I adored the former Love Island host, and wish we could have shown her a more hopeful reality: that women who err and fail are worthy of love
My adoration for Caroline Flack bordered on teenage. As an American abroad in the UK last summer, managing the vague, inchoate loneliness of time spent in a country not my own, the hours I watched her, six nights a week from roughly 9pm to 10.30pm, became a benchmark of cosy normalcy, a point of connection in an often cruel and unfamiliar world. She was, in the way that is specific to pop figures we engage with daily, a friend, albeit one I had never met. That raspy voice, her surprised guffaw, her dresses (pretty, bordering on wacky, like early Cher) and the empathy she brought to a bloodless and occasionally unkind television format lent her an air of approachable glamour, a local-girl-done-good sheen, aspirational but earthy.
Not since I saw Sarah Jessica Parker on Broadway in 1996, belting her heart out with a childlike vibrato, had I hungered so deeply for information about a star. I pored over Flack’s Instagram, over dailymail.co.uk images of her pink-doored flat (I’m not proud of this), and histories of her love interests (most of whom were only figures of note to me because they had been pictured holding her hand outside a nightclub). I read her deceptively sunny memoir, Storm In A C Cup, and took comfort in her durable, bounce-back brand of vulnerability. Her quotes about heartbreak (“I feel at my most calm, in control and happiest when I’m single, so at the minute that’s what I’m doing”) reassured me, yet still I cheered “Good for her!” when she was pictured on the beach in Ibiza with her latest athlete beau. Despite being on fairly intimate terms with the mechanics of celebrity, I felt sure we were connected. Caroline would like me. She would get it. I got her. I am clearly far from the only person who felt this way, which is why her every move, hairstyle and misstep were clocked and noted by the country at large.
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