I ACTUALLY READ THE BOOK!
In case you’re curious to read a review by someone who actually read it and knows what is contained within (and what the quality of those contents is), I’m your guy. Most other reviews here seem based on “Hell No!” rather than looking at the material.
Deciding to pass on a book is totally valid, but I’m not sure I feel the same way about one-starring a book that you’ve never read.
People, we don’t need to all notify each other that we’re NOT doing something that we find distasteful. When a flat-Earther convention is happening in town, I don’t need to tell everyone that I’m not going, just in case someone was worried that I was. When a public figure says something stupid and abhorrent online, I don’t need to raise my hand and say, “Just so you know, I disagree.” Go ahead and just assume that I’m not an idiot badguy. Likewise, there are like a billion books on Goodreads. It’s a mathematically safe assumption that any individual is not reading any random book on Goodreads at any given time, let alone one they might have good reason to avoid. Before we even get into the weirdness of this book, just based on pure math, I would assume that nobody is reading this book at any given time.
But hey, there’s plenty of time for me to lose friends online with this review without telling you how to live your life, so let’s get into it.
THE BOOK
This is a solid book of essays. My feelings on the events come in a bit, but if you’re looking for an essayist with a young perspective, writing flair, and voice-y style, Kathleen Hale is your lady. I can’t sully her good name based on writing merit. If you’re a person who subscribes to “trust the art, not the artist,” there’s a lot of good to find in this book. There’s an essay on rape and consent that’s really quite good and should be getting more attention than it is.
The essays vary, Hale keeps it short and sweet, and the writing feels like it comes from an original voice that I wouldn’t mind hearing more of. In every essay she’s in a situation that I will never find myself in (pregnant, visiting a community for people with poorly defined environmental allergies), and she does a great job as a storyteller helping me understand the emotions and situations.
Clarity is one of my most-valued qualities in writing. Making clear a situation involving emotions and actions that Hale herself doesn’t fully understand isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and I think she manages to do it across the board here.
I liked it. Not totally my wheelhouse, but she’s a good writer, the subjects are interesting, and I was entertained while I read. That checks the boxes for me.
THE CONTROVERSY
If you’re wondering what the hell everyone is talking about and why this book is titled the way it is, Kathleen Hale “stalked” a Goodreads reviewer who gave her a poor review on a previous book, going so far as to show up on the reviewer’s doorstep. Which is why everyone on GR is in a tizzy about this book’s very existence.
The controversial essay itself is pretty damn interesting, and it presents a story that’s different from the one I’d heard a couple years ago. Because I assume most people aren’t going to take the time to read it, I’ll highlight some of the stuff I didn’t know about. Keep in mind, this is all based Hale’s version of events, not a heavily researched dive I did into the case as part of a true crime podcast I’m starting that explores crimes that might not actually be crimes. I think we’ll last 3 episodes.
While the reviewer, Blythe, was presented as a victim of an insane author who was enraged about a book review, this isn’t exactly how it played out. According to Hale’s account, “Blythe” was catfishing in a non-romantic context, was well-known amongst authors for blackballing different books/writers, was putting up a completely false face (which isn’t a problem in itself, but she was claiming that she was very transparent and authentic while being the opposite), and may or may not have been engaging in some light identity theft (claiming someone else’s physical images, but not their social security number or money). The bad review prompted Hale’s interest, but it was only the opening to an internet rabbit hole that led her to a sort of Goodreads mafia of people who were a lot like Blythe. According to Hale, these are not just her opinions, and her thoughts and theories were confirmed by other authors and by social media people from publishing houses who warned her off of interacting with Blythe in any way.
The review itself was, again, according to Hale, objectively incorrect and based on only the first chapter of her book. It also attacked Hale, as a person, calling her a rape apologist and slut shamer. Not Hale’s book, Hale.
I’m not here to blame the victim (Blythe). If you reviewed a book poorly, even savagely, and an author showed up on your doorstep, you’d be right to be extremely upset. I recognize there’s a line here. However, using your internet clout to ruin authors’ careers and attacking their character starts you scooting out of the realm of hapless victim, a simple reviewer of literature. It’s disingenuous to say Hale’s action is the result of simply getting a bad review.
I’m walking a line here, and I know it. But hear me for a second: If someone gets a poor performance review at work, that’s a tough thing. I’d say that’s the equivalent of getting a bad review of your book. If someone finds out that there is a group of individuals who are conspiring to get them fired (for totally subjective reasons), that’s a different level, and I think that those individuals play a role in subsequent events. While I don’t think it’s a good idea for the person being conspired against to show up at anyone’s house, it would be lying for the person who answered the door to say that this person was acting in a completely unreasonable fashion. Disproportionate? Yes. Stupid? Yes. Completely out of nowhere, without provocation, I barely know the guy? Well, no.
