Marie Calloway Has Gone Silent

 

Marie Calloway doesn’t want to participate in this profile.
 
For months, the introverted writer has known that I was working on a story about her and her writing — as well as the often loathsome reactions her work garnered a little less than a decade ago. I tried reaching out to her through her friends, her agent, her former publisher, and she politely declined every time. It didn’t seem like Calloway was displeased, just bemused and evidently uninterested in being directly involved.
 
“I think she thinks it’s funny to be absent in a profile like this,” Annelise Ogaard, a filmmaker and Calloway’s friend, told me in an interview. They’ve been friends since middle school, having found each other on LiveJournal at 14; a lot of the people in Calloway’s life encountered her on the internet as teenagers, long before she became a writer and a symbol for oversharing. “I really think the driving motive here is her loopy sense of humor.”
 
But if Calloway had suddenly become convivial and media-friendly, I guess I’d be disappointed. It just wouldn’t make sense given the nature and tone of her brief public career, one that started around 2010 and ended abruptly around 2016. Part of her appeal — even when she was still on Facebook and doing readings in independent bookstores throughout New York — was that she wasn’t very big on explaining herself. When she deleted her once-prolific Tumblr account a decade ago, her reasoning was brief: “Dislike being ‘watched,’” she wrote.
 
If you were on the internet in the 2010s, you’re probably aware of Calloway’s work, even if you can’t quite remember the specifics. Her writing appeared on websites like Thought Catalog and Vice, which were dedicated to archiving the feelings of upwardly mobile white millennials. Then in 2012 came the story that brought her both notoriety and ridicule; “Adrien Brody” was published online by Muumuu House, a small press founded by alt-lit writer Tao Lin in 2008. (The actor Adrien Brody has no apparent link to the piece.) In it, Calloway describes meeting a man online and sleeping with him. He’s significantly older than her, has more power in their dynamic, and has a girlfriend. “I know you said you don’t want me to say this,” “Brody” — a pseudonym seemingly selected because of the absurdity of naming him after someone so famous — tells her at the end of their encounter, “but you will connect with someone one day. It’s just not going to be me.” Amidst the female personal essay boom of the 2010s, the lengthy piece went viral.
 
It wasn’t tough to figure out who Calloway was writing about. According to the Rumpus, the story had previously been published on her now-deleted Tumblr and used the name of a real literary figure, Rob Horning, then a senior editor and now the executive editor at the New Inquiry; at least in New York media, he might never be able to shake the association completely. Horning has kept quiet publicly about the essay, which paints him as yet another man with an inferiority complex who cheats on his girlfriend with a much younger woman.
 
“Adrien Brody” sparked a debate about the ethics of outing someone’s bad behavior, the value of confessional writing, and whether Calloway was a good artist or just a pretty-girl provocateur who knew that writing graphically about cum would get her some attention. “It’s always been acceptable for men to completely consume young women for their art,” Ogaard said. “But Marie writes about this relationship with this man and everyone’s like, whatever happened to discretion?” (Horning did not respond to my multiple requests for comment.)
 
There were stark contrasts between the prevailing arguments about her: Calloway was either a calculating Lolita-in-training who exposed a man’s legal but distasteful indiscretions for her own professional gain, or she was a fawn among sharks, not understanding how she was being taken advantage of by the men in her life. “With writing like Ms. Calloway’s, it’s tempting to believe that there is some sort of feminist impulse at work, that she derives power from humiliating men with her sexuality, the same tool they used to objectify her,” Kat Stoeffel wrote in the New York Observer in 2011. “But most of her subjects — she’s done it more than once — were complicit, willing, and even flattered.”
 
Some people (like myself) found her work refreshingly honest and the writing crisp and memorable. Others (also like myself) felt troubled by how much of herself she was exposing, sometimes literally, like the photos of her cherubic face and near-naked body that appeared in her book. Her writing also served as an opportunity for some to scold her under the guise of caution. “It does no favors to young female writers to convince them that they are courageous voices in the wilderness for dedicating their talents to writing stories that are received as lurid, not literary,” Hamilton Nolan wrote in a post about Calloway on (the original) Gawker. “Let’s all shut up more in 2012.”
 
Calloway’s work was considered “alt-lit,” a designation once disparagingly and condescendingly described as “Asperger’s realism” for its unemotional approach to fraught relationships and personal stories. Influenced by the platforms and parlance of the internet, alt-lit was an offshoot of the genre of semifictionalized autobiography called “autofiction.” Autofiction writers like Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Jenny Offill, and Karl Ove Knausgaard later received significant praise in the literary world for their work, all very different in content but similarly marked by their emotional disconnection and spare, almost poetic, prose. But in her time, Calloway was a unique lightning rod, and she wasn’t given much time — or room — to grow as a writer. Reviews of her work were barbed and personal. “There’s literary criticism, and then there’s ‘shut the fuck up,’” Ogaard said. “The backlash wasn’t just to her writing. It was to her as a person.”
 

Calloway’s one and only book came out in 2013, titled what purpose did i serve in your life (styled in lowercase, as was de rigueur in alt-lit). It was a 240-page paperback the size of a spiral-bound Mead notebook, the front and back covers plastered with moody black-and-white shots of Calloway’s unsmiling gaze and "Mona Lisa" eyes. The book is part confessional essay collection and part Tumblresque anthology of text and selfies, covering sex work, mentorship, the male gaze, literary (and personal) criticism, and BDSM.
 
In the first essay, “portland, oregon 2008,” Calloway writes about losing her virginity in a way that reads as both heartbreaking and intense and yet completely divorced from the traditional sentimentality of your first time. “In the middle of the night I got up and went into his bathroom. I turned on the light in the bathroom and stared at my face in the mirror,” she writes. “For ten minutes I tried to see what someone could find attractive about me, but I couldn’t find anything.” “Adrien Brody” is reprinted in what purpose did i serve in your life; there are also screengrabs of Facebook conversations between Calloway and men describing their fantasies of pissing on and hitting her. “Mew are you going to make me cry,” she asked a man over text in October 2012. “Yes,” he replied. “It will be glorious.”
 
Published by Tyrant Books, an independent press run by Giancarlo DiTrapano up until his death in March 2021, the book was a modest success by its standards — there was virtually no marketing other than social media word-of-mouth and DiTrapano’s claims that printers had refused to print the book because of its explicit content, which was a pretty good way to drum up controversy. (Fat Possum Records, which now owns half of Tyrant Books, did not have comment about the claim.)
 
