Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker Read online

  Also by Kathleen Hale

  No One Else Can Have You

  Nothing Bad Is Going to Happen

  KATHLEEN

  HALE

  IS A

  CRAZY

  STALKER

  SIX ESSAYS

  Kathleen Hale

  Copyright © 2019 by Kathleen Hale

  Cover art work © Ilbusca/Getty

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  The pieces in this collection were all previously published and have been updated and edited for this book publication. Names were changed, including in original publications, to protect identities.

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  This title was set in 11 point Berling LT

  by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: June 2019

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2909-3

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4691-5

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my daughter.

  May your mistakes feel like adventures.

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Kathleen Hale

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Catfish

  Prey

  I Hunted Feral Hogs as a Favor to the World

  Cricket

  Snowflake

  First I Got Pregnant.

  Then I Decided to Kill the Mountain Lion.

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover

  Catfish

  In the months before my first novel came out, I was a charmless lunatic—the type that other lunatics cross the street to avoid. I fidgeted and talked to myself, rewriting out loud passages of a book that had already gone to print. I remember when my editor handed me the final copy: I held the book in my hands for a second before grabbing a pen and scribbling edits in the margins.

  “No,” she said firmly, taking the pen away. “Kathleen, you understand we can’t make any more changes, right?”

  “I was JK,” I lied.

  Anxious and inexperienced, I began checking Goodreads, a social reviewing site now owned by Amazon. My publisher, HarperTeen, had sent advance copies of my young adult novel to bloggers and I wanted to see what they thought. Other authors warned me not to do this, but I didn’t listen. Soon, my daily visits tallied somewhere between “slightly more than is attractive to admit here” and infinity.

  For the most part, I found Goodreaders were awarding my novel one star or five stars, with nothing in between. “Well, it’s a weird book,” I reminded myself. “It’s about a girl with PTSD teaming up with a veteran to solve her best friend’s grisly murder.” Mostly I was relieved they weren’t all one-star reviews.

  Prior to my book deal I wasn’t on social media. Picking a photo or something to say in front of everyone made me nervous. But my editors urged me to build a “web presence.” There would be no book tour, no launch events, they explained. In lieu of a publicity budget, I’d gain access to an in-house social media team that consisted of two recent college graduates, who by virtue of their youth made everyone else look like dinosaurs and had been trusted to make things “go viral.” No one had yet determined the actual relationship between tweets and blog posts and book sales.* But we were willing to bet that likes and followers led to popularity or even a small brand of celebrity, which could be leveraged, we hoped—someday, somehow—for money.

  As my publication date loomed in the distance, the two young women on this media team encouraged me to tweet every day, to interact with every reader who tweeted at me, and to accept every interview request, even if it was from a blogger who had thirty-eight followers and described herself, in her official bio, as “loves to reed .” I was enlisted to host the media team at my house for several hours so they could make a video of me standing in various places, to write long posts that no one read about what it was like to write my book, and to do “giveaways” of signed books and other items that I’d paid for with my own money. The time and cash I spent trying to “promote my brand” cut into my actual writing schedule. But I’d been taught to think that public relations was part of my job as a modern writer, an otherwise solitary profession that had in no way prepared me to interact with other human beings, period, much less “network” with them. I don’t know how to talk to people—that’s why I write. But I was the dinosaur, a naïve one. I walked into the spotlight expecting applause.

  One night, while deleting and rewriting the same tweet over and over, a tiny avatar popped up on my screen. She was young, tanned, and beautiful, with dark hair and a bright smile. Her Twitter profile said she was a book blogger, tenth grade teacher, wife, and mother of two. From what I could tell she tweeted nonstop between six p.m. and midnight, usually about the TV show Gossip Girl. According to her bio, her name was Blythe Harris, and she’d written saying she had some ideas for my next book.

  “Cool, Blythe, thanks!” I replied. In an attempt to connect with readers, I’d been asking Twitter for ideas—“The weirdest thing you can think of!”—promising to try to incorporate them in the sequel.

  Eager to see if Blythe had read my book, I clicked through the daisy chain of her social media, from her Twitter to her blog to her Goodreads page, where I saw she had given my young adult novel a one-star rating. “Meh,” I thought. I scrolled down her review.

  “Fuck this,” it said. “I think this book is awfully written and offensive; its execution in regards to all aspects is horrible and honestly, nonexistent.” Blythe went on to warn other readers that I was a rape apologist and slut shamer. She said my book mocked everything from domestic abuse to PTSD. She’d only read the first chapter, she explained, but wished Goodreads allowed users to leave scores of zero, because that’s what my novel deserved. “I can say with utmost certainty that this is one of the worst books I’ve read this year,” she said, “maybe my life.”

