Natalie Beach on Life After That Caroline Calloway Essay

“This is all I ever wanted,” I lied. 

That would have been the first line of Caroline Calloway’s memoir. At least the draft I was writing in 2017, before our collaboration ended, as they often do, in competing narratives. The book was never finished, but it’s a joke now that anything about Caroline has gone unwritten. Since we met, almost a decade ago, the revisions and retellings have kept piling up; we became friends in a creative nonfiction class, co-wrote Instagram captions introducing Caroline (or a character named Caroline) to an online audience, and sold a book proposal based off those captions, but because Caroline is a writer who often, in lieu of writing, creates her character by living, we never came close to finishing the book, and so I wrote my own personal essay about it all here in the Cut, for which I received an obscene and life-changing amount of attention that I leveraged into money to buy myself more time to write, this time just about myself. In the four years since, there have been think pieces, a robust sub-Reddit, discourse. A publicly traded company owns my life rights, and a very talented showrunner has been hard at work turning my essay about Caroline into a limited series, because at this point, what’s the harm in one or two more adaptations?

There are no bad dog breeds, just bad dog owners. Speaking of furry friends, bodegas and breweries are a good start, but we want to see cats in all rat-vulnerable places of business. Why day drinking hits (the body) different. Ticketmaster and Seat Geek are ditching hidden junk fees. Beyoncé’s power and influence know no limits. Native Americans will continue to have preference in adoption and fostering of Native American children thanks to today’s Supreme Court ruling. Or at least, they’re supposed to. If you’ve noticed that you’re getting a whole lot of Ozempic and Wegovy ads recently, you’re not alone. And Google is making millions from ads for fake abortion clinics, according to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

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