Carla Jean Whitley

Novelist Laurie Frankel has a track record of writing stories that are sensitive and deeply felt. With her latest, This Is How It Always Is, she takes that to a new level. The story follows a family whose youngest child is born a boy, but in kindergarten becomes known instead as Poppy. It's a timely subject, but also one that hits close to home; Frankel's daughter is also a transgender child.

The novel will make readers think, and may challenge some preconceived notions about transgender people. BookPage spoke to Frankel about the process of writing a story that has some obvious parallels with her own.

As the mother of a transgender child, you had a deep personal connection to this novel. Why did you feel compelled to write it now?
Now is an exciting time to be talking about these issues because, for the first time in history, lots of transgender kids and adults are coming out to acceptance, understanding, and celebration from their loved ones and communities. Great strides have been made. Horizons have widened. More and more people around the world are starting to see gender as a broad and complex spectrum along which there are infinite wonderful possibilities. But now is also a critical time to be talking about these issues. Legislators all over the country are proposing bills to restrict and remove transgender people’s rights and indeed safety. They’re doing it with lies. They’re doing it with cruelty. They are making the world are meaner, harder, scarier, less fair, more dangerous place for all of us, trans and otherwise. So part of the reason to write this book right now is to spread the love, spread the understanding, spread the truth and combat the other stuff.

Why did you choose to fictionalize your experience rather than writing a memoir?
Well, the easy answer is I am a novelist, not a memoirist. I love fiction. I believe in fiction. And I also believe fiction is truer than memoir. Just because it didn’t actually happen doesn’t make it less true. Fiction allows you to tell the stories that should happen, with the perfect arrangement of events and characters and relationships, rather than the imperfect ones that actually do happen. It’s also true that I am keen to protect my kid’s privacy. And frankly, thankfully, our own story is pretty boring and plot-free—great for living, poor for book-writing, so I got to make it up instead. Transgender identity can be a difficult concept for some people to grasp.

What is one thing you wish people understood about children like Poppy?
Actually, I wish people understood that children who aren’t like Poppy are in fact just like Poppy. All kids are average in some ways and outliers in others. All kids conform sometimes and struggle others. All kids face challenges and change unpredictably and grow in directions other than the ones their parents imagined. And all should be loved and honored and celebrated for who they are. This is how it always is. Over the course of the novel, Poppy grows to be older than your own daughter and faces medical questions regarding puberty.

All kids face challenges and change unpredictably and grow in directions other than the ones their parents imagined. This is how it always is.

How did you research the medical implications of the story?
My friend Carol Cassella is a great novelist and also a great doctor, and she helped me with the medical stuff for this book, though mostly I needed her assistance with the hospital scenes because the mom in the book is an emergency room physician (and I am very much not). The medical questions for transgender kids are important and complex but fairly comprehensible for a layperson. I read books. I read studies. I went to conferences and consulted experts. I met a lot of people. I asked a lot of questions. I listened. There’s a lot of information available now. I took in as much as possible.

I'm always curious about process. Did writing a book so close to home come quickly or was it more challenging? This book wrote pretty smoothly. Who knows why? Some books come easy; some come hard. It didn’t feel so close to home while I was writing it because in my head it’s so made up. The family in the book looks nothing like mine. Poppy is really nothing like my kid. From the outside, they seem so close. But because I know them both so well—and because for one of them I consciously made up every single thing—they don’t seem alike to me at all. As you say, for most of the book, Poppy’s older than my child, so writing her was very much an act of imagination.

Sibling dynamics are an important part of the novel, with the four brothers reacting in different ways to decisions their parents make regarding Poppy. And of course, those dynamics can be an important part of our life stories. You're the mother of one child. Do you have siblings yourself? Did your experience growing up with them inform this part of the story?
I have one sister. We were nothing like the horde of boys in this novel. The large family was part of the original idea for this book though. Lots of the details come later in the process, but that wasn’t one of them; that one was in the seed of the thing. For a while, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted them to be boys or girls, but I knew I wanted five siblings from the get-go, even though I also knew it would be hard to fully develop all those characters (and it was). So many siblings allowed me to explore how growing up is tough for everyone—in different ways but no matter what. All kids surprise you, need accommodation sometimes, love and understanding always.