As far as the visit itself, you should know this comes after multiple attempts to talk to Blythe online. Hale, when she was offered an interview where she could pick her interviewer, tried to get Blythe to interview her. She tried to call her. These are weird things to do, totally, but something missing from the story as it was originally told is the escalation, which gives important context.
Quick aside for anyone who thinks context doesn’t matter: Woman A killed her loving, doting husband because she wanted to collect life insurance money, Woman B killed her husband in self-defense after a long marriage that involved some serious physical abuse. No difference?
The essay itself is more focused on Hale hitting a personally-identified rock bottom, and of how cyberbullying (for lack of a better term) plays out in the world of adults. I don’t remember these other parts before, but after the stalking, Hale made a pretty serious suicide attempt, sawing at her wrists with a knife, and wound up in an institution of some sort. I include these details because I think it’s important to note that Hale doesn’t seem to be defending herself or saying that what she did was justified. The essay, in my opinion, is not a defense of herself or an attack on Blythe. It’s an essay about the worst thing Hale ever did. If someone made an anthology based on the theme of “This is the worst thing I ever did,” I’d be interested.
Now I’m going to defend Kathleen Hale. Just a little bit. She didn’t defend herself, possibly because she didn’t want to, possibly because it’s not a good look. But I’m not involved, so I’ll make a case.
Let’s start with the concept of Hale being rewarded with a book contract for stalking a reviewer.
I think she’s being rewarded for creating a piece of art, which is based on something she did. Which is a very common thing in art. Hunter S. Thompson made a career of writing about terrible shit. Most war memoirs involve some heinous stuff. Not everyone is interested in reading about these experiences, and that’s cool, but I am definitely interested, and I don’t really care about narratives that present the narrator as perfect out-of-the-box. I read this as a very complicated situation, and people that find themselves in complicated situations act in complicated ways. The story of a writer who ignores bad reviews isn’t a story. It’s not interesting. Stories of people behaving morally can be inspiring, but they’re not the only kind of story, and I would hate to see only those stories exist in the world. If narratives don’t include true transgressions and bad decisions and actions, every person who has done something bad (or, everyone) has no narrative to look towards.
People can never seek redemption if they’re condemned for confessing.
I also fail to see how it’s okay for Buzzfeed to profit from the story but not Hale. If this story can acceptably exist next to a quiz where you pick a type of cake and find out which Hogwarts house you belong in, or in a follow-up essay that (I counted) has about a dozen ads peppered throughout, it can also exist in a well-crafted longform essay, in a book of essays. Plus, I don’t know how much you all think writers get paid these days, but trust me, this book is not making Kathleen Hale a wealthy lady.
A lot of Blythe’s defenders will invoke a reviewer’s right to express their opinion, and I agree with that. However, you can’t defend one person’s right to their opinion and not someone else’s. The bad behavior is in showing up on Blythe’s doorstep. Writing an essay about it is, in my opinion, artistic expression based on an event that, though indefensible, is not a crime. I could be completely wrong about this, but I don’t think Hale showed up on Blythe’s doorstep to write an essay about it. You might feel differently, and that’s cool. After reading this book, I feel like the essay came after some pretty serious reflection, and it would be tough to convince me that Hale had this terrible saga with Blythe because she just needed some shit to write about.
By the way, if you’re disagreeing with all of this and enjoy True Crime, go ahead and fuck off. The very concept of True Crime is based around individuals who profit from the suffering of others.
There’s another aspect of this whole thing as well, which has to do with creating art and the intersection of online culture.
When you write, you’re basically told: Don’t read the reviews. Don’t read the tweets. Don’t.
At the same time, when you write, you HAVE to read the tweets and the reviews. Your publisher WILL all but force you to get a Goodreads profile, get on Twitter, get on Instagram. I’ve submitted to publishers who specifically ask about your current social media clout in your submission form, presumably because if you’ve got a good following, they can reasonably expect that you’ll make for a good return on their investment.
It’s a rock and a hard place from the get-go. You can’t just avoid it entirely (as a note, Hale wasn’t even using social media before her book came out), you’re supposed to interact with fans, be authentic, and sell. And you’re supposed to have the superpower possessed by exactly no one: Completely ignore the negative shit. If you interact with negative reviews, you’re seen as a loser with nothing better to do than…seeing what people thought of something you worked hard on. Caring about it.
You have to interact, but nobody has to interact with you. When someone leaves that flaming bag of dog shit review on your porch, you have no choice but to open the door and breathe in the fumes.
The closest I came to anything like this on Goodreads was this time I almost, ALMOST clicked “Like” on a 1-star review of a book of poems I wrote. Because my first instinct was that I wanted the person who put the 1 star to know that I saw it, know that there is a real person who made that and has feelings about it.
I clicked on this person’s profile. I looked at how other books were rated. I went that far and stopped.
