Beach takes drama offline with memoir
Essays touch on Calloway, focus more on interwoven larger issues
Natalie Beach is “not bothered” by the constant correlation of her name with her former best friend, Caroline Calloway.
“Caroline is an incredibly interesting person, and she’s really talented and a wonderful writer,” said Beach, who rose to fame in 2019 after writing the viral essay “I Was Caroline Calloway” for New York Magazine’s The Cut.
In it, she details a toxic friendship and unveils her role as the influencer’s ghostwriter. Calloway had become popular for her diary-style Instagram captions about her time as an American at the University of Cambridge, gaining a six-figure book deal for a memoir that never quite materialized. That, along with questionable creativity workshops and Beach’s essay, eventually earned Calloway a reputation as a scammer.
Calloway leaned into that, finally self-publishing “Scammer” just days before Beach’s own memoir was set to be published by HarperCollins’ Hanover Square Press.
Stepping out of the shadows with “Adult Drama: And Other Essays,” now available, Beach does include two essays about their friendship but mostly focuses elsewhere, interweaving larger issues like gentrification, abortion rights, body image and more.
“I didn’t write the book to explain myself or even to introduce myself to other people,” Beach said. “More to use who I am and the character of myself on the page as a jumping off point to bring people into ideas that really excite me and
interest me.”
This interview with Beach has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: What was the selection process like when you were going through and deciding, “I’m going to choose to tell my story through these different moments in my life?” A:
I gravitated towards subjects that caused me some tension that felt like a pebble under my shoe. I still had questions about what the experience meant to me. I didn’t have my feelings worked out. The essays are long and researched at times, and I wanted to attack subject matter that felt knotty and complicated . ... I needed to really stretch my legs and sort of explore digressions and research and go back into my diaries, which were a minefield and take a more expansive view.
Q: Why was it important to bring up gentrification and also acknowledge your privilege? A:
I grew up in New Haven, (Connecticut), born and raised, which is a city that has undergone a lot of change . ... There’s this conflict between the university and the townies, but also, this city wouldn’t exist the way it does without Yale. And I grew up getting to go take part in a lot of great artistic and cultural institutions run through Yale. So thinking about the conflict in a city between money and class and race and all, that is just the waters I grew up in. I think personal essays offer a great opportunity to start with yourself and your own experiences in your own eyes and then use that as a jumping-off point to ask bigger questions and not solve or completely untangle systems of oppression that are semi-visible but to begin to get your arms around it.
Q: What do you hope that readers will take away from interweaving these issues into your essays? A:
One of my favorite books is “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard. And she writes about how there’s this naturalist, who she used to admire, but he had this line like, “Who knows why fireflies light up?” And he was just sort of giving in to ambiguity and metaphor. And Annie Dillard says, “Well, you know, we can figure it out.” The science exists. You don’t need to pretend that there are questions outside our understanding when the answer literally is there. And I think that you can, you know, walk around LA and be like, “Why is my neighborhood changing? Oh, well, like, I’m just going to go buy another $5 doughnut, and that’s it.” I wrote this book just in the teeth of lockdown, and that was just a very heightened
time of driving home the point that we are all so deeply connected to one another. Our fates are interlinked and intertwined.
Q: Years later, how do you feel about Caroline’s name being attached to your early beginnings as a known writer? A:
I think part of us when we were kids and had wild dreams; we thought we would get famous together one way or another. And I don’t think it turned out the way we thought, but in a certain way, that’s what happened. Not to say that I’m famous or anything, but just to be known and interlinked, but also, you know. Maybe I would feel tethered
to her a little bit more if I spent more time on the internet. But I am pretty much offline, with the exception of 10 minutes a day on Twitter. And I work in my garden, and I have my friends and my husband and my pets and my interests that are outside of what happened when I was in my early 20s.
Q: Both you and Caroline have books coming out at the same time. Did you know about that? Have you read it? Do you plan on reading her book? A:
You know, if you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said, “I’m so stoked to read Caroline’s book.” I’ve always
been such a huge fan of her writing. I think she’s so talented, and her voice on the page is just singular and explosive. But I wish her all the best, and I hope that she gets — I hope she’s really happy with the book and that people read it and love it. I just have realized that I need to create some boundaries between me and her. And you know, which might sound ironic considering I wrote about her, but I think that it’s best for me to not read the book. You know, I don’t follow her on social media, and I don’t read news articles about her just because it was a painful time in my life, and we’re not good for each other.