Kathleen Hale is a crazy stalker Six essays

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

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." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

"You my ten o'clock?" a man in jeans called to us. He was standing under a metal lean-to, surrounded by meat hooks, wiping off his hands. I wouldn't call him a handsome man. His skin looked like beef jerky, but he seemed healthy. I felt safe around him, like he would save me if a hog got its horns into my stomach, even though later he would have me sign a liability waiver that made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that I could die and that was my business. "Is Big Mama here?" I asked. I had spoken to Big Mama on the phone a few days prior about appropriate hunting gear. "Wear anything except booty shorts. It's Florida, so the bugs get in," she said. She kept calling me "honey child" and asking me to speak up because she was deaf from "all the crossbows." I didn't yet understand the crossbow reference. But I liked Big Mama. "Big Mama's not here," the guy said, shaking his head. The look on his face suggested that Big Mama might be dead. "But I'm Joe." Joe led us to a locker full of guns and asked which ones we wanted. McKetta explained that she wouldn't be hunting, just watching, because she was a vegan. "What's 'vegan'?" asked Joe. McKetta spent a while explaining the dietary restrictions she ascribed to, then told us that if we needed her she'd be taking pictures of the alligator heads scattered on the ground. Before she walked away, Joe had her sign another waiver. I was starting to feel nervous. "How many waivers are there?" "Enough so it's not my fault." I stared at the guns. "Can I talk to you about some feelings I'm having?" I asked. I proceeded to explain to a now very confused Joe that in addition to concerns for my own safety, hog-wise, I worried that if I took off into the Floridian jungle with a gun, I might accidentally shoot myself in the face or kill McKetta. I explained that I wasn't exactly what you might call "graceful," or "athletic," or "coordinated," and had fallen over just that morning while putting on my denim overalls--and that falling over while putting on clothes was actually something I did pretty often. Joe handed me a handgun, and I handed it back. So he suggested a crossbow, and I was like, "Are there any laws in Florida?" and Joe was like, "Not really, that's why pedophiles go to live in the panhandle after they're finished up with prison," and I was like, "Whoa." Joe became exasperated. "Are you going to kill or not?" I sighed. "I do want to kill, Joe, really I do." "Well, then pick a weapon!" I racked my brain for other armaments, ones that would not have a chance of fatal ballistic error, but could think only of cartoonish weaponry, like swords and war hammers. "Would a knife be too crazy?" I whispered. Excerpted from Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker by Kathleen Hale All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.