The duelling memoirs of Caroline Calloway and Natalie Beach.  Illustration by Ana Miminoshvili The thirty-one-year-old Internet celebrity Caroline Calloway has been many things since she first became famous, on Instagram, in 2013. As Tyler Foggatt notes in a razor-sharp new essay, Calloway has been “a self-proclaimed art historian and teacher, a purveyor of skin-care products, and a former OnlyFans star,” as well as an “agent of chaos, a perpetual overpromiser, and, according to the title of her book, a scammer.” But what Calloway always wanted to be, she now insists, is a writer—which is a little complicated, because much of the scamming that made her infamous involved writing that she didn’t do. In 2019, an estranged friend of hers named Natalie Beach revealed that she had ghostwritten Calloway’s social-media posts, as well as a draft of a memoir that had been commissioned by a publisher for six figures. This controversy briefly made the two women, as Beach later noted, “the main characters of the internet,” before most everyone moved on to the next week’s scandal. Now Calloway and Beach both have new works of memoir out, and Foggatt proves a deft guide to making sense of what each of these books, wittingly and unwittingly, says about fame, friendship, and the crafting of a public identity. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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