The idea of finding community and sharing answers and questions and secrets and stories is the reason I write books.

The notion of finding community and answers by sharing our secrets is powerful. Did that come to you in the process of writing, or was that idea what set you on this path?
The idea of finding community and sharing answers and questions and secrets and stories is the reason I write books. It’s also the reason I read them (and I do so voraciously). There has maybe never been a more important time to find commonalities with one another, to read lives and perspectives which are different from our own, to seek strength in our communities, to share our stories. Those are the ideas that set me not just on this path but on all my paths.

What are you working on next? I’m at work on a new novel, which I’m not talking about yet I’m afraid (writers are superstitious like that), and making plans for the one after that. I’m also writing lots of essays around This Is How It Always Is to answer some of the very important, very timely questions like the sort you pose (and thank you so much for doing so). I think for the most part people’s curiosity about this topic comes from a place of love and recognition so I am eager to answer questions, share stories and talk about how great these kids are. So thanks for asking!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of This Is How It Always Is.

Arts & Culture, Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature Arts & Culture

Anne Boyd Rioux

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

by Carla Jean Whitley

In the loving and extensively researched Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux explores the history and enduring power of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women on the 150th anniversary of its publication. In a Q&A with Rioux, we asked her about her own relationship with Alcott’s novel, the March sisters and other female authors of the era.

You first read Little Women in your 20s. What led you to the book at this time? How did it affect you upon first reading?
I first read Little Women in graduate school. It was assigned in a course on American literary realism as a kind of companion piece to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It meant a lot to me then to read about Jo’s literary ambitions and her conviction, as she says at the end of the book, that she believes she will write better books one day for her experiences as a wife and mother. When my daughter was born about 10 years later, I gave her the middle name Josephine, so obviously it really stayed with me.

When and why did Little Women become a subject of scholarship?
It was largely ignored by academics, who were mostly male, until feminist critics began to establish themselves in the 1970s. The first truly scholarly examination was in 1975 in Patricia Meyer Spacks’ The Female Imagination. Then Judith Fetterley’s essay “Little Women: Alcott’s Civil War,” published in the journal Feminist Studies in 1979, really showed what could be done in an extended analysis that applied the new tools of feminist criticism to Alcott’s novel. Ever since, the novel has proven to be a rich text for scholars using a wide variety of approaches, including Marxist criticism, cultural studies and queer theory.

Which March sister do you find the most relatable?
Jo always meant the most to me. Her ambitions made her the kind of foremother I needed—someone who had grappled in the mid-19th century with the same things I was still grappling with in the late-20th century.

Why isn’t Little Women included on more teachers’ syllabi?
To put it quite simply, because it’s viewed as a book for girls. There is no room in today’s classrooms, (as far as I can tell from national surveys, what teachers across the county have told me, and my own knowledge about schools in my area) for books about girls—unless they focus on other issues such as civil rights or the Holocaust, as is the case with To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank. Teachers feel as if they have to teach books about boys because they believe boys won’t read about girls, but girls don’t mind reading about boys. As one school librarian told me, there is a lot of concern with making sure that students read books from the perspective of other cultures, races, socioeconomic backgrounds, etc., but no one appears to be concerned that boys aren’t reading books about the other half of the population. As I talk about in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, there is plenty of evidence that boys can and will read Little Women and other books about girls if we help them overcome the stigma attached to all things female and feminine. And that is a larger project that will benefit boys and girls.