  Other commenters joined the thread to say they’d been thinking of reading my book, but now wouldn’t. Or they said that they’d liked it, but could see where Blythe was coming from and would reduce their ratings.

  “Rape is brushed off as if it is nothing,” Blythe explained to one commenter. “PTSD is referred to insensitively; domestic abuse is the punch line of a joke, as is mental illness.”

  I shook my head, wondering how I could possibly be guilty of mocking mental illness, when I had it myself, and of all that bad rape stuff Blythe accused me of, when I’d been raped myself.

  “There isn’t rape in my book,” I told my fiancé.

  “Why did
you wake me up to tell me that?” he asked.

  I went back to my pillow and racked my brain, trying to see again where I had gone wrong. I wished I could magically transform all the copies being printed with a quick swish of my little red pen. “Not to make fun of my own PTSD or anything, because that would be wrong,” I might add to one character’s comment.

  At the bottom of the page, Goodreads had issued the following directive (if you were signed in as an author, it appeared after every bad review of a book you’d written): “We really, really (really!) don’t think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer. If you think this review is against our Review Guidelines, please flag it to bring it to our attention. Keep in mind that if this is a review of the book, even one including factual errors, we generally will not remove it.

  “If you still feel you must leave a comment, click ‘Accept and Continue’ below to proceed (but again, we don’t recommend it).”

  I would soon learn why.

  * * *

  After listening to me yammer on about the Goodreads review, my well-meaning mother sent me a link to a website called Stop The Goodreads Bullies. (“I don’t think you’re allowed to call it bullying unless kids are involved,” I said. But she encouraged me to check it out.) Blythe appeared on a page called Badly Behaving Goodreaders, an allusion to the term Badly Behaving Authors—or “BBA,” a popular acronym employed by Goodreaders to describe authors they didn’t like. (In the comment thread under Blythe’s review, “BBA” appeared several times.) When I emailed the cofounder of STGRB, Athena Parker, she told me that BBAs are “usually authors who [have] unknowingly broken some ‘rule.’” In my case, I’d become a BBA by writing a book containing “triggering” materials. Other authors had earned the title for tweeting their dislike of snarky reviews, or supporting other BBAs. Parker warned that once an author was labeled a BBA, the entire book-blogging community unofficially blacklisted his or her book. She also told me to stay far away from Blythe Harris. “Blythe was involved in an [online] attack on a fourteen-year-old girl back in May 2012,” Parker said. Apparently the teenager had written a glowing review of a book Blythe hated, obliquely referencing Blythe’s hatred for it: “Dear Haters,” the review read. “Everyone has his or her own personal opinion, but expressing that through profanity is not the answer.” (Blythe had cursed in her review.) In response, Blythe rallied her followers, and adults began flooding the girl’s thread, saying, among other things, “Fuck you.”

  It turned out that Parker and her cofounders were not the only ones to have run into trouble with Blythe and her followers. Over time, I would randomly meet a couple other authors who’d been attacked by either her or her followers. One had written a female protagonist into his young adult novel, Firecracker, and was subsequently hounded by a blogger, who called him a misogynist for even attempting to capture the female experience and wrote a scathing review of his book, the link for which she continued to tweet for years. When his wife (unbeknownst to him) sent the blogger a harmless email, asking her to please stop, she published the email on her blog, claiming that she’d been threatened and was now traumatized. An editor friend encouraged me to get in touch with other authors she knew who had been negatively reviewed by Blythe. Only one agreed to talk, under the condition of anonymity. She remained terrified that any more beef with Blythe might ruin her career. Like Parker, she considered Blythe dangerous.

  I’ll call her Patricia Winston.

  “You know Blythe, too?” I Gchatted her.

  She responded—“Omg”—and immediately took our conversation off the record.

  “DO NOT ENGAGE,” she implored me. “You’ll make yourself look bad, and she’ll ruin you.”

  * * *

  Writing for a living means working in an industry where one’s success or failure hinges on the subjective reactions of an audience. But, as Patricia implied, caring too much looks narcissistic. A stand-up comic can deal with a heckler in a crowded theater, but online etiquette prohibits writers from responding to negativity in any way.

  In the following weeks, Blythe’s vitriol continued to create a ripple effect: every time someone admitted to having liked my book on Twitter or Goodreads, they included a caveat that referenced her review. The ones who truly loathed it tweeted reviews at me. It got to the point where my mild-mannered mother (also checking on my book’s status) wanted to run a background check on Blythe. “Who are these people?” she asked. Then she accidentally followed Blythe on Twitter—“I didn’t know the button!” she yelled over the phone—and started getting cyberbullied herself, by Blythe’s small but fanatical army. (“Fine, I’ll get off the Twitter,” she said. “But I really don’t like these people.”)