According to Tyrant, the book sold around 5,500 copies. The book caused so much uproar that Calloway was reportedly invited — and then uninvited — to appear on Dr. Phil. (The person who could probably best contextualize what made Calloway’s writing so affecting is no longer around; DiTrapano was a fierce defender of hers, both personally and professionally.)
 
In 2016, Calloway published a piece of fiction in Playboy about a young woman’s encounters with married men called “Insipidities.” It’s the last thing she wrote for public consumption, and as far as I’m concerned it’s her best work; it shows the clarity about sexual politics, power, and the literary industry that she was building toward in her book. After the story’s publication, she basically vanished. Her Facebook page is gone, and her Instagram has disappeared. The young woman who once wrote, “To be dominated and degraded was what I wanted. Sex is just a way to get those things,” has gone silent, a true literary recluse.
 
If someone wanted to build a young woman specifically for the purpose of being hated by the internet, Calloway was what they would’ve wrought. She and I are the same age, and, while stylistically our work is different, I always felt a little envious of how dynamic and divisive her work was. While some people found her writing evocative, she was more often the subject of sneering attacks. How could someone handle that much vitriol directed their way? Every so often, I wonder what it would take for Calloway to come back to the world she left behind. But then again, it feels perfect that someone who captured the attention of the internet would decide to bail on it completely.

 
Despite Calloway having once been an extremely online cult favorite, there’s very little publicly available about who she actually is. Her real name isn’t even Marie Calloway; that’s a pseudonym she developed in her early 20s when she started blogging. Her real name, it’s rumored, is somewhere in the first edition of her book. Through conversations with her friends and literary contemporaries, I’ve found out that she’s originally from Las Vegas, and that she relocated to Portland, Oregon, after high school. From there, she floated around — to Chicago, London, possibly back to Portland for a while, then to New York the year her book was released.
 
She’s probably 30 or 31. No one seems to know for sure because no one seems to know Calloway’s birthday. Rachel Rabbit White, a writer, longtime friend, and erstwhile lover of Calloway’s (White told me they had matching necklace vials filled with each other’s blood), told me even Calloway herself doesn’t. “We both spent so long in [sex] work lying about our age that she would forget,” White told me over the phone. “She decided she was going to be a Scorpio but then forgot her actual sign.” According to White, Calloway now lives in Manhattan, recently got married, is studying Japanese, and just enrolled in massage school.
 
People I spoke to told me that Calloway was painfully quiet and deeply awkward in person. Her work does betray this; she always portrays herself as an ugly little gnat bothering the literary elite or crying in a man’s bed as he emotionally rejects her. “That was her big issue at the time. She was like, I’m too Aspie, I’m too Aspie,” White said. “She did have a hard time socializing and hanging out with people.”
 
Calloway’s work was niche. She might have been at the forefront of alt-lit, but she was never reviewed by the New York Times. Her book was a success for Tyrant Books, but it probably wouldn’t have been distributed by any of the mainstream publishers, even today. Yet her influence is present in the personal essay genre, in memoirs, in fiction about troubled young women. Her sparse prose and unflinching unpleasantness is no longer unusual; Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed, Halle Butler’s The New Me, or Darcie Wilder’s Literally Show Me a Healthy Person all belong to her lineage. Even literary megastar Sally Rooney’s work betrays flashes of Calloway in the hornier passages of her three bestselling novels.
 
And, of course, Kristen Roupenian’s mega-viral short story “Cat Person” inspired a similar furor to Calloway’s work. Published in the New Yorker in 2017, it too was about a relationship between a younger woman and an older man. (“I think there’s this moment when ‘Cat Person’ came out where people kind of realized that Marie was influential,” said Monika Woods, Calloway’s longtime literary agent.) Roupenian was also criticized for seemingly having drawn from a real person’s life for her story. In July of this year, Alexis Nowicki wrote a story for Slate about how she believed “Cat Person” was based on her former relationship. “What’s difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialized in the most viral short story of all time is the sensation that millions of people now know that relationship as described by a stranger,” Nowicki wrote. (The Slate piece included Roupenian’s response to Nowicki’s claims, and Roupenian subsequently published her own essay about what drives her to write.) But isn’t that what all good writing, fiction or not, is — a story that feels so familiar and connects so deeply that it feels like it was written specifically for you?
 
“I do think her work looks back at you,” said Brandon Proia, an editor at the University of North Carolina Press and an old acquaintance of Calloway’s. (According to him, they met on OkCupid.) “Which is why it’s hard to duplicate. It’s an inimitable thing. She was so fucking ahead of her time.”
 
Calloway sparked an online dialogue about ethics in personal essay writing well before the Babe.net essay about Aziz Ansari during the height of #MeToo. Her work was about sex, sex work, and sexuality, which rankled plenty of readers. “I don’t understand how it got so dismissed,” White said. “People would be like, we know this story. Well, do we? Name another great American sex work novel.”
 
In what purpose did i serve in your life, Calloway seems very aware of how people have judged her and her work. Throughout the book are photos of her face, her pixelated naked body, her drinking a coffee, all overlaid with critiques. “There’s absolutely nothing interesting about this girl,” says one, printed on an image of Calloway in the shower. “She’s half-conceited, half-insecure, moderately slutty in a dull sort of way, fancies herself to be a writer, yet lacks the talent to produce even a decent grocery list.” Another is much more succinct: “Slut.” Calloway wasn’t writing Letters to Penthouse, but a lot of reviews treated her like she was. “For the book’s first half Marie’s fragility carries the text,” Publishers Weekly wrote, “but her voice grows tiresome as she moves from selling sex to becoming a published author.”
 

Calloway was also perceived as having ridden on the coattails of another literary man rather than stewarding her own critical success. What purpose did i serve in your life contains a very thinly veiled essay about Tao Lin called “Jeremy Lin,” which was also originally published online. (Lin has not disputed the connection. “I really like reading about myself from other people’s perspectives,” he told me in an email.) In it, she tries to impress a vaguely powerful but obnoxious male writer and editor in New York. “That’s the book’s central dynamic, powered always by the narrator’s age,” Michelle Orange wrote in Slate. “Men respond to Marie. This is both what happens in these stories and what she tells us herself.”
 
