They make us feel like we are privy to something personal and private – that they are trusting us with their most vulnerable moments. What makes Scammer so compelling and clever is that Calloway makes readers feel like she is giving them a look behind the curtain when in reality she’s showing us another part of the set, dressed up to look like backstage.īut that’s what all good memoirists do, really. ‘I’ve honestly never really expected to be happy.’ Author Caroline Calloway

Sometimes people say I’m like those bugs – feeding off of tragedy while the real victim’s dead”. She admits to lying on her successful application to Cambridge, deploys graphic descriptions of her mother’s surgeries and is blunt when painting a picture of the room where her father died, writing that “there was still a colony of maggots inside his mattress. The book deliberately courts controversy both with its admissions and its directness. But the truth is that in this case it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to know when either reading Calloway or speaking to her whether she is being radically honest or performing radical honesty.

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