Caroline Calloway ‘10 Reflects Falsified Realities
By Felix Yeung
Columnist
We live in a post-fact world. This reality is a sobering one, but it is just that: a reality. Truth no longer matters. Nowadays, we are concerned only with your truth, my truth, his truth—a series of subjective truths that color our lives. This phenomenon is seen most clearly in the political battlefield, where politicians and newscasters face a constant barrage of alternative facts. Nevertheless, this "postfactualism" has asserted itself in much of popular culture as well.
Nothing makes this more clear than the rise and fall of Exeter’s very own Caroline Calloway ‘10.
To those who are unaware, Calloway, or Caroline Gotschall, is a popular social media influencer. Leveraging her time at Exeter and Cambridge, she built herself an Instagram presence grounded in reveries of elitism. Much of her life is centered around prestige, pseudo-intellectualism and faux creativity. The very flights of fantasy—that she is anything more than an egoist—that led to her rise, have now caused a remarkable downfall.
In the earliest days of her Instagram career, she crafted the narrative that she was a carefree American, staking her path at the Old World institution of Cambridge. She gave Harry Potter fetishists a modern retelling of the classic tale, an innocent falling in love with the fantastical institutions of Great Britain.
Nevertheless, her narrative masked several truths. First, that she had applied to Cambridge—and a series of other elite institutions—several times over a period of four years. She was continuously rejected, until St. Edmund’s College relented and finally granted her admission. The three years in the interim, she says, were gap years.
As an article in The Atlantic shrewdly notes, "[This is] straining the term of art to the breaking point, and also a flagrant denial of something that happened [in real life]: enrolling at [New York University], which most people would consider putting an end to the gap years and starting college."
Still, her followers ate it up. After all, what was better than the story she claimed to have?
Of course, Calloway already had much practice in constructing such narratives for herself. Even at New York University, Calloway told stories of Exeter that were misconstructions of her experiences at the Academy. She described an institution that had welcomed her with open arms (she says it was her destiny to arrive at Exeter), when she was rejected three times. This is not to say that those who are rejected and reapply are somehow less worthy of admission. I am simply attempting to elucidate the fact that Calloway created fiction and somehow made it a reality.
Heck, even her name—Caroline Calloway—was designed at age 17 (by reversing the order of middle name and last name) to make her seem more like a member of the elite.
The chronology here, though, matters. Calloway was eventually able to gain admission to some of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. She was at Exeter. She went to NYU. She also attended Cambridge. Yet, she had told herself that she was destined for these things long before she had actually attained them. And when she failed to do so, she kept trying. Then, she wiped away all the inconvenient truths.
The way Caroline Calloway forged her path highlights a focal component in my understanding of contemporary culture: that today’s youth decide on a certain narrative, do anything to make it a reality, and then blur the details so that their narrative is the narrative, the entire truth.
In some ways, Calloway’s tactics have come back to bite her. She has recently been labeled the Fyre Festival of influencers, a scam artist who has defrauded her loyal fans. After receiving an astronomical advance for a book proposal, she failed to deliver on her deal, forcing her to refund the publisher. Next, her attempts to organize a series of "creativity workshops" resulted in cancellations and refunds en masse. Her self-conceived truth, that she could deliver on all her promises, resulted in failure after failure. Worse even, a former friend, Natalie Beach, published a vindictive account of how she edited some of Calloway’s work and ghost-wrote the soon-to-fail book proposal.
While these "crimes" do not seem severe, and she refunded all her patrons, a predominant narrative arose in which Calloway was cast as a swindler, even though she offered refunds for all her work. She became a victim of the narrative gameplay that she so eagerly partook in.
Even after the transpiring of all these events, Calloway continues to drive her narratives forward. She labels herself as an art historian on Instagram, despite the fact that she has only one degree in art history and her "work," if you can call it that, revolves around taking selfies and occasionally sharing a few scattered thoughts on the actual artwork.
Moreover, she continues to drive home her narrative of connections to prestige. She discovered that her father, who she claimed was second-in-command at the Harvard Crimson, only had one letter-to-the-editor published. Not long after, she came out with a new claim: "It turns out I misremembered. My dad was second-in-command at The Exonian."
Ultimately, Caroline Calloway is just a symptom of a world that has forgotten objective truth. We now seek to indulge in stories that suit our interests and needs. Much of this evolution has been driven by the Internet, an echo chamber that prevents you from breaking out. Regardless, we are becoming more and more obsessed with alternative facts—glorified fiction.
This is the true tragedy of Caroline Calloway: that she is just one of many examples of the pitfalls of “postfactualism.”