Around the time of the book’s publication, there seemed to be some belief that Lin was Calloway’s literary Svengali. Others thought she was mimicking him and his disaffected demeanor, because that’s what everyone else was doing. “If you weren’t there at the time, it’s hard to remember what a huge presence Tao Lin was,” White said. “It was wild. Tao would walk into a party and suddenly everyone would have slumped posture and be speaking in a whisper like he did.” In “Jeremy Lin,” he comes off as withholding, never really telling Calloway what he thinks about her, and she desperately yearns for his approval. These days, Lin is effusive about Calloway’s work. “I was amazed by the combination of the focused and original story and content, the earnest and melodramatic tone, and the straightforward and unclichéd writing style,” he said.

 
Lin continues to publish and get good reviews, but he’s far less influential than he once was. In 2014, a former partner accused him of statutory rape and emotional abuse on social media, a year after his most famous book, Taipei, was released. (He has never been charged with a crime.) “I’m not trying to start any wars with the alt-lit people, but a lot of them were disgraced,” Proia said. “Her work stands up in a way that seems more relevant than a lot of the stuff that happened back then. The sometimes-submerged-but-nevertheless-there politics of what she was talking about and working through was there from the start.”
 
Not only was her writing seen as a little grotesque and unflinchingly sexual, it was about sex as work as well, sometimes titillating but also depressing and discomfiting. She framed her clients as sometimes preening, pathetic little men, and she didn’t enjoy the sex. She spent her money on things people generally consider frivolous, as if a sex worker isn’t entitled to a new lipstick or a pint of beer like everyone else is. In her own stories, she was sometimes flighty, anxious, inconsistent, unmanageable, and almost aggressively self-destructive. Calloway’s departure from public life is a shame on a few fronts, but that’s namely because she’s missed out on a unique moment of sex positivity, one that she helped create 10 years ago. “People called her ‘attention-seeking.’ Well, if you publicly create art, of course you’re seeking attention,” Ogaard said. “They weren’t mad she was seeking attention. They were mad that she got it.”
 
In hindsight, the hatred for Calloway’s work was inevitable if disproportionate to her apparent transgressions. She wasn’t mainstream, she wasn’t rich, she wasn’t cruel, and she had very little power. Still, the reviews and public discussions around her book were vicious and often angry. How dare this young girl sell her body to men and then write about it as if we care?

 
Even when reviews were complimentary, they were still a little leering and sometimes derisory. In 2013, Esquire writer Stephen Marche called her book “a minor masterpiece” but also wrote, “Personally, I find it hard to see how having your face come on by an older man constitutes an act of female empowerment, but of course I am a man.” Nearly all of Calloway’s readers — regardless of gender — treated her like a zoo animal, something to be gawked at. “On the cover of my book, I wasn’t wearing makeup and I didn’t style my hair,” Calloway told Michael Musto in Gawker in 2013. “Some people have commented on how ‘ugly’ the photo is. When people talk about my supposed beauty, it seems almost accusatory, not so different than when MRA types talk about female privilege.” (Among Musto’s other questions: “Do you wake up horny every day?”)
 
“There was this male fixation on the young woman. I think a lot of those people had a problem with Marie because she was a young woman and she was writing about her experience,” Ogaard said. “She was a transgressive writer, whereas they would borrow this take, this pedophilic, gross lens. They didn’t have any real perspective. Their interest in women was like a fetish. They weren’t interested in women. They were interested in young girls.”
 
Writer Sarah Nicole Prickett was also critical of Calloway at the time. Prickett and Lin interviewed each other in 2013 after the release of what purpose did i serve in your life. At the time, Prickett was downright cold on Calloway’s work. “Maybe she’s a writer. I don’t think she’s doing anything else,” Prickett said in the interview. “I will say that she seems to be a slightly better writer than sex worker.” But Prickett had actually pulled the “Maybe she’s a writer” line from a scene in Calloway’s book: A friend tells Calloway that she has to stop thinking that sex is the best thing she has to offer when in reality it’s her writing. “An interesting choice on my part to take something she said about herself and repeat it in a kind of perverted, contemptuous tone,” Prickett told me over the phone a few weeks ago. “It’s something that I said about myself.”
 
Calloway would have been around 22 at the time, and Prickett in her late 20s. But Prickett was arguably the more established writer, which makes the comment seem even harsher. “I think I had more conservative values at the time, maybe a conservative idea of what literature should be, and I was wrong about a lot,” Prickett said. After I contacted her for this story, she said she had reread Calloway’s book and felt at least a little regret. “I don’t know whether I identified with Marie but, having been recently Marie’s age, there’s nothing more embarrassing than the recent past,” she said. “When you’re 26 and think about who you were at 23, it’s a little repulsive. I think I took it personally whenever I saw a young woman writer who I felt was not being taken care of properly. Obviously I wasn’t really talking about Marie, was I? I was just talking about myself.”
 
That might have been Calloway’s greatest gift as a writer. Reading her work felt a little like reading snippets of your own diary. Even if you were nothing like Calloway, the feelings of alienation, inferiority, and the all-consuming need to be desired were so familiar, and that unabashed vulnerability got under people’s skin in a very specific way. “I often feel like other women attack my work to ensure a distance,” she told Vice in 2013.
 
Many of Calloway’s critics were women, and the arguments against her were often cloaked under the ideals of feminism: Here was another young woman offering herself up to the male gaze. It’s an interpretation that removes a lot of her own agency. Couldn’t she have just been writing what she wanted, the way she wanted to, about the things occupying her mind at 22? “I feel that especially hurt, to have so many women detractors who were saying that she was selling her sexuality, when really what she set out to do was explore female sexuality in an honest way,” White said. (Few of Calloway’s former critics spoke to me for this story, and the ones who did were all women. The many men I contacted who had mocked and derided Calloway’s work ignored my requests for comment.)
 
When what purpose did i serve in your life was released, I’m sure I was cruel about it too. I’m sure I denounced her portrayals of sex as gimmicky or that I winced at those private messages where she purrs “mew” to the men trying to employ or court her. But in retrospect, I think my critiques stemmed from jealousy or maybe the desire to protect someone who seemed a little bit like me. “I thought she needed to be protected from herself,” Prickett said. “I was probably just reaching the age when I was starting to regret writing things. Maybe I thought it was too ephemeral and regrettable. I think I was saying things about Marie that other women three years older said about me. I was just taking my place in the chain.”
 
It’s been eight years since Calloway published a book, five since she published work online. Her agent and friends assure me that she isn’t publishing under a pseudonym, and that she currently only writes for herself.

