Why Is The Internet So Obsessed With Caroline Calloway And Natalie Beach?

Every now and again a story comes along that captures the imagination of the world. Think Fyre Festival, or the story of fake German heiress Anna Sorokin.Or, right now, the story of the friendship between Caroline Calloway and her ex-bestie Natalie Beach.

If Caroline's name is familiar it will either be because you follow her on Instagram (she currently has 785K followers) or because you remember the scandal where she tried to put on a 'creativity workshop' for $165 per ticket, which was promised to be an astonishing event full of orchids and ended up being a disaster full of empty mason jars.

Natalie Beach has now written about her close and personal relationship with the influencer for The Cut.

Beach and Calloway met on a writing course at university. Beach explains that she found Calloway compelling from the outset, and that she seemed like an 'adult' compared to everyone else thanks to her attitude and incredible clothes.

'__Caroline{=nofollow} [arrived] late to the first day of class, wearing a designer dress, not knowing who Lorrie Moore was but claiming she could recite the poems of Catullus in Latin. She turned in personal essays about heartbreak and boarding school, had silk eyelashes, and wore cashmere sweaters without a bra. She seemed like an adult, someone who had just gone ahead and constructed a life of independence. I, meanwhile, was a virgin with a meek ponytail, living in a railroad apartment that was sinking into the Gowanus Canal.'

The two became increasingly close, and eventually Calloway discovered the newly popular app, Instagram. She would apparently post pictures on her account and get thousands of likes. Soon Instagram became a way of life.

The relationship between the two evolved when Beach ended up owing Calloway money after she covered some flights during a holiday in Italy. The agreement was to work off the debt by writing captions for her Instagram account.

But then the relationship began to fall apart.

Calloway moved to Cambridge to study, and Beach was left (though a complicated set of circumstances) looking after her apartment as an Airbnb for $200 a week.

Calloway sold a book idea to Flatiron, who offered $375,000 dollars for it. Natalie writes about going out for a celebratory dinner at the Waverly Inn in New York, at the end of which Caroline disappeared with a man.

The pair grew apart, but when Calloway came back to the US and having missed the deadline for her book deal. She 'needed [Natalie's] help'. The two started working on the book together with Beach as a ghost writer, in a similar arrangement to the captions she had written for the Instagram.

Beach then details a downward spiral in which Calloway moved back to Cambridge, became depressed and increasingly unable to work. She then alleges that Calloway confessed to buying thousands of Instagram followers.

'It was around this time that Caroline revealed to me that for all these years, she had been lying about her origin story. She hadn’t, in fact, gotten famous from a picture of macarons on Instagram’s favorites page. [She had been] buying tens of thousands of followers.'

The pair then took a terrible trip to Amsterdam, where Beach alleges she was left with nowhere to sleep after Calloway left her, assuming she was going home with a bartender. This seemed to have been the final straw for the friendship.

Ending the essay, Beach writes about how she and Calloway have left things, saying:

'Caroline and I hadn’t spoken in two years until I reached out to tell her I was publishing this essay. I wrote too many versions of that email, some drafts still furious at her, another calling myself the fox in the henhouse of her life.

'I still couldn’t help apologizing to her even as I tried to explain that after five years of losing myself in our friendship, I needed to be something more than a supporting character in her life. In her response, she told me she loved me, this essay will make her life so much harder, I’m the best writer she knows, she’s off Adderall now, trolls will tell her to kill herself, she still wants to be friends. And there I was, once again knocked flat by the force of her praise, her self-mythologizing and raw sentimentality. Part of me longed to keep talking to her, once again warmed by the glow of her attention.'

Perhaps that's why the story has captured our collective imagination. Not only does it have the stock characters we love from TV and film (privileged beautiful insider; intelligent, thoughtful outsider), but it's strangely familiar.

The story might be absolutely batshit – the idea of ghostwriting a friend's book because she's an Instagram celebrity is a million miles away from the average life. But at the centre of it, it's a story about a complex, painful female friendship and a deep desire to be accepted and wanted by a person who you admire. And who among us can't relate to that?