"Adult Drama and Other Essays" is hardly an exceptional book, and even though Natalie Beach proves herself to be an appealingly straightforward and readable writer, it'd be difficult to argue that it was worth much more than the two bucks I paid for it on Amazon. For what(ever) it's worth, Beach was once briefly internet famous for blowing up her friendship with a certain Caroline Calloway, an early-sage Instagram influencer, by outing herself as the ghostwriter and one-person support-system. If you missed the Calloway/Beach drama, which was published in The Cut, an online newspaper, you might be asking yourself, "who cares?" And that's a fair enough. But, from a certain point of view, you could call Beach's experiences uncannily -- and depressingly -- representative.

Beach's memories of growing up awkward in New Haven, Connecticut during the first decade of the millennium, the time she spent as a serious collegiate soccer player, and her reminiscences of semi-bohemian life in not-yet-completely-gentrified Brooklyn are enjoyable, if perhaps not essential, reading. But Beach is also a Yale townie who has labored in a number of customer service and physical labor positions that seem incongruous, given her NYU diploma. She's also taken for everything she was worth by a shallow, charismatic, and utterly remorseless con artist -- which is to say Ms. Calloway -- who popped a lot of pills, lived a glamorous, enviable life that existed -- if that's the term -- wholly on social media. Ms. Calloway managed to turn her carefully constructed image into a book contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it seems almost unnecessary to say that the author, who did almost all of the writing involved, didn't see one thin dime's worth of this money. Whether Natalie Beach is a great writer or not -- and since she freely admits to working a "desk job" in LA these days, she seems pretty aware that she isn't -- she has had a front-row seat to the little that we've seen of the twenty-first century so far.

Beach offers no real answers to the inevitable question of why Caroline Calloway did what she did, but she suggests that Caroline might be a very good writer who chose not to put the work in. Why produce endless drafts when you can co-write Instagram captions with somebody else? Why live a remarkable life when you can just convince people who browse social media that you do? Why build an audience when you can just buy followers wholesale? While Beach suggests that Caroline's behavior was likely motivated by more deeply rooted emotional issues, it's worth noting that her experiences don't seem to have taught her too much, and the influencer economy she participated in didn't exactly give her too many incentives to be honest with herself or with others. Beach is also honest enough about herself to reveal to her readers that her dating life was a series of disasters before she got married, and that she was socially clueless as a teenager. She doesn't always come off well in "Adult Drama", to put it mildly. But, as ordinary and unphotogenic as her life might be, it's clear that she chose a path different from Caroline Calloway's, and it's one that gives her a real chance at personal growth and real-deal maturity. I don't know if I'll read aything else by her, honestly, but I really do wish her well. ( )