 
Her work exists in the specific paradigm of the 2010s; to imagine her in contemporary terms is to ruin whatever legacy she’s left behind. “You can’t imagine Marie Calloway [saying], ‘Take my three-day online Zoom workshop!’ You can’t imagine Marie with a GoFundMe page, making sweeping generalized statements about sociopolitical conflicts,” said Scott McClanahan, a fellow Tyrant Books author. “Wouldn’t it be funny if Reese Witherspoon signed off on this book? Unleashing that on the moms of America!”
 
While Calloway repeatedly declined my requests for comment through her agent and White, some of her friends were confident that I’ll hear from her after this story is published. (This seems like a pattern — even Calloway’s critics have heard from her, privately, over the years. Some told me they have even become friends with her.) Meanwhile, every source I called had a story to tell me, one that Calloway had suggested they recount. “This is probably what she wanted me to talk to you about,” Proia said with a laugh, launching into an anecdote about how Christian printers refused to reproduce the book. “She actually is her best interpreter.”
 
“It’s too early to say whether she will matter,” Prickett wrote in Thought Catalog in 2013. At the time, this was true. Who knew whether Calloway would be a flash in the pan or whether her work would have a long-term impact? Her milieu was pretty small. “It felt like you were publishing for your friends. There was no chance of one of us being in the New Yorker,” McClanahan said. “We fucking hated the New Yorker. And now the New Yorker has published very Marie Calloway–esque stories.”
 
But of course Calloway mattered. You can see her influence in the way personal writing on the internet has become a cottage industry, and how it has gone from something people considered a passing fad (women talking about themselves?) to its own subgenre. You can see it in how the public discourse around sex work has started to shift away from judgment toward compassion.
 
One thing Calloway likely understood earlier and better than almost anyone else was the cruel tides of the internet. And after experiencing intensely corrosive blowback, she simply decided to leave. Like everyone, I think about logging off most days. The more I stare at Twitter and worry about my least generous critics, the less I feel capable of cogent and publishable thoughts. I also think a lot about “Insipidities,” her last short story. It’s the most mature and self-aware she’s ever been in print. “New York is hideous, with gray dilapidated buildings and filthy streets mottled with failed asphalt and garbage heaps,” she writes. “And the people are even worse. It’s like living inside an eternal cocaine comedown. Why does anyone live here?”
 
It betrays the kind of cynicism that can only come from receiving endless virulent criticism from your peers. But, according to her friends, Calloway’s absence from the literary world may not be permanent. “I know she’ll write. I know she’ll publish again,” Ogaard said. “It’s a matter of when. It’ll happen when she’s ready.” But a version of the future where she never reemerges is pretty compelling too. It would be satisfying to keep pristine the memory of Calloway’s brief and fiery career, someone whose insights were so ahead of her time, trapped in internet amber. Why make yourself available for a new round of cruel takedowns about your work and your body? “I don’t know that she’ll ever come back,” White said. “If I were her, I don’t know that I’d want to either.”
 
The tragedy is that there is probably no one better suited to speak to the misery of the online feedback loop than Calloway. She was an early victim of the worst of the internet, so who would be better to contextualize it for the rest of us still trapped here, hoping to escape? But Calloway owes us nothing, especially after giving so much and getting very little in return. I’d love another essay, another story, another Tumblr post, but I know we don’t deserve it. Her victory is in her retreat.
 
Marie Calloway Was Reviled By The Internet. Then She Disappeared. By Scaachi Koul.BuzzfeedNews , October 5, 2021.

"I wondered if I should go into his apartment." That line opens Marie Calloway's debut novel, what purpose did i serve in your life. She, of course, does go in, and the following 240 pages are what happens next—which is very little. There is to Marie's casual and prostituting sex scenes, in which she traps the older, richer, more powerful men who set out to trap her, a stiffness, a menace, an elegance, and a (never elucidated) mournful quality that reminds me of Hemingway's dialogue. The encounters are not so recognizable as sex in literature, what with the lack of fade-out. What we get instead are the false starts: the times he didn't come, trying to force each other into images or ideas of what should or could be sexy, feeling forced, feeling almost there, feeling disgust, feeling sexy at feeling disgust, feeling disgust at feeling sexy at feeling disgust. He reaches for his camera while she's blowing him and then he changes his mind.
 
Reviews and comments about Calloway’s novel (nearly all mistake the narrator for her) are horrendous, and usually start by noting her exploitation of herself by deliberately turning on everyone with such a "jailbait" photo as the cover. It's just Calloway’s face. No makeup, no short skirt, no glass of wine offered to us by candlelight, no expression at all. She looks about 14—but is it her face's fault if you look at that and think about fucking it?
 
Notes one commenter, she's "a fame whore, with the accent on the whore." Her "lazy, Penthouse Letters style" is "offending to real writers." C'mon, exhorts Michael Musto in Gawker, when her answers to his questions aren't vixenish enough: "It's not like you're afraid of intimacy."
 
She's too sexy to be real. Or she's too real to be sexy, and that is even more offensive somehow. Her work is "repeatedly about how she is frigid, how sex is painful to her, and how violence turns her on because she was a victim of rape. Just gross… and sad." That's how it is for her. Or was in the time period what purpose covers. A writer is vulgar for depicting an inconvenient-to-hear-about interior life?
 
Then there are those who theorize Calloway doesn't even exist. She's a male author or authors using a model's picture. Or she does exist, but she made up this alternate self as a character who feels confused about debasement, when she (the author) is merely calculating.
 
All of which makes me wonder why everyone is so invested in a young, good-looking woman not being complex.
 
Gene Gregorits wrote in basically the same style years earlier, mixing email exchanges and emotionally dead, drug-fueled, roller-coastered action shots of his affair with at-the-time boyfriended, much older, much more established Lydia Lunch when he was just starting out as a writer. Not one critic or reader called him an "ugly slut" or a homewrecker for it, as they do Calloway. He does get called a narcissist, which is at least action-oriented and self-starting, as far as insults go. It's not a passive recipient of others' energies.
 
More encouraging critics call her "naive," a "Lolita," an "enfant terrible," and offer unsolicited advice. Molding is grooming. Women writers don't require your direction in describing what they think or feel, old man. And to be sexually detached after rape, to be numb emotionally as your elders blur the line between career help and blowing a load on your face is not “autism.” It's normal. It's just that most of us don't write about it because we're ashamed of ever having been a victim.
 
