Calloway took two years off Instagram. It was during this time that she underwent therapy and overcame her amphetamine addiction by following parts of Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12-step recovery programme. In her essay, Beach refers to this period as Calloway having “fallen out of the public eye” but does not discuss her recovery, nor does she refer to Calloway’s poor mental health. The only time the word “addiction” appears in Beach’s essay is in reference to what Calloway told a fact-checker with regards to feeling suicidal because she could not get herself off amphetamines and had sold a memoir she couldn’t write.

“I very nearly killed myself because of my undiagnosed depression and my struggles with addiction,” Calloway tells me. “It was really painful to see my mental illness and recovery erased from the record in Natalie’s essay. She portrayed all of the symptoms of my diseases without using the words mental illness, addiction, or depression.” Calloway believes this was tactical. “It paints me as more of a villain, so it helps Natalie’s narrative. I have to give her credit as a writer.”

When I put this to Beach, she says it was not her intention to create a villain and victim binary, but to explore the complications of her relationship with Calloway. “Writing about mental health and addiction is a fraught endeavour,” she explains, “especially when you’re writing about someone else. Caroline is of course entitled to her interpretation of how I portrayed her.”

Beach also tells me she hasn’t spoken to Calloway in months, though the two did talk on the phone and exchange a few texts shortly after the essay was published. It was around this time Calloway’s father took his own life. “Mental illness and depression are the reason why I no longer have a father,” Calloway says, adding that this made Beach’s portrayal of her all the more hurtful. “It was incredibly hurtful to read about a version of my life where my poor mental health was just erased from the record.”

Talking to Calloway can be disorientating. Thanks to her honeyed Virginia drawl, everything she says sounds kind, which is why it can be easy to miss it when certain words jar – like when she describes her uncle as “skitz” or refers to the part of Scammer that is about her father’s death as a “scene”. She frequently refers to herself as a “performative person” and a “storyteller”, too, which feels like another way of saying I should take everything she says with a pinch of salt. So I do.

Nonetheless, she gives generous answers to most of my questions and seems happy to be chatting with me. Only when I ask about Beach’s role in her Instagram success does she bristle. “I wrote the captions that built my brand,” she replies. “I did a good job, and it really bothers me when people say that Natalie made me famous or even that she had a hand in making me famous because we wrote Instagram captions together when all I had was fake followers. We wrote to an audience of no one, just bots. Then I started writing the captions that made me famous at Cambridge.” She does concede that Beach deserves credit for her part in the book proposal.

Calloway found it hilarious that people accused her and Beach of colluding on the essay for publicity, mostly because Beach, she says, has “no appetite or aptitude for fame”. “She doesn’t want it and doesn’t understand how to accrue it, so it makes me laugh,” Calloway continues. “I can see how the colluding narrative would work for me but the idea that Natalie is doing that as well, it’s just not who she is and it’s not her personality.”

Calloway was in fact quite famous before Beach’s essay came out, but probably not for the reasons she hoped. In January 2019, she was forced to deny claims that she was a con artist after a series of “creativity workshops” she had organised – and charged £128 ($165) a ticket for – fell short of expectations. Guests had been promised a four-hour “seminar” on mental health creativity, complete with oat milk lattes, homemade lunches and personalised care packages that would include a letter written by her. The reality was quite different; as journalists who attended have documented, pointing to the disappointing care packages (no letters included), Calloway’s prolonged pontifications about her own life, and the measly Whole Foods salads they were served.

A series of withering articles about the workshops went viral fuelled by Twitter threads comparing her workshops to Fyre Festival, which were retweeted by celebrities like Seth Rogen. Despite the fallout, Calloway maintains attendees enjoyed the events. “I wasn’t scamming anyone,” she says. “The articles about my workshops are dripping in derision but if you speak to the people who attended the events, people loved it and thought they got their money’s worth.” Calloway urges me to research this to support her claim, and I do. But apart from the odd review that is at best indifferent, all I can find is criticism and, well, mockery. “I’m really pleased with how my workshops went,” she continues. “I didn’t feel like I had all the answers on how to be happy, I just thought I had some lessons worth sharing. And the point of those events was to bring my brand to life and that just means being a regular person, being a little disorganised, making jokes, sitting on the floor and eating salad. It wasn’t about being a manicured person.”

For now it is not clear when Scammer or And We Were Like will be released – though according to Calloway’s website, the former has an estimated shipping date of 1 April – nor is there a publication date for the essay Calloway has written in response to Beach’s. But she tells me it is finished, will be titled “I am Caroline Calloway” and that she plans to “shop it around” a few publications. Right now, she is keen to do a lot of press to counteract the negative criticism surrounding her. “If you tell reporters the truth, how much can they really spin it? Even if you don’t understand me, or you don’t want to. Anyway, it’s really OK,” she says, drawing a breath. “You can write whatever you want.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, you can reach out for confidential support at Samaritans by calling 116 123 or visiting their website

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