How have you seen your own students impacted as they study the novel at a collegiate level?
I’ve seen a range of responses. Initially, they are dismayed at its length (nearly 500 pages), and some wonder why we were reading a children’s book (until I remind them that Huck Finn is a children’s book, and it’s often taught in college literature courses). But once we start reading Little Women, they grow attached to the March sisters and Laurie and find themselves quite invested in the choices they are making as they mature. They realize that the book is dealing with some of the same life choices they are also facing, so it isn’t the children’s book they were expecting. Although I did have one male student who obviously refused to even buy the book, I’ve also found that many of the men are as affected by it as the female students. One man came into class very upset the day we read the part where Jo turns down Laurie. Another wrote in his final response that even though he was a 30-year-old man, he was so glad to have read the book and was sorry it was over.

In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, you write about literary heroines who have followed in Jo March’s path. Is there one character in this tradition whom you find the most appealing?
Rory Gilmore, from the television series Gilmore Girls, is particularly interesting because we see her grow and develop over the course of about seven years. The summer my daughter spent binge-watching the series on Netflix, I realized that Rory was to her what Jo March has been for generations—she was a touchstone, a girl whose personality, experiences and life choices my daughter could identify with, measure herself against and learn from. And Rory’s choices aren’t always what we’d want them to be, just as Jo’s weren’t. But it’s the way that girls and young women see themselves reflected in these characters and how they judge and compare themselves to them that really interests me.

You’ve written extensively about Alcott’s contemporaries, including Constance Fenimore Woolson. Who are other female writers of the era you believe merit more recognition?
There are many, but I will mention particularly Fanny Fern, Elizabeth Stoddard, Sui Sin Far and Zitkala-Sa. And when we examine the writings of women from these earlier eras, we need to be able to evaluate them on their own terms as well as ours. Looking back and expecting women writers to conform to our contemporary ideas of what makes great writing is not going to help us understand the paths that earlier women writers have forged. Each of these writers is available in print with introductions or essays that can help put them into the context in which they lived and wrote. I highly recommend them!

Why do you believe it’s valuable to tell the stories of these 19th-century female writers?
In addition to the fact that if we forget the past we are in danger of repeating it, I’m also concerned that so many women writers today seem to feel, as Virginia Woolf did in the 1920s, that there isn’t much of a tradition behind them. Or they might not want to think of themselves as belonging to a separate tradition of female writers. But it’s important to recognize that they aren’t the first women writers to feel that way and to struggle to belong to an American literary tradition. There have been many who’ve been there before and whose legacies have been forgotten, ignored or suppressed. I see women writers today struggling with many of the same issues that early women writers did: wondering if they can combine their lives as writers with motherhood, trying to assert their value as writers and not only as women writers, pushing against male critics’ expectations, and resenting the bias they feel directed toward them as women writers. How can we move beyond these issues if we don’t recognize how long-standing they are and continually repress them as each new generation of women writers is largely forgotten?

What’s next for you?
I’ve actually become very interested in a forgotten woman writer from the 20th century: Kay Boyle. I have the same feeling when I read her stories as I did about Constance Fenimore Woolson’s—namely, why don’t I know her, why is she not read today, and what can I do about it? For now, I’d like to help get more of her incredible stories into print. She wrote about the rise of fascism in Europe, the German occupation of France and the aftermath of World War II in Germany. Her stories make you feel as if you are right there living the experience with her. I’ve never read anything like them.

Author photo by Jennifer Zdon.

In the loving and extensively researched Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux explores the history and enduring power of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women on the 150th anniversary of its publication. In a Q&A with Rioux, we asked her about her own relationship with Alcott’s novel, the March sisters and other female authors of the era.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Popular Fiction

Fiction Popular Fiction Debut Fiction

Hank Green

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

by Carla Jean Whitley

If you’re into YouTube, Hank Green is already a familiar name. He’s co-CEO of Complexly, the video production company behind more than a dozen popular YouTube shows, including Crash Course. He’s co-founder of VidCon, the online video conference that drew 40,000 attendees in 2017. He’s one half of the VlogBrothers, whose YouTube channel has more than 3 million subscribers.