"Adrien Brody" is the essay that made Calloway famous, but I think "Jeremy Lin" (I assume that's Tao Lin) is worse. After she sent him a piece of hers to publish, he started enthusiastically bossing her around: how to change her writing style, how to use other writers, how to look at things, how to be. It seems to me that he recognized something giant in her that was still unrealized, and he seized his opportunity to go down in history as The One Who Had Her First. Writing-wise, that is. It's worse to penetrate still-forming talent than a vagina.

 
Lin invited her to Paris to stay in his hotel, making a writing assignment out of how things unfolded between them. Calloway  didn't have the money for the flight. He flew back to New York. They met. He did not want to fuck. He had a lot of excuses, for example, that he'd watched too much porn to have real-life desire anymore. When she said she was attracted to him, he replied, “Who wouldn't you fuck?” and then became enamored with a real-life skinny blonde, later telling her he only wanted women “under 100 pounds.” Calloway was told by a mutual friend that she didn't understand Lin. “You expect him to see you as a sex object, but he sees you as a person, and as a writer.” Not anymore.  He'd seen her as a writer-object. A new person. But now she'd been published—she was used goods… Plus, she'd turned out to weigh more than 100 pounds.
 
Men and women alike became enraged and judgmental about Calloway turning this dynamic around by exploiting (in print) her exploiters, by laying bare how she had offered up to these predators her own debasement, anxiety, needs, and wishes—some of them secretly malicious. It saddened me to hear my hero Chris Kraus's take on Calloway in an interview. Kraus recounts Calloway asking the pseudonymous character Adrien Brody to "take a sex pic with her phone, and he asks, 'Are you going to use this?' and she says no, and then does. That doesn't seem right… I think after the buzz from the ‘controversy' surrounding her work dies away, if Marie Calloway decides to continue writing, she'll figure something else out." Sure, it was hateful for the then-20-year-old unknown to trick the girlfriended 40-year-old intelligentsia kingpin into taking a picture of her face with his cum on it and then publish it. We think and do hateful things in our lives. It's a major part of relationships, at least ones with such vastly unequal power dynamics. A writer writes what we don't want to see, not the things that would make us an excellent human being if we were like how we rewrote ourselves. For Kraus, who is in a very secure financial and career position, to question the very insecurely positioned Calloway's not being nice is akin to natural-born citizens accusing an illegal immigrant of having an entirely unethical character because of the lie about citizenship: the powerless and the unlucky sometimes have to lie. Whether it's abuse in a family, a society, a work environment, they make you say you want it, you deserve it, and then you believe it, and you initiate more abuse. The whole thing collapses without your cooperation. Calloway describes having consented and even sought out her own debasement, but to say it plainly like this, to tell the truth about all the lies, is dissent—is an explosion, personal and political.
 
The interview is not fantastic. Calloway's a writer, not a professional interviewee. She's not suave, not yet at least, but luckily that has nothing to do with how good her book is. While I was messaging Calloway, some guy kept interrupting us with his IM bings bugging me about letting him interview me, after I'd already said "No, thank you" twice.
 
VICE: “No means no” needs to apply to turning down interviews, too.
 
Marie Calloway: Men would ask me to write for their blog or to do an interview, and if I said no, they would ask my (male) publisher. Like he's the adult in charge of me.
 
V: That Huffington Post writer… How did he know your normal demeanor is "coy" and "coquettish," and that you were hiding your true "seductress" self by not attempting to have sex with him… until you finally revealed it by answering his question about your plans that night with saying you had none? How much had you hung out with him before?
 
MC : Only that one night, when he interviewed me, for maybe two hours. I think he was expressing surprise at me being shy. A lot of people who read my writing before meeting me have said this. But I don't get it. I feel like I write a lot about shyness, alienation. I definitely have trolled a few other times in interviews though certainly. I did an interview with Flaunt where the guy seemed really angry at me as well as mentally unstable so I just gave him a bunch of ridiculous answers. He ended up not using any of it, and ran his own rant about me and my book which I find funny now.
 
 
V : Female critics show you some hate, too.
 
MC : I often feel like other women attack my work to ensure a distance. Like they're serious thinkers, not little girls. I don't know. I felt hurt/amused by this woman who basically wrote a giant review about the kind of therapy I need. I have struggled a lot with wanting to be an academic or intellectual but can't really accomplish that because of my class background, and, I don't know, stuff goes over my head.
 
V : Being smart does no good for writing. In fact, it might hurt it. All you need to be is brave. You write on Facebook and Tumblr stuff like all men should be turned into cat food. I appreciate that the same way I appreciate all these artist guys taking on hating women as a tool, trying to be offensive or shocking to get some action going in people's brains. Making invisible things visible. Most male artists have mommy issues, just as most artist ladies have daddy issues.
 
MC : I don't know. I guess a lot of men use misogyny in their work to be shocking, but how shocking is it really? Misogyny is all around us. I feel like a lot of writers/artists/philosophers/musicians are nerds (or were nerdy as kids and that never goes away completely), and if the internet has taught me anything, it's that nerds hate women.
 
V : Do you hate men?
 
MC : Sometimes. Really I like a lot of individual men. But I just feel like I'm at a place in my life where I don't get much out of personal relationships with men. All of my friends are female and I don't feel interested in having sex with or dating men anymore. I feel like they have nothing to offer. They take so much. This is after spending my teen and college years being incredibly desperate for male attention at all times. They're more trouble than they're worth.
 

 
V : You are energetically freeing yourself now from men's opinions, yet you are still concerned with being thin and wearing nice shoes. Why?
 
MC : I think it's impossible to separate what I as a woman want to look like from living in patriarchy. Federici talks about how we are always expected to do all this “work” as women, dieting and buying pretty clothes. We have to do all this work to be capable of being loved. The consequences of not living up to beauty standards go further than people think. See the many reports of overweight women earning less than their thin peers with the same qualifications. You can create a kind of distance and understand that your weight doesn't have anything to do with your worth as a human being, and focus on more fulfilling things. But it's difficult to escape entirely, and we should not be hard on ourselves or others for worrying about weight. Our worries are not frivolous, or because we are vain, but the result of something very real and pressing.

"One trick pony has only one trick," says “bitter anonymous,” who apparently can see into the future and knows that for the rest of Calloway's life, she'll churn out books exactly replicating her first. It feels self-congratulatory, his turn of phrase.
 
