Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker

April 15, 2019
Journalist and erstwhile YA author Hale offers six previously published essays gathered in an apparent attempt to prove the collection's title. The title springs from events described in a 2014 Guardian piece called "Am I Being Catfished?" that made news in literary circles, when the author became so obsessed with a negative Goodreads review of her first YA book, No One Else Can Have You (2013), that she burrowed into the reviewer's online identity and physically tracked her down to confront her. Slightly reworked as "Catfish," that essay leads off this collection. In the others, Hale recounts a hunting trip to Okeechobee in which she "stabbed the shit out of" a female feral hog and a separate series of futile efforts to track down and kill a mountain lion in Hollywood's Griffith Park; one reporting trip to the Miss America pageant and another to Snowflake, Arizona, to profile a community of people suffering from "environmental illness"; and, most poignantly, the rape she endured at a sketchy massage parlor on the same day she moved into her freshman dorm at Harvard, an event that warped her college years and, by implication, perhaps her adult life. Hale weaves references to her own mental illness throughout the collection, describing how, after the publication of "Am I Being Catfished?" "I went bananas. I lost my mind," took a knife to her wrists, and spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. For all her seeming forthcomingness, however, the author rarely gives readers anything other than what feels like an intentionally curated sense of Kathleen Hale, crazy stalker. The essays don't work as well together thematically as she perhaps hopes they do, an effect intensified by her caginess as to the timeline of both events recounted and the essays' original publication dates. Readers may feel themselves responding as her college acquaintances did: "my problems and I were a burden. 'You're too much, ' they said. And they were right; I was impossible."

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June 1, 2019

These six essays from YA novelist Hale (Nothing Bad Is Going To Happen) have previously appeared in publications such as the Guardian, Hazlitt, and Elle. The title references an incident Hale wrote about in 2014 after she was "catfished" by a Goodreads reviewer who criticized her novel. Hale went to the reviewer's house and contacted her by phone after discovering her fake persona. The online backlash against her (#HaleNo) was swift and severe. This article is reprinted here and discusses Hale's obsession with this woman whom she admitted to stalking. Hale writes with an open and engaging style. Many of the pieces in this collection (including the catfishing entry) have been revised and lengthened since their original release and examine an array of topics, including hunting feral pigs in Florida, the Miss America Pageant, individuals who suffer from environmental illness, and fierce maternal protectiveness that drove the author to pursue a mountain lion while pregnant. The most powerful essay describes Hale's sexual assault while a first-year college student and the two trials in which she testified against her attacker. VERDICT Recommended for readers interested in creative nonfiction, especially the essay genre.--Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA

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