Luckily, I made the smart decision and let it go. BUT, what you should know is that decision basically amounts to, “I decided to just internalize my feelings, not express them, and do the unhealthiest emotional thing that people always tell you not to do by pretending that someone who said they strongly disliked what I did never said it, it didn’t affect me, and I’ll just smile and bliss out.”
Let’s be honest, when you put a pic on Instagram, how often do you check back for likes? How often have you put something up and thought, “What the hell, how come so-and-so didn’t like it? What does that mean?” Have you ever crafted a killer tweet and been disappointed that nobody laughed?
Now, imagine you spent several years putting something together, only for someone to tell you how terrible it is, how terrible you are, and what a piece of shit you’ve made. Take the amount of time you put into throwing something up in Instagram, multiply the effort by a few years, add in the fact that a novel is much closer to your sore spot than an Instragram pic, and then think about how you’d feel not only with a lack of attention, but from yahoos weighing in with their negative attention.
And keep in mind, if you end up making a life via social media, a skillset involved is dealing with assholes online. Sort of like making a career in HR means you have to be able to fire people. If you make a living as an author, dealing with assholes online is not necessarily your skillset.
Authors are not authors because they are immune to criticism. We don’t take classes where someone teaches us how to be good at taking shit. We don’t get any special meditation lessons or mantras or anything like that. We don’t write books because we discovered we have no feelings about our work once it’s published.
Now, I’ll say that I’ve learned A LOT about taking criticism from workshopping. But that’s different. In a workshop, for the most part, you’re working with people who have your best interest in mind, who want to help you create the best version of your work. That’s really different from someone saying you’re a shithead because you wrote a novel they don’t like. There’s a difference between someone saying your character voice is inconsistent and someone leaving you an Amazon review that says, “if you are reading this comment, you are the most screwed up person ever… i cant beleive anyone would write such a useless piece of crap. i was looking to see if anyone preserved the nintendo power magazines… and this piece of excrement comes up. wts. screw the person who write this book… what the crap…” Real Amazon review of one of my books, by the way.
In a workshop, face to face, people learn that if they are assholes without reason, nobody will want to workshop with them next week. If you’ve been ghosted by your workshop, it’s probably because you acted more interested in writing a scathing review than you did in helping others with their work. Online, you can act however you want, and it doesn’t matter. Just move on to the next thing.
I don’t disagree with the idea that it requires some serious maturity to write books and open them up for criticism. That said, I don’t think that releasing a book excuses any and all behavior online. Authors putting their books in print and online means it’s open season? If they didn’t want to take shit, they wouldn’t publish? That stinks of “Well, if they didn’t want comments on their body, they wouldn’t dress that way.”
How to put this…
When I see a video online of a little kid teasing a cat, when the cat takes a swipe at the kid, I’m not devastated. There are better ways for kids to learn the lines with animals, I’m not rooting for the kid to lose an eye, but I think it’s a very natural part of life to experience something like this as a way of learning limits.
While I wouldn’t go to a reviewer’s house (obviously as I decided against even clicking the “like” on a 1-star review I got, I wouldn’t even go THAT far), there’s a part of me, and I recognize that this isn’t the most positive thing in the world, but there’s a part of me that isn’t so upset about the idea of someone bagging up the shit they were taking online and dumping that soggy bag on the sender’s doorstep. I don’t love the idea of someone showing up at someone else’s home, I don’t think this worked out well for anyone involved, but there is a part of me that doesn’t hate the idea that an author decided not to exist as a medium that absorbs criticism in a way that’s inhuman. That the author decided to assert the simple fact that she’s a real, human person, and if you want to go beyond criticizing her book and trash her career, I don’t know that the human person behind that career showing up and saying, “I exist, I’m real” is too great a consequence.
I say this as both someone who’s written books and someone who has written some harsh reviews.
It’s complicated. I don’t want reviewers to only say positive things because they’re scared. I don’t think people should disrupt each others’ expression. I do think it’s a very acceptable thing to negatively review a book, and I think it’s unacceptable to threaten someone for doing so.
And I think that’s what I really want to say about this book: It’s complicated. What happened is not as simple as this poor author was bullied online and reacted reasonably, and it’s not as simple as someone left a mildly negative review of a book and the author went Michael Myers on her. As with EVERYTHING, the story, as reported, is all fucked up. The reality is probably somewhere between the way it was reported and the way Kathleen Hale tells it. And I don’t know how you find the center without going to the poles and deciding for yourself.
That’s why I’d encourage people to read the essay. If you don’t want to “encourage bad behavior,” that’s cool. Pick up the book, read it, don’t buy it. Pick it up at your library, read it, and don’t actually check it out. Put it right back on the shelf. If you’re super opposed to supporting what you see as a negative, there are still ways you can avail yourself of the information and make your own choice. Don’t let Buzzfeed tell you what’s true, don’t let Goodreads reviewers tell you what’s true. Read and then decide.
I hope that telling Goodreads people to read and make their own decision isn’t offensive. If so, I don’t even know what the fuck is going on anymore.