I wish there was a comparable word like emasculate for what people do to a woman by chipping away at her pride and comfort in being and enjoying female qualities. Because if you de-feminize a woman, it's like you'd take away the attributed silliness, hysteria, and cattiness, revealing (finally, if ever, if anything) what's important about her. I guess for now, in this culture, all we have is dehumanize. That's what bitter anon and his cohorts do. "If she thinks people are interested in her as some kind of sociologist rather than soft-porn purveyor," he goes on, "she's delusional. Sorry, love."
 
I really hate people who say sorry when they're not.
 
 
Marie Calloway on Her New Novel and Being Called "Jailbait". By Lisa Carver. Vice, June 26, 2013.

Marie Calloway is shy in person.

 
I'd been in contact with Calloway, who uses a pen name, about her new book, "what purpose did i serve in your life," a mélange that places first-person, memoiristic tales of sex at every level of coerciveness alongside images of her bruised body and Facebook chats in which the seduction runs both ways. Calloway first rose to repute with an essay, "Adrien Brody," that described her brief entangling with a Web writer she idolized. In matter-of-fact, flat style that will or will not be evocative depending on the reader, Calloway describes a conversation after sex:
 
    “"I hit the last guy I had sex with, too, because I was sad he didn't want to date me. It's like that again. Hitting you didn't make me feel better or change anything. It's not like I can stop you from leaving."
 
I'm totally powerless in the face of men.”
 
In winter 2011, the piece sent shockwaves through the publishing industry, as documented in a New York Observer piece: the identity of "Adrien Brody" was sussed out, Calloway came in for criticism in particular for a photograph purportedly showing "Brody's" bodily fluids on her face. The piece, devoid of comments and presented as a series of vignettes (Calloway, or "Calloway," becomes a sex worker in order to buy "BareMinerals foundation and MAC lipstick and soy lattes and pizza"; she's later forced to consume her own vomit), appears in her book.
 
Upon release of the book, I had Facebook-chatted Calloway -- she's a voracious updater on the site and accepted my friend request immediately -- and then emailed with her. She was disinclined to speak over the phone, she told us, but would respond to email queries. She hadn't yet replied when I met her outside a book party for Tao Lin, the novelist known for tales of drug use and disaffection and a mentor of sorts for her. His encouragement of her writing career, at a time when she worries that she's only novel for her subject matter or her sex appeal, apparently shows up in somewhat fictionalized form in her story "Jeremy Lin."
 
I introduced myself to her; she was wearing a red dress and smoking a cigarette, and asked to borrow my bottle of water. She had her cellphone out; it was pink and bedazzled, like Carrie Bradshaw's in the first "Sex and the City" movie. I told her that I wasn't kidding in my email -- I had really enjoyed "what purpose did i serve in your life." "Enjoyed" wasn't the right word, but having been primed to expect mere provocation, I'd been surprised to actually have thought about it.
 
"That's funny," she said, seeming to weigh her words carefully. "Men usually don't like my book."
 
Calloway has been the subject of online critiques that range from savage -- just look at any of the collages she made while suffering writers' block, with detailed mockery overlaying images of her body -- to just-not-getting-it. This week, Esquire's Stephen Marche (who'd previously written for that magazine that Lena Dunham was too "plain" to be taken seriously) noted that he liked the book. But! "Personally, I find it hard to see how having your face come on by an older man constitutes an act of female empowerment, but of course I am a man."
 
But of course.
 
Marche suggests that he takes every element of the book as literally true and sees Calloway as an artist who "has been submitting herself to horrific sexual experiences in order to write about them [emphasis original]."
 
Not that Calloway is likely to see this critique.
 
"I tell my publisher he's not allowed to send me even positive reviews," wrote Calloway over email. "I find it to be very boring (after a while you kind of read it all and criticism or even positive feedback becomes just the same few things rehashed endlessly, it seems) and it interferes with my creative process."
 
Calloway says she writes every day and has done so since childhood. She doesn't regret either her first-person work or its consequences, though -- after all, it was at least somewhat a project of persona. Contradicting Marche's read of her as a girl seeking experience at all costs, Calloway said, "I don't regret anything. I would have written things differently now, and I feel more protective of revealing certain things, but with this book I often played with things like affected naïveté."
 
But from what literary tradition did this writer of the Internet age, so seemingly sui generis, spring forth? Tao Lin, author of "Taipei," disavows responsibility, telling Salon, "I don't see my influence. I saw similarities with Jean Rhys, particularly 'Good Morning, Midnight,' but not strong similarities and I know Marie wasn't influenced by Jean Rhys who she hadn't read until having written most of the book."
 

The poet Robert Gluck, a fan of Calloway's, locates her forbears a bit earlier: "She makes a performance of writing. The reader is wondering how far she will go, just as a live performance. You could say Baudelaire was doing that. You could say that Rimbaud was doing that."
 
"Are you going all the way back to Simone de Beavoir?" asked "Motherland" novelist Amy Sohn, who began a sex column for New York Press at 22. (Calloway is 23.) She described her own work: "It was a hybrid of autobiography and fiction and very diaristic ... People didn't pick up on the fact that there was a more intelligent narrator behind the action."
 
The comparison to HBO's revealing series "Girls" is, if not inevitable, easy. It was made in a Huffington Post profile of Calloway that she complained "painted me as a lolita sex kitten seductress" and a review on Slate that mused on "the wish that Calloway and her book simply didn’t exist, that we might all just ignore it." But Lena Dunham's series is, for all its viewers' confusion on the subject, fairly explicit: Hannah Horvath is a fictional character, and Dunham is her creator. "A decent percentage of my book is fiction," Calloway told Salon, but she didn't specify which parts were invented and which were true.
 
"It makes a problem of what is fiction and what is not fiction," said Gluck of Calloway's work. "Any time that you challenge social regulation, you're challenging society itself. That is upsetting to some people. To other people it's exciting. It's causing a scandal because you're challenging the ways society keeps itself proper."
 
"I feel like I have to fight for every inch, in interviews," wrote Calloway. "Like interviewers just want to ask me about 'what does your dad think' or ask me leading questions about some half-baked idea they have about the Internet and narcissism and kids these days." This doesn't account for the fact that those -- excepting the dad thing -- are at least more interesting than the debate over whether, per Slate, Calloway should even exist. ("Imagine someone wishing a book of literary fiction that you'd written didn't exist, and not having a reason why," said Lin.)
 
"Women are damned if they do, damned if they don't," said Sohn. "If they write about sex, it seems as if they slept with someone to get the job or that they were trying to get a reaction." Not that it's easy to advocate for yourself when you're young: "I realized I was going to serve a purpose for [the New York Press] at a time when no one really talked about brands, and I was finding my voice as a writer," she said.
 
