“Caroline first took an interest in me after I wrote an essay about growing up in New Haven. Yale was an obsession of hers; she’d been rejected and never got over it. The fact that I was a Yale townie won me an invitation to her West Village apartment”
The author with Caroline Calloway Photo: Courtesy of Natalie Beach When I was a sophomore in college, I took a creative-nonfiction workshop and met a girl who was everything I wasn’t. The point of the class was to learn to write your own story, but from the moment we met, I focused instead on helping her tell her own, first in notes after workshop, then later editing her Instagram captions and co-writing a book proposal she sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A year after Caroline and I met, the world was introduced to Caroline Calloway the influencer. That spring, at the end of my semester abroad in London, Caroline flew out to travel to Sicily with me. When she arrived, she told me she was getting more active on this new platform called Instagram. Apparently she had posted a color wheel of macarons that had landed on the “favorites page,” and now she had 50,000 followers, mostly teen girls who wanted a life like hers.
For the three months I helped develop #Adventuregrams, Caroline in Northern Italy, me in South Brooklyn. We ran up our families’ phone bills but kept gaining followers. Our captions were mostly chirpy travelogues — “Hand-made spaghetti tossed with black truffle butter and Atlantic squid ink … It’s how Venetian aristocrats do munchies.” “That jolt of disorientation when you wake up in a place you’ve never been before … And you see a sword.
“Oh no, Natalie, I would,” she said, her new boyfriend sitting supportively next to her. “It’s just, you’re the only one of my friends who needs the money badly enough to take the job.” “You must be so happy, what with 90,000 followers and counting … I feel strange being an excited onlooker,” I emailed her with no response.“YO get back to me, girl. I just wanna check in and be your ally and do some planning!”
The proposal was originally called School Girl but Caroline deemed that too pornographic, so went with her first choice — And We Were Like — as in the way girls begin to tell stories. The first week of November, Caroline and Byrd took the proposal out to publishing houses while I waited for updates. The good news rolled in — the executives loved the writing, loved Caroline.
Caroline lived in King’s College, whose alumni include eight Nobel laureates and the inventor of the flush toilet. Students lived and went to class in stone Gothic buildings, which loomed over a great lawn that was brighter than I thought grass could be. My goal was to finish a draft in the two-to-three months I planned to visit, but the longer I was there, the more I saw the gap widening between the story we told and the situation on the ground.
“Well, men treat you very differently than they treat me,” I told her. “Look at you, look at me.” I was in scuffed Timberlands and leggings under my jeans while Caroline wore a lacy baby-doll dress with knee-high suede boots. Being the foil to a hot girl was taking its toll, and writing someone else’s love story was even harder. Ghostwriting for Caroline was like writing in a new tense — first person beautiful — the rules of time and inevitability were just different for her.
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