Caroline Calloway survived the hurricane, makes an impact again

For Caroline Calloway, everything is happy.

In the 2010s, she rose to fame as an early Instagram influence, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers with pictures of her supposedly idyllic life studying art history at Cambridge University in England.

But her fame turned to notoriety when it was revealed that she had bought followers and that a friend had written her evocative captions.

Calloway developed an addiction to Adderall, lost a lucrative book deal and went broke.

Now, she’s back in the spotlight for self-publishing a new book, “Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life” and controversially weathering Hurricane Milton, who has been living in Sarasota, Florida, since 2022, with cheeky social media posts.

“So if you’ve been following Hurricane Milton, I’m going to die,” Calloway, 32, said in a video Tuesday on Instagram, where he has 676,000 followers, a day before the deadly storm made landfall. .

Despite living in an evacuation zone, Calloway, who once called the West Village home and moved south to care for her grandmother, stayed.

On Wednesday, she posted a photo of herself on top of a tube sitting cross-legged in front of a sliding glass door with her cat, Matisse, on her lap inside her home.

“If he really dies in this storm, the price of my books will go up a LOT. Order now,” she shamelessly wrote on Instagram.

The next day, in a viral text exchange about a meme, he declared, “I lived, b—h.”

His hurricane antics outraged some.

“Caroline Calloway refusing to leave a mandatory evacuation zone (right in the water, right where she’s expected to make landfall) and dying in a hurricane would be the perfect ending for her narrative tbh,” he write a follower to X.

The influencer defended her actions to The Post.

“I decided to stay to help my elderly neighbors and because evacuating for a hurricane is always a difficult and nuanced decision for any Florida resident,” she explained. “I’ve been making content in my spare time because we’ve been stuck indoors, but that’s not why I stayed.”

But he also noted that it has been a big help for sales of his new book and said the money would help his mother fix her car.

The new memoir mixes essays by Calloway with excerpts from the late Wurtzel’s 2001 tome of advice, “The Secret of Life.”

“(It’s a) never-before-seen kind of conversation between two depressed downtown sweethearts across time and space,” she said of the book, which also features lines from Julia Fox and Cat Marnell.

Her road from disgraced Internet girl to self-help author has been a winding one.

In 2013, the church in Falls, Virginia, created an Instagram account (@CarolineCalloway) to showcase its picturesque British academic life: castles, the River Cam, wreaths.

He spent $4.99 to get 40,000 followers early on, a common practice in those days, now considered a tactless faux pas.

By 2015, he had amassed around 300,000 followers, a massive fan base for the time.

“I had no idea the golden cage I would be locked into by catering to the algorithm. What the algorithm likes is wealth, happiness, aesthetics, beauty,” he said.

In 2016, he used his following to negotiate a book deal with Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan, for half a million dollars.

But behind the posts, he was struggling, battling an addiction to Adderall. He soon realized he couldn’t deliver.

“I was dumb as a rock. . . . I sold a book I didn’t want to write,” he said. “The book I sold presented a fairy tale version of my life. It was a cross between what I wanted it to be. and how I wanted to be perceived.”

But, Calloway admitted, “I signed the document; nobody put a gun to my head.”

She quickly outgrew her $100,000 advance, in part to pay her $30,000 tuition for her senior year at Cambridge, leaving her stuck with the publisher.

“I needed to find a way to make money,” said Calloway, who described herself as a “manic pixie nightmare” at the time.

In 2019, desperate to make money, she sold $165 tickets to a “Creativity Workshop” that never came to fruition and bought a $210 “fountain of youth” homemade concoction she cheekily named Snake Oil.

(It was actually grapeseed oil and various other oils. A dermatologist told VICE UK it could cause a sensitization reaction.)

His problems increased throughout that year.

First, her former West Village landlord sued her for $40,000 in back rent.

He then reached a new level of fame when New York magazine’s The Cut published an article by former friend Natalie Beach claiming she had written his Instagram captions.

It went viral and Calloway was labeled a con artist and a “one-woman Fyre Fest.”

“My reputation was in tatters,” he said.

A few days after Beach’s piece was published, Calloway’s father, William Gotschall, killed himself with an overdose of pills. He had struggled with depression and bipolar disorder for years and was on the verge of bankruptcy.

“I was just dealing with so much pain. My depression, his depression, his credit card debt, and on top of that, my addiction to Adderall,” she said. “I like to think that without the drug addiction I never would have (got a book deal). . . . I really wanted the validation of being taken seriously as a writer.”

At the height of his addiction, he was taking 90 milligrams of extended-release Adderall a day, the “legal high you can get in New York,” he told British podcaster Grace Beverly last year.

In 2017, he began a rehabilitation program. While he still drinks, he has been off Adderall since then.

“The truth is, I just had a lot of pain to process,” he said.

In 2020 she created an Only Fans account by selling topless photos of herself dressed as famous literary characters such as Daisy Buchanan to raise enough money to pay off her debt to her publishers.

“I paid them back that summer; then I left Only Fans,” said Calloway, who claimed he made about $100,000.

Although she’s been lumped in with the likes of Fyre mastermind Billy McFarland, 32, and Anna Delvey, 33, Calloway says the comparisons aren’t fair.

“I’ve never been to jail, I’ve paid all my debt,” he said.

(McFarland and Delvey served nearly four years in prison, for fraud and theft, respectively.)

But Calloway has also been shown to be a con artist.

In 2023, he published his first memoir, “Scammer.”

It was universally well received, with the New Yorker calling it “funny, engaging and full of genuine knowledge”.

According to Calloway, it sold 20,000 copies.

“People already think I’m a fraud,” he said. “Might as well get some benefits out of it.”