He shares those titles with his older brother, John. If you’re not into YouTube, you’re likely familiar with Hank’s big brother’s bestselling young adult novels, including The Fault in Our Stars. Hank Green’s background has ensured his debut novel is eagerly anticipated, and An Absolutely Remarkable Things delivers on its promise.

You’re well-established in the world of online creativity. Why did you choose to move to the written word, and why now?
There are some ideas that don’t fit into a four-minute video or a tweet or a blog post, and I had a story to tell that couldn’t fit into any of the other media I was working in.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing explores many complex issues, including how the internet and fame can affect our sense of identity. How have you grappled with that over the years?
Well, one big way was writing a whole book about it. I worked through a lot of issues while writing this, and the fact that I was able to spend so much time focused on that problem was really helpful for me. But yes, I have been grappling with fame and power and identity for a long time. The worst part is when you don’t realize your influence, and you end up making a situation worse or hurting people’s feelings. For me, the process has been about a lot of introspection and compassion and talking with people who care about me.

You live in the rather remote state of Montana. Does life in a small city help you balance your internet visibility?
It’s not really about visibility—there are plenty of people who recognize me in Missoula, maybe more than the average place because it’s a college town. I don’t live in Montana for any particular reason, it’s just home. All of my friends are here!

Your work combines creativity and education, but that’s not overt in your novel. How did your process differ here?
Interesting question! For me, this is all about trying to convey complicated ideas efficiently. That might be a character’s emotional state during a fight with a friend; it might be photosynthesis. It’s all about getting into the head of the person who is reading (or watching) the book (or video). People are complicated, and the predicaments these characters are in are complicated. In many ways, telling this story was a more difficult puzzle than teaching someone physiology.

The world looks to April May for guidance during a confusing time. Did you internalize any lessons from your main character?
Oh yes. April and I struggle with a lot of the same things, including our need for attention and approval as well as our addiction to internet outrage. I don’t think we’re alone there. But the moments in which April makes better decisions, or even simply recognizes that she has a problem, were very helpful for me.

Did you fully immerse yourself in writing the book, or did you have to work it around your other obligations? What was that balance like?
This book took me around four years to write, and it was never the only thing on my plate. I’m very good at focusing for one- to two-hour periods, but after that I have to shift my attention. Luckily, I have lots to do!

Do you have another book in the works?
I sure do. I hope a lot of people will want more from this story, but I already know my wife does, so a sequel is in the works!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.

Author photo credit Ashe Walker

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Nicole Chung

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

by Carla Jean Whitley

In her memoir, All You Can Ever Know, Nicole Chung, who was adopted as a baby by a couple in Oregon, explores how the truths that were revealed upon finding her birth parents changed her life. Here Chung discusses growing up Asian-American in a white family, her writing and editing career and more.

What prompted you to turn your experience into a book, and why at this particular point in your life?
I’ve tried to answer people’s questions about adoption my whole life. My thoughts about it—and of course, the answers to which I’ve had access—have undergone some real change over the years. I’d tried to tell pieces of the story in essays, and it finally just became clear that only a book-length project was going to provide the space I needed to explore the whole story with all its nuances.

I really wanted to write this for families like mine and for younger readers who don’t see themselves in the books they adore. Ideally, reading this story will also encourage some people to reconsider issues around transracial adoption and identity and multiracial families and people who exist between cultures. I fervently hope this book helps make room for more adopted people to tell our stories, as opposed to others telling them for us.

As for why I wrote it now, I don’t believe I’d have been ready to write this 10 years ago, right after I searched for my birth family. I was writing about it at the time, of course, but mostly in journals and letters; it would be five years before I published anything at all about it. I could perhaps have written this book three or four years ago, when I first had the idea, but you know, it takes a while to find an agent and write a proposal and convince someone to let you write the book! And I’m glad it happened now. It’s probably a better book because I had a lot of time to think about it, and to fully consider and process what happened during my first pregnancy and my search, and see how the choices we all made at the time continued to play out in our lives.