Like Sohn, who left her own semi-fictionalized sex writing behind to write novels, Calloway is moving on; her future work, she says, will be "more mature and written in third person, more expressive and perhaps more blatantly political."
 
What her book most amply documents is not sex but trying to fit sex into the life of an ambitious writer. What are the boundaries? What can be disclosed? If you say everything, will anyone take you seriously? The character of Calloway is more consumed, throughout the book, with her career than with sex; it's the substance of "Jeremy Lin," which concludes with a friend emailing her, "You should stop thinking of sex as your best thing and realize, like Jeremy has, that writing is your best thing." It's the subtext of Calloway reappropriating the critiques of her -- she was, once, a writer who read her own reviews -- as well as the notion that writing about sex automatically makes the writer a character whose behavior in the real world a Stephen Marche may decode.
 
"I don't like the privileging of other topics over sex, like that it's somehow a lesser subject than others," said Calloway over email. "I had a question from an interviewer about how since I'm capable of talking politically or about literary theory shouldn't I do that rather than 'sex writing.'" Perhaps Calloway will be allowed to do what she wants if the book gets admirers. Or perhaps she'll be wished into nonexistence, having made her splash.
 
In a report of Lin's book party, novelist Miles Klee describes running away from Calloway, "whose own book [...] is doing quite well despite three publishers balking at its 'obscene' content." (This apparently refers to printing presses refusing to print the nude photos of Calloway in the book's galleys.) When Klee meets Calloway again, she reportedly "turns around and locks eyes, and I have the fleeting fear that I’m about to puke on her." As the Slate headline had it, "Men respond to Marie," or at least to an image of her that her book does not support.
 
The day after the party, on her Facebook, Calloway wrote: "Sometimes at a party u get really excited that a boy is talking to u, but then minute into it u remember how stupid and boring men generally are :("
 
Memoirist Marie Calloway: "I don't like the privileging of other topics over sex" By Daniel  D'Addario. Salon, June 12, 2013.

 

Among the conventions of the author bio, age disclosure has a particular function. Often it signals a debut’s trump note. “Zadie Smith,” a flyleaf of White Teeth informed readers, “was born in North London in 1975.” Jesus, sighed her contemporaries, who in 2000 were still finishing degrees or scrambling for desk jobs. A reader, growing aware of its intended effect, might notice that few authors older than 30 bother with the year drop, and begin to hear double snaps in its wake. X was born in 1978, but Y was (b. 1983), bitches.

 Scanning the bio attached to what purpose did i serve in your life, the first book from online lit’s enfant terrible Marie Calloway, I didn’t hear snaps but the voice of Judy Garland. During some mid-duet patter on an episode of her early 1960s variety show, Garland stopped Jack Jones after he mentioned being born in 1938: “Nobody was born in 1938,” Garland said. Of course her dismay is funnier, and sadder—that was young once—50 years later. But seriously, nobody was born in 1990.

 In her debut—a collection of starkly observed, first-person sexual odysseys (some originally published on sites like Thought Catalog and Muumuu House) interspersed with collages of low-res photos and chat transcripts—Calloway’s age forms the self-conscious center of a desperately self-conscious world. The narrator, whom I’ll call Marie (Marie Calloway is a pseudonym, though the author draws heavily from her own experience; close-ups of her face fill the book’s front and back cover, close-ups of other parts of her body are found between them), rarely has a thought unconnected to her sense of a very young self. And rarely is she observed without her age—her youth and beauty—being observed first. Very little guards the border between Marie the subject and Marie the object, and this porousness is the source of a confusion particular both to young women and, perhaps, to this moment.

 The pieces are ordered, roughly, to follow Marie from age 18, in 2008, to 22. Often in her interactions with older men—the only kind of man, or person, for that matter, Marie encounters in these stories—she drops her age to discover or refresh its effect. Some of the men are older writers, some are older photographers; some are older johns. In one of the better stories, “Jeremy Lin,” the title character—whose name provides a celebrity membrane for the elsewhere named and pictured author Tao Lin—places half a tablet of MDMA on Marie’s tongue, then looks at her and sighs: “I can’t believe I’m 28.”

 That’s the book’s central dynamic, powered always by the narrator’s age: Men respond to Marie. This is both what happens in these stories and what she tells us herself. Often the stories begin with an appointment to meet, and go on to describe a real-world encounter produced by the kind of correspondence Calloway excerpts elsewhere, in which an intricate dance of staccato chat and selfies lead to plane tickets and a more carnal if no less blighted attempt at connection.

 In “Adrien Brody,” the story that earned Calloway a profile in the New York Observer and the wrath of the commentariat—along with a few key admirers—Marie emails a 40-year-old cultural theorist to compliment his thoughts on pornography. To his delayed, cordial response she replies with clipped entreaties, like telegrams sent from inside the cloud: “if you want please read my writing zzz…tao lin liked both stories zzz.” “plz add me on fb if you want.” A quick email exchange follows, 10 days pass, and then, Marie tells us, she sends Adrien this:

 “hello

I will go to Brooklyn may 26 - june 1

I would love to sleep w/ you

probably you’re not into that sort of thing but thought I would say anyway zz via nothing to lose

goodluck in your life zzz”

 

As happens throughout the book, Marie explains her motivation in terms that manage to feel simultaneously disarming and disingenuous: “I wanted to keep his attention, so I emailed him again, this time a gallery of photos a friend had taken of me in thigh high socks. I was also curious to see how someone who seemed so dignified and cerebral would respond to a young girl sending sexy photos of herself to him over the Internet.”

 The outcome of Marie’s gambit will not surprise you, but the quality of the ambivalence and automatonic detail with which she documents it might. We all know this story, as those who dismiss Calloway as a tiresome or even dangerous kind of disclosure artist point out. What feels unknown enough to be shocking when it surfaces, as it does with some consistency here, is access to the enveloping perspective of an ordinary young woman seeking affirmation, connection, comfort, and other, darker unknowns through sexual contact. If what she describes is the same old anomie, Calloway joins a new chapter in the literature of disaffection. Here self-consciousness, far from a new literary toy, has flattened into landscape, an airless plane where stunted characters pass the occasional pebble back and forth like a cold potato.

