The self-proclaimed scammer is back with a controversial new book, inspired by cult author Elizabeth Wurtzel. ‘It’s the sort of thing you want in your hands during a mental breakdown,’ she tells Felicity Martin
Every morning, as soon as she wakes up, Caroline Calloway makes herself a combination of yuzu juice and sugar-free energy drink (in ‘Sunset Vibe’ flavour). She’s adding the ice cubes to a glass when Dazed calls her. The recipe for this “nuclear” coffee replacement is printed in her latest book, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life, as one of several pieces of advice. Some of these are Calloway’s own: normalise therapist break-ups, for example, or pretend you’re 99 as a way to cure body dysmorphia. Others are Wurtzel’s, from her 1998 advice book Secrets Of Life, now out of print. These include: never clearing the table at a dinner party unless the men get up to help first, and always trying to know what the kids are up to.
In true Calloway fashion, the book’s premise is unhinged. You may (correctly) be thinking: Elizabeth Wurtzel, the acclaimed author and journalist who passed away prematurely in 2020 from breast cancer? Wurtzel rose to fame through her 1994 memoir Prozac Nation, in which she recounted her struggles with addiction. She wrote for Dazed, the New Yorker and countless others, and her confessional memoir style launched a movement, laying the groundwork for the rise of the lit it girl, as well as online oversharing. It “changed the way we consume non-fiction writing”, Calloway says.
Wurtzel, along with Sylvia Plath and Eve Babitz, is one of Calloway’s favourite authors. Calloway bought a load of Wurtzel’s things at auction, including a floor-length mink coat, and boxes of her “most magical, priceless crap” including letters, photos and old debit cards.
On page, Calloway openly navigates copyright law to republish Wurtzel’s words, claiming fair use. It’s not all advice – it’s part memoir and part biography, and highlights parallels between the two of them. Wurtzel, of course, wasn’t able to consent to being part of a “life advice” book (over the phone, Calloway laughs about one critic of the project suggesting he would publish a joint cookbook with Anthony Bourdain.)
While the idea of the book is chaotic, it’s cleverly written and painfully self-aware. It also raises important questions about women writers, their posthumous reception and the problematic authors we do idolise. When Wurtzel died, publications fell over themselves to post obituaries, yet Guide to Life is the very first book to be written about her. “I don’t think I’m the right person to write [Wurtzel’s biography],” Calloway says. “When this book actually arrives in people’s hands, I hope to god that some smart, research-oriented, sad literary girlypop out there is as moved by her life story and vibrant, pithy, darkly humorous voice, and wants to write that well-researched biography. Because we’re forgetting about Elizabeth Wurtzel, and not on my watch.”
Calloway is, to say the least, a polarising figure, and this book is already whipping up controversy online. She’s no stranger to that, having leaned into her historic scammer allegations by releasing a book titled Scammer and ‘snake oil’ branded face oil. Her most recent incident of rage baiting was her refusal to evacuate during Hurricane Milton. To find out more about the book, Dazed phoned her up in her Sarasota, Florida home.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like you haven’t been going that hard at promoting this book as Scammer. Are you worried about getting sued?
Caroline Calloway: It is truly laughable how little I care about getting sued, and I say that with my chest, because I literally just cackled. I feel very confident that I stuck to fair use and I feel very confident that the Elizabeth Wurtzel estate is not going to come after me. It’s in shambles. I feel confident in the shambolic state of the Wurtzel estate.
You released Scammer in 2023, and books two and three in your Instagram trilogy are due soon. Why did you pause, mid-trilogy, to publish this book?
Caroline Calloway: When I went to New York and was shivering under Elizabeth’s mink coat, I just became obsessed with her. There’s no other way to say it. Once I revisited her work, it really struck me that not a single book has been written about her. Ever. I dropped what I was doing – not metaphorically, but literally. I tried to figure out how I could take the spotlight of the internet that’s pointed at me and point it at her instead.
This is the sort of book you want to be holding in your hands during a mental breakdown. I say that because, when you’re really having a mental breakdown, you don’t need Jane Austen, you don’t even need Toni Morrison, at least I don’t. Their prose is almost too smart for me, it’s too intellectually dense. When my mind is at its most ragged, you want something light, easily digestible and, above all else, instructive.
You make all these valid points, but the premise of publishing a ‘joint work’ is a moral grey area. Did you think about these criticisms?
Caroline Calloway: Absolutely. The word that I was haunted by was ‘grave-robbing’. Like, am I? At the end of the day, I came to conclusions that not everyone will agree with, but that I would die on the hill of. One: I think Elizabeth Wurtzel would have, and did, pull similar shit in her lifetime. She was irreverent, she was incendiary, she was avant-garde, controversial and in a strange way, I think the spirit of what I’m doing speaks to the spirit of her work. But more importantly, I think doing this is ultimately what’s best for her legacy. At the same time, I hate that it is. I hate that no one else has published a book about her, that there’s no authorised biography.
When you’re really having a mental breakdown, you don’t need Jane Austen or Toni Morrison... When my mind is at its most ragged, you want something light, easily digestible and, above all else, instructive
Why do you think that is?
Caroline Calloway: Girl, I think it’s straight-up sexism. 90 per cent sexism and 10 per cent the lingering effects of how she was blacklisted in the publishing world. Because the industry is so slow to change, there’s still a lingering distaste around her name – the same distaste that haunted her for the last 20 years of her career. The last true book she ever wrote, she released in 2001. Wurtzel died in 2020. We missed out on her last 20 years of creative productivity! When David Foster Wallace fucking died, how many biographies of that man did we get? I’ll tell you: too many. We got essay collections, we got new, unpublished works. He’s of the same generation as Elizabeth, and I would argue, a lower-quality writer.
I enjoyed the formula you’ve come up with for optimising dating [‘have four first dates in one night’]. How often do you go on dates where they know who you are?
Caroline Calloway: Men in New York know what’s up. Men in Florida are dumb as rocks. Not a single man in Florida who likes women – because honestly I have yet to meet a bi man in the fucking state of Florida, although I’d love to. Bi men in Florida, if you’re reading this, slide into my DMs please? – has any idea who I am. It’s a real testament to men that they couldn’t even fathom how successful I am at the very specific kind of writing and performance art I do. When I say I’m a writer, they’ll just start talking about themselves. They don’t even ask, you know? It’s so easy to go unnoticed, and I like it.
And finally, I’ve got to ask you about your Luigi Mangione post [“OMG GUYS I LITERALLY FUCKED THE UNITED HEALTHCARE CEO ASSASSIN”].
Caroline Calloway: It’s a true testament to you that you’re only asking this now. I want the reader to know that you showed enormous restraint. People can choose to believe I’m joking or lying or... honestly, he’s fucking exactly the type of guy the world already knows I like. Um, I don’t want to talk about it, and I maybe shouldn’t have tweeted that at all, because I don’t plan on talking about it in the future. So, next question!
Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life is out now