As a child, you felt out of place in a predominantly white town, and you mention that you found solace in writing your own Asian-American characters. You are now frequently able to interview and write about people of color. Has being able to address race helped you develop as a writer?
Almost everything I write about has helped me develop as a writer! I do love talking with interesting people, learning more about their art and their work and why they do what they do. I love to interview people, and I love research; writing about other subjects and figuring out which questions to ask have certainly helped me grow as a writer. I hope I get to do a lot more of that in the future.

While All You Can Ever Know is respectful and considerate of all your family, uncovering the story of your adoption was clearly not an emotionally easy task. How has your family walked with you through the publishing process?
So much of the story belongs to my sister Cindy as well, so she was the first person I shared a draft with. I asked her to tell me if she wanted me to change or take anything out, but she didn’t, though she did help me by answering my annoying questions and correcting a few tiny things. She and my brother-in-law, Rick, are proud of the book, and have been so supportive throughout this process. I’ve also shared the book with my birth father, who is working his way through it more slowly: He’s fluent in English, but Korean is his first language, and I don’t think he reads a ton of memoirs in English. He encouraged me to write whatever I needed to write and said I could check facts with him and Cindy, but he didn’t feel it was his place to tell me what to say about my adoption.

My adoptive parents have been very supportive, and also just very interested in the whole publishing experience and what it involves. I sent them a draft right after I sent it to Cindy. My mother has read the book, and she really likes it. As I wrote about here, my adoptive father suddenly passed away while I was working on the book; he only got through about half of it before he died.

Do you feel that becoming a mother yourself gave you any greater understanding of your family, both adoptive and biological?
Becoming a mother certainly changed my understanding of myself, and encouraged me to reconsider what I thought I knew about my families—my family of origin, the one I grew up in and the one I was starting with my husband. I was thinking a lot about the kind of parent I wanted to be, the things I wanted my own children to have and to know. Before, I’d only been able to consider that in the most hypothetical sense!

Becoming a parent makes you question so much about yourself, I think, and that’s true whether or not you’re adopted. But in my case, because I am adopted, expecting a child of my own pushed me into asking questions about my history and my families that I hadn’t been 100 percent ready to ask before.

Your work at Catapult magazine helps elevate a variety of voices, and Catapult’s publishing arm released All You Can Ever Know. Will you share your perspective on the value of these sorts of independent outlets?
I am far from an expert in traditional publishing, as my background is really in the digital space—but I really do appreciate how indie publishers can and will take risks, often inspired ones, for books and authors they believe in. Many of them are starting with a diverse list of beautiful writers and making that their foundation. They are centering these writers and throwing everything they’ve got behind them. I don’t think Catapult ever saw my book as a risk, exactly—at least, no more so than any other book. They’ve told me all along it’s great, which I appreciate deeply because I am, like many writers, insecure about my work. I feel very lucky that they bought it before I went to work for the magazine, actually, because if I’d already been an employee I don’t think I’d have even sent it to Julie Buntin (my editor there).

We have so very few memoirs by adopted writers writing about adoption—the cultural narrative around it has really been dominated by nonadoptees—and so few by Asian-American women. And it’s really not always easy to convince someone to let you be one of the few or one of the first. But for Catapult, I think all of that was actually a selling point. Julie was the perfect editor for this book, and I’ve had the kind of institutional support many debut writers can only dream of.

As for my editorial work at the magazine, it’s a constant thrill to get to publish so many wonderful writers every single day. Before Catapult, I was at the Toast, and as a freelancer I’ve also had the privilege of writing for many outlets and publications, many of them independent. We publish a wide range of voices, some more established than others, but to be honest my favorite thing is working with emerging writers—being someone’s first byline.

How did your work at Catapult and other outlets, where you focus on shorter pieces, inform the process of writing your memoir?
Writing a lot makes you a better writer! I’ve been lucky to be edited often, and well, and that has taught me a great deal. Editing other writers on the daily has also made me a better writer—I can look at a piece of work (even my own) and identify things that are working and things that aren’t. I also know that even if I write a draft that isn’t super, I can tear it apart later and maybe turn it into something I don’t hate.

