As detailed in the pages of this publication, Caroline Calloway has survived online cancellation. Now, refusing to evacuate her beachfront home in Sarasota, Florida, directly on that dotted-line path of Category 4 Hurricane Milton, it’s not 100 percent clear even to her whether she’ll survive the storm—but, she tells Vanity Fair, speaking by phone on Wednesday from her oceanfront condo, she won’t evacuate despite official orders.
“One area of being an influencer that really prepared me for this hurricane,” she says, “let me tell you, boy, do I have some excellent backup phone chargers.” She has four of them plugged in, and “these are real, you know, bricks of a portable charger.”
She’s hunkered down with her mom and a few others in her third-floor hurricane-grade condo, which she says is “like living in a parking garage,” and has plans to fill up her bathtub with water, “cook a bunch of pasta noodles,” and fry some dumplings before her building loses power. She already has three Stanley tumblers filled (“they’re turquoise, so they’re festive”) at the ready, and “I’m showered and shaved and clean as hell. I took an everything shower yesterday. I ran 10 miles yesterday to, like, really get in a workout. I’m ready for my rest days.”
The tone of an Instagram Story she shared Tuesday was decidedly less chill.
“Um, I’m gonna die!” she declared at the top, disclosing that her home is “Zone A, mandatory evacuation,” and then that she won’t be leaving it.
Calloway then shared a clip of Tampa Bay Mayor Jane Castor warning those in the path of the storm that if they don’t evacuate, “you will die.”
However, she tells VF Wednesday that she feels “very safe,” and explains that grabby first line: “In order to get people to view content, you have to make the first few seconds of your video interesting.” Castor’s clip was added, she says, “to just contextualize the quote.”
To Calloway, being an influencer and content creator is similar to being a reality TV personality: The Caroline Calloway you see on her Instagram is Caroline The Brand, not necessarily Caroline The Person. Caroline The Brand is posting through it (“it” being a hurricane) with her signature dark humor, but Caroline The Person—whether the placement or even existence of that delineation is evident to the world—is doing her prep and helping neighbors in the building who also chose to stay. Part of her decision not to evacuate, she says, is due to the “genuinely traumatic” experience of evacuating with her mom in 2022 for Hurricane Ian. The two were stranded in her mother’s North Port, Florida home for three days without power or running water, she says, and eventually boarded a military fan boat and got out.
She considers her videos to be part of her job “entertaining the public,” not a record of her truest, innermost feelings.
“It’s very strange and something that I hope the world will grow out of when we quote influencers at work as if they were normal, as if they were normal social media platforms that weren’t their job and source of income,” she says. “I just don’t think the culture is really caught up so that everyone’s on the same page about how much of a job being an online personality is in the same way that for a long time, people thought reality TV was totally unscripted.”
Calloway also, however, doubled down on other social media platforms about not evacuating, while plugging her next book, a self-published self-help tome called Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life, that’s sort of a mash note with work from the late Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation and other books, heavily annotated by Calloway. If you pre-order the “luxury first edition” from her site, you will receive a “fuck up” sticker, among other bonuses, upon shipment sometime in October.
“For more great advice, buy my second book!” she wrote in a tweet Tuesday, immediately following a declaration that she was defying official evacuation orders. “It’s called Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life. It’s about to come out if I survive! It’s an advice book 😉 Cute!!!!!
