The Accidental Stalker

Years ago, while browsing in the library, I picked up a book with an intriguing title and read a few pages. I was hooked right away. I checked out both of the books on the shelves by that author and read them as soon as I got home.

This woman was gifted! She was so funny, but thought-provoking at the same time. Her characters were people I could relate to and wanted to know. The stories were riveting, keeping me reading just so that I could find out what happened next. I had to read more of her work.

I went back to the library and checked to see how many books of hers they had, then put myself on the waiting list for every one that was checked out. Since they didn't have all of her books, I also started haunting used book stores to find the out of print titles.

That was almost 20 years ago, and I still grab every old title of hers that I run into. It doesn't happen too often, unfortunately, which has left my collection with some gaps. She's not a big name and probably hasn't sold too many copies of any one title, but she sells enough to keep getting published, and I make sure I do all I can to help keep that going by buying anything new as soon as I know it's out.

There are a couple of her books that I really love and have read again and again. Every time I do, I find myself wanting to write to her and tell her how much I enjoy her writing. I've even fantasized about maybe running into her, at a writer's conference or something. Maybe she'd join Momwriters and I'd get to be her secret friend! Wouldn't that be just great?

Every so often I've done a casual search on the internet to try to find if she has a website. Unfortunately she doesn't, but I did find various bookstores that sell her work, and some of those listed pen names that were new to me. (She's fond of pen names.) I bought those books and also did a quick search on each of those names for a website. Again, no luck.

A few months ago I found out something. All the names I had for her were pen names, including the one I thought was her real name. One bookseller, a tiny little place I'd never run into before, gave her real name, which she had never written under.

How cool! I did a quick search on that name, and got a handful of hits. I checked them out quickly. There was a (very) short biography of her, a list of short stories she'd written (new to me - I bookmarked that one), someone's genealogy ... huh?

I backed up and looked at the page again. Sure enough, there she was, in a family tree submitted by her daughter to a family history site. The birth year corresponded to that short bio I'd just found, and to back it up, many of her pen names ran in the family. It was the daughter's name that caught my attention, though.

I stared at it, puzzled, trying to think where I knew this name from. Someone I'd met online, not in real life, I thought. I did a quick search through my email archives and found it. And suddenly I knew who my favorite author really was.

No, I'd never met her, but I did know her daughter. We'd been on the same e-mail group for awhile. She'd helped me through a personal crisis. I'd heard her vent about her family, especially her mother with whom she had plenty of reason to be unhappy.

Her mother the writer.

Suddenly I felt a little sick. All I'd wanted was to find a website, maybe find out about current projects, definitely write a letter expressing my appreciation, and then just keep buying her books. I might have fantasized about meeting her, but I always imagined that happening more by accident than design. If I'd found the writer's website I was looking for I wouldn't even have written her more than once. Anything else would be, well, stalking.

Except now I knew all sorts of things about her, some of them incredibly intimate. I knew how she'd left her first husband because he was beating her, and how her second husband molested her daughters. I knew about her unsupportive reaction to her daughter's infertility, her fights with her sons, the church she had recently joined. I even knew the town she was living in. I felt so dirty, so guilty. I'd egregiously violated her privacy. It wasn't intentional, but so what? If she knew that she'd been so exposed, the fact that the intrusion was inadvertent wouldn't make her feel any better.

I closed the window, erased all my bookmarks from previous searches, even went through and deleted most of the emails I'd ever gotten from her daughter. I felt so bad I couldn't even read her books until just the other day.

It's astonishing how small the Web has made the world. We intrude on each others lives without even meaning to. Was I in the wrong to keep looking around after a few unsuccessful searches? Is there more stalker in me than I realize? I'd like to think the fact that I was so horrified about what I'd stumbled across speaks well of me, but I wonder.

And what about me? If I succeed in my goals, and get published someday, what will someone find out about me when they do a search?

I hope they'll be horrified, too.