  That same day, Blythe began tweeting in tandem with me, ridiculing everything I said. Confronting her would mean publicly acknowledging that I searched my name on Twitter, which is about as socially attractive as setting up a Google alert for your name (which I also did). So instead I ate a lot of candy and engaged in light stalking: I prowled Blythe’s Instagram and Twitter, read her reviews, considered photos of her elaborate baked goods, and watched from a distance as she got on her soapbox—at one point bragging she was the only person she knew who used her real name and profession online. As my fascination mounted, and my self-loathing deepened, I reminded myself that there were worse things than rabid bloggers (cancer, for instance) and that people suffered greater degradations than becoming writers. But still, I wanted to respond.

  Patricia warned me that this was exactly what Blythe was waiting for—and Athena Parker agreed: “[GR Bullies] actually bait authors online to get them to say something, anything, that can be taken out of context.” The next step, she said, was for them to begin the “career-destroying” phase.

  “Is this even real?” I Gchatted Patricia.

  “YES THERE IS A CAREER-DESTROYING PHASE. IT’S AWFUL. DO. NOT. ENGAGE. Omg did you put our convo back on the record?”

  She went invisible.

  I sighed, feeling lonely, and switched from Gmail to Google Scholar. Recent studies had dark things to say about abusive internet commenters—a University of Manitoba report suggested they shared traits with child molesters and serial killers. The more I wondered about Blythe, the more I was reminded of something Sarah Silverman said in an article for Entertainment Weekly: “A guy once just yelled, ‘ME!!’ in the middle of my set. It was amazing. This guy’s heckle actually directly equaled its heartbreaking subtext—‘me!!’” Silverman, an avid fan of Howard Stern, went on to describe a poignant moment she remembered from listening to his radio show: Stern was about to hang up on an asshole caller, when the caller blurted out, in a crazed, stuttering voice, “I exist!” I had a feeling the motivation behind heckling, or trolling, was similar to why most people do anything—why I write, for instance, or why I was starting to treat typing my name into search boxes like it was a job. Despite our differences it occurred to me Blythe and I had this much in common: we were both obsessed with being seen.

  I wanted to talk to Blythe—to convince her I was a real person with real feelings and that my book was really good—and my self-control was dwindling. One afternoon, good-naturedly drunk on bourbon and after watching Blythe tweet about her in-progress manuscript, I subtweeted that, while weird, derivative reviews could be irritating, it was a relief to remember that all bloggers were also aspiring authors.

  My notifications feed exploded. Bloggers who’d been nice to me were hurt. Those who already hated me now had an excuse to write long posts about what a bitch I was, making it clear that:

  1) Reviews are for readers, not authors.

  2) When authors engage with reviewers, it’s abusive behavior.

  “Sorry,” I pleaded on Twitter. “Didn’t mean all bloggers, just the ones who talk shit then tweet about their in-progress manuscripts.” I responded a few more times, digging myself deeper. For the rest of the afternoon, I tried to neutralize venom from teenagers and grown women alike. A few people st
ood up for me and were immediately attacked. So they deleted any mention of me, or switched sides and joined the hubbub to survive.

  Eventually I emailed an apology to a blogger who still liked me. After she posted it, people quieted on Twitter, and my inbox quit sagging with unread mail. But the one-star reviews continued, and this time they all called me a BBA. The career-destroying phase had begun, and I longed to meet with its commander and broker a peace treaty. I imagined myself sitting down with Blythe for drinks. Sure, there would be an initial moment of awkward silence. But then we would cry and admit to a deep-seated, mutual admiration, realizing with delight that underneath our acrimony had been a friendship waiting to happen. Then we would feast on her elaborate baked goods and laugh and laugh and laugh.

  Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a discrepancy in Blythe’s social media profiles; in one, she said she was an eighth grade teacher, but another said tenth grade. This didn’t seem all that strange to me—some of my teacher friends go from grade to grade—but in my eagerness to demystify this woman, I wanted to know the exact details of everything she did. So I typed her name into the internet.

  Although I’d read all the reviews she’d ever written on Goodreads, I had somehow never googled her, which was odd, given how many things I googled every single day. (One recent search inquired, “mcdonalds stop make pizza 90s why?”) But when I googled Blythe Harris, there was nothing to be found—which was weird, considering she was a high school staff member. It suddenly dawned on me that Blythe probably wasn’t her real name. So I dug a little deeper. I noticed she tweeted and uploaded blog posts during school hours. Admittedly, a lot of people I knew went on social media at work, but my teacher friends didn’t—they just didn’t have time. So was she maybe not a teacher, either?

  I clicked back to Blythe’s Instagram, scrolling through the hundreds of now-familiar photos, and realized, for the first time, that none of them included human beings. Other than her main profile picture, which was the same on every site, she posted pictures only of her baked goods, her home’s majestic interiors, a Pomeranian, and the packages of books she received from publishers like mine.