I don't dispute the fact that I ordered too many mason jars. 1,200 Mason jars in a studio apartment is not the hill that I will die on.
Caroline Calloway
How do you hold on to the idea that you are good and kind and deserving of love when the whole world thinks you're evil? It's really disorienting to see this character with your face and your name and your details catch internet wildfire. It really bothered me.
People care about such bizarre and specific things about me.
The publishing world has been very slow to adapt to the digital world.
I'm always grateful when people share stuff on social media that I've never seen before, because it gives me a bit more strength to hold more space for the unsavory parts of my life that cause me shame.
I think a lot of people feel shame when they revisit their years of addiction.
Mental illness and depression are the reason why I no longer have a father.
I wrote the captions that built my brand.
The articles about my workshops are dripping in derision but if you speak to the people who attended the events, people loved it and thought they got their money's worth.
My life isn't going to stop because my father's dead and my trolls won't stop and people won't stop writing about me.
I spend a lot of time unpacking the pain surrounding my addiction - both my own and the pain I caused other people.
Even at my most depressed and low-functioning, as soon as you put another person in the room with me, I would perk up and be happy to see them.
It's not that I don't experience absolute sadness, which is very unentertaining, but I think - when I'm being really honest about myself - I think there's, like, a really performative streak in my personality.
You know, when I was little, I actually did want to be an actor. But I only wanted to play myself. So Instagram is sort of perfect for me.
I wanted to create art that fit the Pinterest interior aesthetic, because that is so of the internet age and my platform, my celebrity.
I am more respectful of the parasocial relationship of myself and my fans than anything Damien Hirst does between himself and his collectors.
With everything that's happened since I was exposed as a scammer, I can't lie, it's been good for business. Now I can sell my story for way more than my original book deal ever was.
The idea that my life would be something I shared with the public wasn't just something that I assumed - it was something that I actively wanted. I still want it.
I love fame. I love being written about. I don't really mind if people think I'm a bad writer, if they don't understand my weird Instagram performance art or they find my long captions annoying. That's part of the package of being in the public eye, and honestly I find it exhilarating.
If I'm not ready to open something up to the scrutiny of the internet, I don't write about it.
I know people think that having a regular publisher is more prestigious, there is even this idea that self-publishing is a result of being snubbed. But self-publishing really appeals to me.
I think it would be hard to find an American who, during their first week at Cambridge didn't genuinely feel like it was fairy tale.
A lot of people think I hang around Cambridge as this Hogwarts-obsessed Anglophile looking for anyone with a British accent.
What was so comforting was that the more I started being honest on my blog, the more people responded.
I feel like the more serious a life event is that you share on social media, the more ridiculous it sort of becomes, the more you sort of self-trivialize.
In the U.S. we have the mentality that you can make it on your own.
If you build a life around an identity that springs from your own imagination, is it ever inauthentic?
There's always something uncool about what I do.