I was a little nervous about writing an entire book when my longest published essay was around, I don’t know, 4,000 words? And I knew I was writing a memoir with one continuous narrative arc, as opposed to a collection of essays. As an essayist and editor, though, I possess a bottomless well of faith in the writing/editorial process. And I trusted my editor entirely. That is probably what got me through.

You also write quite a bit about books, so I’ve got to ask: What are you reading?
I just finished The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, and I’m currently in the middle of way too many books, as usual: Sanpaku by Kate Gavino, The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya (translated by Asa Yoneda), A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton and The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo.

While this book is deeply personal, you also write about a range of other topics (some family-oriented, others not). What’s next on your radar?
I’m working on a few different projects, nothing I’m quite ready to go into detail about, but I hope to talk and collaborate with more great people and write more books. I’ve started a novel. I imagine I’ll keep doing my day job, because I really enjoy it! I would particularly like to help more of our magazine contributors think about and develop book-length projects if that is their goal. I also want to teach more, and I’ll keep freelancing whenever I get the chance.

In the more immediate short-term, when I get through book tour, I will probably be looking into the grief counseling I have not had any time or space for this year. And—it’s probably not going to happen!—but I think a month-long vacation would be lovely.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of All You Can Ever Know.

Author photo by Erica B. Tappis

Essays, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Essays

Pam Houston

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

by Carla Jean Whitley

Pam Houston takes readers to her Colorado ranch in her new memoir, Deep Creek.

How long did you spend working on this book? How does that compare to your others?
This book took longer than any other book I have written so far. Like every book, it started out fast, and during the first year, I thought, wow, I am going to knock this out in no time. And then I hit the wall I always hit around page 100, but it took me longer to get around the wall with this book. There are a few reasons for that. I had said to myself early on, I am not going to rely on all of my old tricks with this one. God knows what exactly I meant. God knows why I wanted to torture myself that way. I meant something about motion and quick changes. This book was about staying put, and none of my others have been. I kept saying I wanted to write deeply into the tall grass. This book is my most earnest book by far, in a career of fairly earnest books, and I was afraid that earnestness would bore people to death. Without the flash. Without the motion. It took every bit of six years to write. That is two years longer than pretty much all of the others.

Did this writing process change you?
Sure. Every book changes me. I told myself I wasn’t going to rely on my old tricks, so I learned some new ones. Or maybe I learned it was OK to be a little more generous with myself, with my thoughts and feelings. Maybe I completed another chapter in the lifelong lesson in how it is better to be kind than cool, less important to be smart than sincere.

What prompted you to begin this self-exploration?
My whole career has been about self-exploration. Every book. This particular self-exploration happened because Alane, my editor, suggested I go on a book-length adventure. She wanted a memoir from me for a change. Not autobiographical fiction. Not something in the middle, as Contents May Have Shifted was. I thought about an adventure. I have always wanted to sail the entire coast of Turkey. I have always wanted to complete a long journey on a dog sled. There were several options. Then one day I was driving home to the ranch after 10 weeks of teaching in California. The drive is 18 hours, and the dogs and I get so happy at hour three, when we get back over to the leashless side of the Sierras. We are elated to be coming home. I got halfway across Utah and thought, wait a minute. The ranch is my book-length adventure. My life-length adventure. This ranch. Sitting still. Becoming responsible for something over the long haul. So I proposed that to Alane, and she accepted.

Any public self-expression is a vulnerable act, but memoir seems especially so. How do you process this?
Telling the truth, the deepest truth, or as close as I can get to it, has always been my objective, whether the book is called fiction or nonfiction. I honestly don’t see any way to be a writer without being vulnerable, and without telling your most delicate and dangerous truths. I guess I just think of it as the price of admission, and when bad things happen because of it, when I get hurt or threatened or shamed, that is just part of that price. There are a lot of benefits to it, too. Like a really great job and sanity.