 Melissa Panarello, the Sicilian author who under the pen name Melissa P. published 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed at age 18, in 2003, wrote of her sexual extremities in comparatively florid, fairy tale tones. Not for Calloway are spades thrust into “rich, luxuriant soil.”  The image of Marie and Adrien Brody discussing Gramsci while doing it, however, is equally laughable. (“I couldn’t pass up the chance to sleep with my intellectual idol,” Marie writes after learning of Adrien Brody’s girlfriend, one of many painfully ingenuous declaratives that stand in place of metaphor, abstraction, and psychological insight.) She adopts in these dialogue-heavy scenes a style of relentless, somewhat remedial observation, like an inverted Lillian Ross reporting with alien fascination on her own feelings and her companion’s limited array of airs, gestures, and expressions. Even Marie’s pleasure seems pleasureless, passive, occurring for the purpose of data collection and dissemination. Compare her description of sex with her first trick—“He lay there and had an erection while I moved”—with that of her more profound, much anticipated assignation, with Adrien Brody: “He penetrated me and I was happy. I felt a strong sexual connection with him.”

 This style, with its suggestion of mournful detachment—critic Christian Lorentzen coined the term “Asperger’s realism” to describe the work of Tao Lin—reaches its fullest expression in “Jeremy Lin.” For two such stolid characters, Marie and her mentor do a lot of feeling, first in emails, then in person, then in emails again. “I feel like you know what you’re doing and when I read other people’s advice it makes me feel like I want to help you feel like you don’t need their advice,” Lin writes to Marie in the wake of publishing “Adrien Brody” on his website. Together they feel and they feel like, such that the phrase begins to suggest, amid a profusion of screens and floating personae, a kind of mutual assurance: I feel.

 Marie tests Lin, as is her habit, annoying him with her need to be desired as well as championed. “I feel like I felt how you felt when you were lying in the bed not wanting to leave,” he writes to her, after she ends a druggy party lying on Lin’s bed, not wanting to leave. Lin is attempting to communicate empathy, but the abstraction-free style, whereby nothing is taken for granted, suggests a language, after centuries of wanton proliferation, reset to its basic verbs, pronouns, and prepositions. Like couples rebuilding a decimated relationship, Calloway’s characters seem trapped in a specialized therapy session, an endless series of Imago exercises. I feel this when you say that; I hear what you’re saying and it makes me feel this. Most often those feelings are: awkward, embarrassed, worried, lonely, confused, humiliated.

 A similar dynamic begins to define the relationship between reader and author. Calloway addresses the reader privately, occasionally expressing concerns about her “career,” a concept indistinguishable from her story, her arc, her sprouted mythology. Of her mentor Marie tells us that she “would probably always feel stifled and overshadowed unless I were to somehow totally disavowal [sic] Jeremy Lin from my life and career, and accept all of the difficulty and pain that would bring. I wondered if I would ever be able to reconcile my ambition to be a serious writer with my desire to be loved.”

 Calloway might have worried about awkwardness as much as her character does. Transitions, behavioral logic, and attempts at self-analysis creak or have a studied glibness. (“I did block him,” Calloway writes of one Internet creeper, “but then I got bored and started talking to him. Then I realized I want more pictures of me, so I said he could take mine.”) Marie’s voice sometimes veers from zombie reporter to second-year grad student. “Sex work experience three” opens with a diaristic salvo:

 “I need money for BareMinerals foundation and MAC lipstick and soy lattes and pizza. If I earn money I will no longer be a financial burden on my parents; I will be productive and accomplish something. I will be a commodity, and I will be in demand and valuable. I am so beautiful and young that men will pay three hundred dollars to have sex with me; sex work will reify my youth and beauty. I have no friends and nothing to do except school and this will give me something to do and a way to study other people besides through the Internet. I’ll find out for myself what sex work means, and what kind of men pay for sex and why they do it.”

 Writing about the HBO show Girls for the New York Review of Books, J. Hoberman suggested that its creator, Lena Dunham, has “tapped into a vein of tragicomic sexual naturalism in which, as in the novels of Czech writers Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima, social constraint (here economic) makes sex, however messy, the lone arena of freedom.” Though it’s tempting to draw Calloway into this same arena—where blood and other fluids are spilled in search of a connection strong enough to obliterate its parties, their worries, their disparities, their fakery, their endless, obscuring refractions—the Dunham connection feels more complicated. The photos, the threesomes, the drugs, the men eager to tout and publish Calloway ASAP, all remind me of Hannah Horvath’s e-book deal with the editor of a pop-up press played, in Season 2 of Girls, by director John Cameron Mitchell. Where’s the sexual failure, he chastises his protégé when she turns in a draft focused on her female friendships. “Where’s the pudgy face slick with semen and sadness?”

More than once I have heard expressed by other women—particularly woman writers—the wish that Calloway and her book simply didn’t exist, that we might all just ignore it. It’s a weary wish, not a malicious one: It would just be easier, they sigh, and maybe better that way. I confess that being asked to write about this book inspired in me a similar wish—that the email had not been sent, that I would not have to decide—and mine was as useless. The experience of reading what purpose did i serve in your life, which rides the line between performed and genuine vapidity and malign naiveté so closely that the distinction between them blurs, is by turns dull, titillating, appalling, riveting, and as head-spinning, in Hoberman’s phrase, as “a hall of mirrors in which Girl Power and female powerlessness are endlessly reflected.” It is not, in other words, easy to turn away from. Easier, perhaps, to catch a shattered glance of oneself.

What Calloway depicts most persuasively is a young woman’s intrigue with herself—her transient powers and her highly exploitable weaknesses. Though she makes sexual discoveries, somehow freedom has little to do with it. Rather than sexual ecstasy, Marie reaches for her camera; pornographic shadows flicker around every coupling. In a book describing at least a dozen sexual encounters, Marie’s orgasm count never budges. When it appears, the word “love” has a random, retrospective quality: Marie might claim, two stories later, to love the partner from two stories back, but we can only take her word for it. Sex may be one arena of freedom, these stories imply, but the page is where the bloodied seek a rematch.

 Finally, the book’s emphasis on scene suggests a failure of story: With the size and feel of a coloring book, what purpose did i serve in your life appears as an outline of sorts, something preliminary. An exercise in self-portraiture as modern self-mythology, it’s a book I can imagine appreciating best at 19, while taking cover in some furtive bedroom from the betrayals of young womanhood. But I’m not 19, and neither, anymore, is Marie Calloway. That was young once.

 Men Respond to Marie. By Michelle Orange. Slate, June 7, 2013.