Some autobiographical writers can get by on voice alone. Others may get away with unspectacular prose if they have scintillating content. Then there's Kathleen Hale: each piece in her six-essay collection Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker succeeds as both a paragon of writerly execution and a crackerjack story.
In "Catfish," which has sparked considerable controversy since it ran in the Guardian in 2014, Hale goes in search of the true identity of a blogger who has been writing vicious things about her young adult novel. It's an episode that she regrets as "a sort of personal rock bottom" and that precipitated her stay at a psychiatric facility. In "Prey," she recalls her sexual assault by a man she was led to believe was her masseur and describes her role in his subsequent trial. There are several forays into immersion journalism. For one: in "Snowflake," Hale, as the houseguest of a woman in Snowflake, Ariz., who is suffering from what's known as environmental illness, must go fragrance-free and otherwise observe the "local logic" of a beset community.
Linking these disparate pieces are a steady stream of self-criticism, a fixation on animal nature and a preoccupation with ethics, including journalistic ("I wasn't convinced that our chemical odors would kill Snowflake's residents. But our narrative about them might"). Regarding ethics: Hale does things in these essays that the reader may not like--"Catfish" in particular may unnerve some. However, it's hard to be mad at a person who seems so mad at herself. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer