In case you’ve been under a rock this past week, here’s a rundown of something that has people on twitter buzzing: On Friday, YA author Kathleen Hale published an article via The Guardian, entitled Am I Being Catfished (spoiler alert: no). Here is the article via a channel that won’t provide hits to the article itself: donotlink/framed?565129 In the article, Kathleen opens by saying that she received a negative review from a goodreads blogger. In case you’re pretty committed to life under that rock, negative reviews are pretty standard in an author’s career. Think of it as the first time a toddler faceplants. It sucks, we cringe, the kid gets back up and still has a reasonably good life. The review was really more of a series of status updates as the reviewer read and reacted in real time. What was said in those updates is of little importance. All you really need to know is that the review was completely about the work itself, was presented as 100% opinion, and did not make comment about the author or the author’s life in any way. In other words, a standard 1-star review. The book community is a social one. When we love books, when we dislike books, when we cannot finish books, we talk about them. Readers, writers, and reviewers exist in a self-contained bubble of like-mindedness, and strive to create a safe place to share what we all have in common: books. So naturally, this goodreads reviewer shared her 1-star opinion with her friends. Let me emphasize again that the opinion was strictly about the book and had nothing to do with the author on a personal level. Except Kathleen Hale did take it personally. So personally, in fact, that she spent months analyzing the situation. She closely monitored this reviewer’s instagram, facebook, and twitter, in addition to her other reviews. While this reviewer had presumably put this book out of her mind and gone on with her life, Kathleen google image searched her photos, and perused her facebook friends, and analyzed the photos of this blogger’s house. When an opportunity to provide review books arose, Kathleen Hale found a way to acquire the reviewer’s address under the false pretense of sending signed books for reviews and giveaways. What she really did was rented a car and drove to the reviewer’s house. After that, she calls the reviewer at work, pretending to be taking a census type survey, in another attempt to gain information about this reviewer’s private life. In her very lengthy Guardian article, Kathleen Hale justifies her behavior by insisting that the reviewer blogged under a pseudonym. In the online community, this is pretty standard, and it’s because of people like Kathleen Hale that many people lie about their real identities. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, much of the reviewer’s online persona appeared to be false, and so Kathleen used this as a platform to justify her obsession, putting on a sleuth hat when in fact all of this was a simple case of an author driving to a reviewer’s house for no reason at all other than that she didn’t like the review left for her. She drove to her house. She called her at work. Multiple times. And then, at the end of all this, she posted a very detailed account of this horror show for The Guardian, with a cute title image and many giggles and winks to her neurotic quirks. The reviewer, for her part, had merely posted a review of a book. In the days that followed the article, I have seen plenty of people hoisting Kathleen Hale on their shoulders as a sort of vigilante against cyber bullying. All of these people are presumably pasting their own personal bullies’ faces over the blogger’s, and seem to have lost focus of reality, which is that the blogger merely expressed an opinion. The blogger was one person, on the internet, reviewing a book she did not like. In an earlier post by Kathleen Hale, she blogs about her own mother allegedly molesting a child. Kathleen’s reaction was to follow that child into a movie theater, call her fat, dump peroxide on her head, and run away laughing. Her mother, over several glasses of wine, thanked her for this. Kathleen then spent several years stalking this child online. But I really can’t do the article justice. You can read Kathleen’s own blog about the event here: thoughtcatalog/kathleen-hale/2013/02/169836/ She seems proud of this action to this day, calling it revenge. This is the person you’re enabling with your praise. This is the person you’re hailing as a hero. And whether you review books or not, you have undoubtedly, at one point or another, shared an opinion on the internet. Maybe you don’t review books. Maybe you talk politics. Maybe you hate Taylor’s newest song. Maybe you’re just really fricking sick of Someone Like You. And for every one thing you dislike, there are thousands, if not millions, of people on that same social media outlet who like it. This blogger disliked a review and said as much in a benign way to her friends on a site designed for sharing opinions about books. The author showed up to her house. People clapped. Tomorrow, you’ll dislike a song, or the finale of a TV show, and you’ll say as much. What will happen to you then? Kathleen Hale is not the only Kathleen Hale out there. There are thousands of them. Millions. Unstable, predatory people who take it just too far, who spend months fixated on a stranger who exists to them only in photos or status updates. It cannot be predicted what will set these types of people off, but if we expect to be safe ourselves, we need to stand up for the opinions of others as if they are our own. Because if one opinion is unsafe, if one person “deserved it” then we all do, because we have more in common with that reviewer than we do with the person who showed up at her house. Think of that the next time you click “post.”
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 21:49:29 +0000
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