CAROLINE CALLOWAY IS not exactly famous for telling the truth. Whether she’s hiring her former best friend to ghostwrite her Instagram captions or peddling a ramshackle collection of plastic flowers and salad bowls in the guise of a “creativity workshop,” the American-at-Cambridge influencer turned performance-art memoirist—propelled to national fame by a New York Magazine exposé written by said former best friend—has made an entire career, and a personal brand, out of gleeful mendacity. Back in 2021, she even sold a $75 skin care product she straightforwardly labeled Snake Oil.
So when Calloway announced, several years after returning the six-figure advance for a memoir she never delivered, that she would at last be self-publishing her memoir as a trilogy,—and that fans could preorder the volume for $65—one could be forgiven for doubting that any books would actually materialize. Preordering , outlandish list price and all, seemed to double as a kind of ironic celebration of Caroline Calloway’s freewheeling disregard for reality: a winking acknowledgment that we all want, deep down, to be scammed by someone with the confidence to scam us unapologetically. As the circus impresario P.T. Barnum, himself an infamous scammer, wrote in 1855: “The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived.”
