Accidentally(?) wrote a 1700 word review on Scammer.

I feel the most relevant way to start this is to give myself either context or credibility. Because, as we know, Caroline has nearly none present in her book. I’m an English major at a decently prestigious university; not Cambridge level, obviously,  but top 10 in Canada… last I checked. I point this out only because Caroline is obsessed with status and I wanted to try writing this in her style. Just as an exercise. I too have dabbled in amphetamine misuse (though not addiction, that’s a heavy word, and I never suffered from the social or monetary consequences that riddle Caroline’s book). I am closer to being an over-online pseudo-intellectual than not. I live in an expensive city in an apartment furnished with stuff I shouldn’t reasonably afford littering the floor. I annotated my copy with the scrupulous eye of a nitpicky film critic. I am not going to apologize for how long and disorganized this review will inevitably be. I’ve been following along since 2020 and if I am one thing, it is verbose.

If you think my writing tone is annoying: I’m sorry. The review calls for it. 

The first thing I notice about the prose is that it is not very good. It reads easily, though more like disaster-laden spools of text messages sent to you from a friend who misunderstands tact. I can see her influences were the intimate, chatty memoirs of Marnell and Wurtzel. Her execution just reads so much less coherently that the overall effect on the reader falls closer to pity. I don’t think the whole book was bad, or awful; there was some tender, honest observations and lucid descriptions of universal experiences like alienation and tangled up ambition scattered between chapters of froth. Now, I understand a memoir is not intended to be relatable. But the narrator has to be relatable enough the reader does not go through the book left with more questions than answers. A notable pitfall in her writing style is that if the reader does not immediately understand what she is alluding to, you will not understand. She makes no attempt to explain why she acts the way she does, or how she hopes her plans fall together. Her conscience comes across as abbreviated in the book because so much of the narrative never leaves her mind. It is just a very frustrating cocktail of arrogance and dismissal because she makes no attempt to earn the approval she is obviously aching for… I genuinely believe she could have been more successful if she just explained herself better. The picture that immediately is conjured is an overgrown toddler scribbling all over her walls with Copic markers she lifted from a Micheal’s and then obstinately replying that “I wanted to be like Pollock.” It’s a frustrating ordeal as the guardian (reader) because it’s a mess you can’t make sense of despite some grasp at an end-goal is almost, almost sensical. 

I think the most successful paragraphs are her context-laying ones. For example, when she explains how the semester system at Cambridge works, or how Instagram sponsored posts didn’t need to follow FTC guidelines or whatever  until 2016. Her strength as a writer is also apparent in her most raw paragraphs about her inability to finish writing anything, or the way she felt on Adderall. I get it’s different for everyone. And it’s probably unfortunate the fact my experiences as a 17 year old strung the fuck out [making newspaper collages and staying awake for two or three days at a time] line up with hers as a college student. But I do think her description of the good and the bad is valuable to the book, even if it does veer very close to corny and romanticized. I am not going to talk about if I believe she was addicted or not, I don’t doubt she used it.. But I think her personality and likely drinking problem is what blew up her life, not just pills. She lifts a few sentences straight up from How to Murder Your Life and More Now Again and I think it’s so weird that she seems to view addiction as a token of being a good writer. I kind of thought that too, when I was on the precipice of “do I stop here or keep going” in relation to knocking back shots or vyvanse capsules or whatever the fuck my daily poison of choice was.., but I was also seventeen then. My substance abuse could almost be described as a caricature of a problem, and I think this is the same for CC. I don’t understand how she hasn’t outgrown the narrative that the most intellectual way to have a brain is to be unwillingly piloted into ruining it. Like, any good writer knows you cannot write without living. Sure. But they also know that writing about addiction is tiresome, let alone reading about it. Experiencing darkness is not a token of intelligence and I wish that she would decouple the crises in her life from her credibility as an author. I would not say she risks “instructional” qualities in her writing because it sounds like she is trying to make a muddy screen print from what she knows about addiction. It’s … detailed at best and gauche at worst. 

I also think some of her strongest writing, unfortunately, is how she talks about her various boyfriends. It’s a bit counterintuitive to the girlboss narrative she shills because it is so, so clear male validation is almost as much a drug to her as Adderall was. Sorry to be reductive, but the pages describe  gorging herself on men, cheating (romantically of course, it was Europe!), lying (romantically, of course, it was Europe!!) and stealing (romantically.. Of course.. It was Europe). It’s probably the most relatable to the general public, because I think making yourself sick under the fever of love is pretty universal, but I think the greatest strength is the honesty she posts about being a shitty girlfriend. Most of the disasters in her book are narrated in a very deterministic fashion as though she is allergic to accountability– except for when talking about her exes. That is the one instance she is almost triumphant in the realization that sometimes people are wrong for each other, and it takes two. 

A lot of the time her writing crams far too many ideas into a single sentence. She seems to have a decent social awareness, though over-reliant on her facsimile of a Gen-Z consciousness that I think she dates the book quite badly. I think it’s funny that she mentions that she doesn’t want future editions of Scammer to require footnotes…. when this copy totally could benefit from them. Including proper context requires very little set up imo; who are they, what are they known for, how do you know them, simple. It’s a failure as a writer to rely on name dropping and then blame the everchanging zeitgeist or whatever. The style of writing has absolutely no cultural longevity imo. There are too many layers of online culture that are already fleeing as I read it in 2024. 

Another thing I noticed about the book is the like.. Weird lesbian undertones in the whole thing? I’m straight so I generally try to avoid making criticism on how other people choose to experience or express their sexual orientations. Any understanding I have of romantic confusion or prejudice is purely observational. But even from that, there is this stiffness to how Caroline talks about loving women. It feels performative and kind of, like, pornographic? I actually just really don’t like how she writes about sex in this book at all. It’s very gratuitous and not intimate in a sensual, cerebral way like she clearly intended but makes the reader feel like kind of a pervert honestly.  There are these creases in her consciousness she hasn’t even unfolded herself yet so the effect produced feels like an intrusion on the reader’s part. I used to think the worst way you could have a sexual relationship was if it was solely transactional, but I think it might actually be the wet and self-loathing way Caroline describes. 

This is getting way long and I haven’t even added any quotes yet! I will do that at a later time. I did want to make sure I spoke about her vocabulary, though. I was right: she totally suffers from “thesaurus syndrome” as  I call it. All her big words are used a little bit wrong. I guess it’s awesome that I have the vocabulary to clock that because I’m sure she read it like “ooh la la.., 3 syllables looks good!” but it just really rubs me the wrong way because how are you a writer that can’t use the word SALUBRIOUS right? She uses it in the scene of getting locked out of her dorm room after losing her virginity and being stranded in the cold and her attempts to like, romanticize the weather like an ice bath to calm her shot nerves. I would have used a simpler word, like soothing, or used a metaphor for the ice bath like “it didn’t feel like the cauterizing blast on the open wound Andy left me with anymore,” or… be corny but correct than just… I digress.

Her grammar is also sloppy. Lots of run on sentences, weird over-use of dashes like-so, and some sentences are missing periods (.) The book itself is bound nice enough, and I like the paper quality, but the spine is missing the title and the lack of jacket is an odd corner to cut imo. 

The book didn’t really cover anything I didn’t already know, yet it divulged details I wish were left between her and the people they were about. It is worth a read and not worth a read. Really depends on how much free time you have really… 

Two questions: did you like my review. Please say yes so the time i spent on it is less embarrassing. 

And should I write about this vs Adult Drama? thxxxx