You’ve spent years living part-time on the ranch, part-time on the road, speaking and teaching. Does the split still feed both your desires for metropolitan amenities and connection to the land?
Yes. As much as I love the land—and I do—I still love an adventure. (I am writing to you from far eastern Uruguay right now, surrounded by Criollo horses, in the middle of a lightning storm.) I also like sushi and bookstores and mass transit. I imagine I will take some version of this split with me to the grave.

Have your neighbors in your small community read the book? How do you think they’ll feel about it?
I can’t speak for my neighbors. I have read the portions of it to those folks who figure in it directly, and they are OK with how they are portrayed. As for the others, a few of them will like it, and more of them won’t like it, and some of them will ask me, if the book is called “Deep Creek,” why is the dog on the front standing in an inch and a half of water.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Deep Creek.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Pam Houston takes readers to her Colorado ranch in her new memoir, Deep Creek.

Essays, Humor, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Humor Essays

Kathleen Hale

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

by Carla Jean Whitley

Kathleen Hale isn’t hiding from the controversy that inspired the title of her new essay collection, Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker. When she published her essay “Catfish” in The Guardian in 2014—about stalking a Goodreads reviewer who gave her book a one-star review and exposing the reviewer as someone using a false identity online—it inspired a wave of online criticism that led Hale to quit the internet for good. Now, with the release of her first book since those events, we asked her some questions about mental health, the “toxic hellscape” of the internet and how to keep writing when your every word is being scrutinized.

I noticed that the version of “Catfish” that appears in this book has a different ending than the version that originally appeared in The Guardian. This ending is more vulnerable; it gives more details about your stay in the psychiatric hospital following the essay’s blowback and delves into the ramifications for your mental health. Do you hope the new ending will give people a fuller view of the story? How do you hope they will respond?
The new ending is the linchpin to my essay’s original thesis, which is that the internet and in particular social media breed psychosis. I might have been an extreme case. But I feel like my case is on a continuum with what non-mentally ill people experience.

Four years removed from the essay’s original publication, how do you feel about it now? Has that changed at all over the years?
It’s more obvious now than it was in 2014 that the internet is a toxic hellscape. Since then we have literally elected an internet troll as our president, which says a lot about the power trolls wield on Twitter, and social media has ruined lots of lives. People born in the 2000s seem to have a healthy distrust of things like Facebook. I realize looking back at myself how unsophisticated and naive I was. I got sucked into the internet, and it made me go crazy.

Has this experience—and the critique that is resurfacing now, with this book’s publication—affected how you interact with social media and the internet as a whole?
Very much so. I’m no longer on social media. I don’t write for free. And I don’t read what other people write about me, which has made me saner and a lot more productive.

Has this experience affected your view of “cancel culture”? How so?
I was at a party the other day and someone asked, “Has anyone read XYZ?”—some article online that was apparently controversial. And the first thing people asked was, “No, what are people saying about it?” I find that fascinating: that the first question is not about the work itself but about its reception. That is a very post-Zuckerberg phenomenon.

Though “Catfish” is already generating a lot of attention, it’s not the only essay in which you're vulnerable. What motivates you to continue to reveal yourself in this way?
During the recession in the early 2000s, women’s personal essays were referred to as “confessional essays” and were some of the only things I could get paid to write. During that time I published a ton of essays that really embarrass me now, because they’re revealing to no end. But under more ideal circumstances, I try very hard to differentiate between “secrets” and “story,” and to only pick those “confessions” that drive the story forward.

My hope is that the six essays in this collection productively harness revelatory details. They have been revised since their original publications to knit together a story of insanity in my 20s, which is only a phase if you survive it, and my desire to seek out the external danger that mirrored my internal experience.

But the collection is also a swan song to my 20s, and to memoir writing in general, in the sense that I don’t think I’ll ever write about myself again, at least not like this. Six good essays over eight years simply isn’t good math. And ironically, it turns out that I’m a pretty private person. It’s a Catch-22: part of the creative process naturally involves sharing one’s work with other people. But I’m shy, so there’s also desire to hide, or remain pseudonymous, which is a right that is still enjoyed by trolls but no longer afforded to artists.

