Unlike Caroline Calloway, Elizabeth Wurtzel Was Actually a Writer
the scammer shit gets less cute when the person you're ripping off is a woman who's too dead to consent
Caroline Calloway is “writing” a “book” “with” Elizabeth Wurtzel, an often penetrating, sometimes-frustrating, undeniably talented and hardworking writer who can neither consent or object to Calloway’s project, on account of she’s been dead for four years. Read all about it in the classic literary journal Nylon. (Sample passage: “Inside [Wurtzel’s books], Calloway discovered love letters from men written on the covers, notes from Wurtzel’s friends urging her to pay her back taxes, and no less than two debit cards.” No less than two, you say.) The name of the forthcoming book? Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life, a title which directly asserts the participation and consent of a woman who, I will remind you, is dead. Please look forward to my next book, Anthony Bourdain & Freddie deBoer’s Treasures from Tuscany Cookbook.
As a preliminary, I want to say that the wave of positive reviews for Calloway’s long-awaited, ~150 page book of Tumblr aphorisms Scammer was predicated on the notion that she actually wrote it, which is a bizarre thing to believe. Here’s someone called Tyler Foggatt, writing in The New Yorker, pretending to believe that Calloway wrote the book and pretending that it was good. Calloway hired someone to write for her before Scammer, including (literally!) her Instagram captions. Almost every piece of her writing that she has ever put out there before Scammer has been confirmed to be the work of a ghostwriter. Often by her. Why on earth would any thinking adult believe that the book she published was written by her? This is a woman who forged her transcripts from Cambridge. The title of the book is literally Scammer. This is not a reliable narrator. And yet the sweaty desire to be cool, and the professional incentive to tell a counterintuitive man-bites-dog story, drove a lot of people to take a joke seriously. “Caroline Calloway’s book is actually good!” is the stuff facile New York media careers are made of. Well, I’ve read the thing, and it’s not good. It’s a bunch of Millennial fortune cookie bromides awkwardly stitched into preexisting work that Calloway had already published, written by who knows who.
Why does that matter? Because Calloway is not a writer, and Elizabeth Wurtzel very much was, and that makes this whole vulgar thing that much worse.
Three years ago I wrote what I needed to about Elizabeth Wurtzel, and you can click the link above to read it. Suffice is to say that I’ve been defensive about her for a long time. She was a uniquely talented and sometimes-maddening writer, a quintessential Gen Xer who dramatized that generational identity as well as anyone. A born memoirist, her book Prozac Nation has served for decades as a symbol of raw and honest confession to some and of maudlin self-obsession to others. What I admire about that book, and her career in general, is that they actually exemplified both - pretension and self-pity, yes, and also self-knowledge and perspective. Wurtzel’s great gamble was to allow herself to appear genuinely, deeply unsympathetic; that commitment allowed her to better represent the difficulties of depression, which reliably makes us more selfish and more pathetic. Some people feel like they can’t come along for the ride, to put it mildly, and I get it. But the repulsion some people felt towards her books was clearly alright with her. And her commitment to doggedly pursuing the ideas that interested her in the face of an increasingly-hostile public was noble, even if her books never quite returned to the heights of publicity or effectiveness achieved with Prozac Nation. Critics were frequently scathing; this contemporary review was not alone in suggesting that Wurtzel would be more interesting if she died. She stuck with her plan regardless. She trusted her work.
You may contrast all of this with Ms. Calloway, who has clearly never trusted anything less than she trusts her work, if indeed she has ever actually produced any herself. Calloway has lived out loud in a way typical of many people of our era, and in doing so she’s done something that Wurtzel never would have done: courted pity. Calloway’s personal instability is performative, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not real, and I think the bizarre media kaffeeklatsch groundswell of sympathy for her book ultimately stems from concern for her immediate wellbeing. Wurtzel, who responded to a string of underperforming books by applying to and attending Harvard Law School, always projected a kind of noble and fragile competence in the mist of her mental illness and personal chaos. This is a core aspect of More, Now, Again, her 2002 recounting of her addiction to prescription stimulants, the fact that what was so deeply impressive about her kept those around her from realizing how far gone she was. Calloway doesn’t want you to think she’s impressive, she just wants you to think about her, for whatever reason, over and over again and forever. That’s what this project will amount to, a 33-year-old woman panhandling for the attention that will never satiate her. Well, she’s entitled to seek attention on her own time and with her own life. Dragooning a dead woman into that effort, though, is just gross.
I do have sympathy for Calloway. But this is exactly what our attention economy does worst, what makes it most pernicious: what she needs is to stop receiving the kind of prurient attention that she’s received for so long, but the people who claim to care for her the most will never stop giving it to her. She needs to get offline; they will pull her back. It’s tragic. No one’s experience better exemplifies the difference between taking care of someone and enabling them, and that’s what all the amused quasi-ironic admiration for her in our culture industry amounts to, enabling. I don't find it funny, I find it deeply irresponsible.
You’d look at our media, our book media, our culture media, and you’d think, that’s a very feminist landscape. There must be a lot of people who think critically about what it means to support women or a particular woman. But none of them are going to do this but me; I’m the only person who’s going to object to this disgusting gravedigging project. Because they feel sorry for Caroline Calloway. Because they think she’s cute. Because they think that feminism means that they have to consent to literally any project, no matter how exploitative, if it’s waged by a woman who wraps it up in some sort of horseshit beautiful mess narrative. Because they want to appear to be down. But surely feminism should encourage people to pause and ask whether it’s remotely kosher for a dead woman and her work to be appropriated this way, remixed like a forgotten single. Surely concern for women should include concern for the posthumous rights of a dead woman. It is offensive to do this with someone’s reputation after they’re gone, regardless of whether her estate was shameless enough to sign off on it, and you should be offended by it. Even if you really hate to be on the same side as me.
Every day, I wonder if we’re ready to stop our sprint into a culture of mandatory childishness. Everything about contemporary culture reflects people who are terrified of aging and will do anything in their power to deny that it’s happening. And since the service the media now sells is the service of providing excuses, we are excused from ever being adults. Just watch Star Wars and comic book movies and nothing else, and if anyone judges you, they’re a cruel elitist. Spend the mortgage money on Taylor Swift tickets and steal your seat from an 11-year-old who might have gone otherwise, and if anyone judges you, they’re a mansplaining man who hates women. Smoke weed all day every day as a 30 year old with no plan or desire to come up with one, and if anyone judges you, they're a tool of the Man. Stay up late into the night writing “funny” tweets despite the fact that you’re 45 years old, borrowing stale memes from 2014, and if anyone judges you, they’re owned. Decorate your house from floor to ceiling in Funkopop, and if anyone judges you, they’re pretentious fakes. Get a job at The New York Times and write only about the most ephemeral and childish pop culture, taking away space that was once devoted to art or opera or ballet or books, and if anyone judges you, they’re old and old fashioned. Elevate the most absurd and attention-begging aspects of online culture and write endless essays defending those behaviors in facile political terms, and if anyone judges you, they’re a conservative. Forget about dignity, dismiss integrity, mock being reserved, attack solemnity, insult the self-possessed, celebrate insecurity, perform vulnerability, mandate anxiety, insist that taking yourself seriously is some sort of con. Embrace the momentary, the facile, the snide, the juvenile, the self-infantilizing, the self-exculpatory, the trivial. Make your own existence a joke.
All of that will make you very popular and all of it is slowly killing the best parts of being human. I have to believe that someday the tide will turn. But that feels very far away right now.