Do you have a response for those who question why someone who harassed a book reviewer should have the opportunity to continue publishing?
I think the essay shocked people in part because we like to think that what we do and say online has no repercussions for us whatsoever. But what if the owner of that restaurant we smeared on Yelp, under multiple user names, lowering its overall rating to, say, 2 out of 5, all because the hostess had a “bitchy” demeanor, showed up at our front door? Nobody wants that. That’s scary. But is it fear we feel when the restaurant owner rings our bell, or an unwelcome sense of responsibility for our online conduct? Maybe it’s a little of both.

What do you hope readers, skeptics or otherwise, take from this collection?
After dealing with some very dedicated internet trolls, who’ve been with me now for nearly five years (happy anniversary), I began to realize that I couldn’t effectively sit down and try to tell a story while simultaneously trying to gauge or mitigate potential backlash to it. This collection contains honest essays about my life, which obviously opens me up to scathing analysis about how I lead my life. But allowing myself to hope that “readers, skeptics or otherwise” take it the right way spins me out of sorts and hurts my productivity. The way I’ve survived since getting offline is by thinking, “My job is just to write,” and now that the collection has been published, I must move on to the next thing.

Sometimes you juxtapose one subject with another, as in “Cricket,” in which you write about the Miss America pageant and a woman who overdoses in a bathroom. What does your writing process look like, and how does it allow these seemingly disparate concepts to come together in your mind?
Disparate concepts are always coming together in my mind because I have mental illness. As a writer, I try to weed out the random thoughts from the relevant ones and string the latter batch together into a narrative that isn’t boring.

You seem to be drawn to unusual or difficult subjects in general, such as the community of environmentally ill people in Snowflake, Arizona. What prompts this curiosity?
I can’t take credit for coming up with the idea for the Snowflake essay—that one belongs to Mae Ryan, an amazingly talented filmmaker who had pitched the story to The Guardian and was originally going to report it with Jon Ronson, but he couldn’t make it, so they called me. It was one of my first real gigs after getting out of the psych hospital, and I found the experience so refreshing, because it allowed me to write about a community of people suffering in ways I could relate to, while also taking a break from being a main character in my own stories. Susie and Deb were fascinating people and generous hosts. I can’t thank Mae enough for finding them and letting me tag along. The whole experience really seeded my current interest in writing exclusively about other people.

Though you’ve published a number of essays, this collection is a genre shift as far as your books go. Do you anticipate continuing in young adult fiction?
No, my career in young adult fiction is over. No YA publisher will work with me out of fear of offending my anonymous online critics/trolls. I still get to write professionally about teenagers, but it’s always for television and film, where I can remain anonymous. I love it.

You address mental health several times throughout this collection, including mention of a psychiatric hospital visit that followed the incident from which the book takes its title. How has your own mental health journey continued since that time?
Perhaps in another five years, when a decade has passed since I published something “inappropriate” online and caused a minor uproar on Twitter, I’ll finally be known for something other than an essay that landed me in a mental hospital. That said, it’s a pretty good story, and the title of my collection, Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker, is clearly in part a callout to that story. But the title also refers to the theme of predation that unites all six essays and to the gaslighting that women endure in a sexist society that recapitulates female aggression as insanity. In my case, however, the word “crazy” is absolutely true, and I own it completely! I am crazy. The internet drove me crazy.

How are you caring for yourself surrounding this book release, as people critique your publisher’s decision to publish it and you personally?
I stay offline and sit down at my desk in the real world and work on my next thing.

What are you working on now?
In my 20s I was interested in myself. But now that I’m in my 30s, I realize that other people are much more interesting than I am. My next book is a work of nonfiction about an unusual community where something tragic happened. Most people have heard of it. But they don’t know the whole story.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker.

Kathleen Hale discusses mental health, the “toxic hellscape” of the internet and how to keep writing when your every word is being scrutinized.