UNFOLLOW ME

In this lightly fictionalized memoir, an author recounts her chilling experiences involving a stalker.

In her debut book, Caraway (a pen name) recalls the day she met a man called Todd. The author, a hard-working board member of a children’s nonprofit, was introduced to him by her friend Monica. Todd was the owner of a small IT business supplying services to several outfits, including the local police department. But he seemed to keep turning up, and the stakes of the drama between him and the author grew greater and greater. He used his professional skills and connections to root into every corner of her life, and the bizarre experiences that resulted made Caraway begin to feel stressed. “At my lowest point, my mind was no longer operating in organized, concentric circles compartmentalizing the psychological war I was battling,” she writes. “It had morphed into a maze with dead ends at each turn, causing chaos and robbing me of my ability to think clearly or rationally.” Caraway’s decision to craft the story of her own nightmarish experience as “a work of creative nonfiction” is telling. As she rightly points out, her subject is both grim and extremely significant; one study she mentions shows that in nearly 80% of the cases where women were murdered by an intimate partner, stalking preceded the crime. But many a manifesto has been torpedoed by shoddy storytelling skills. Fortunately, in these pages, Caraway not only tells an important story, but also a gripping one. She compellingly describes not only the slow, insidious way Todd’s stalking escalated until it was entirely choking Caraway’s life, but also her own dogged pursuit of justice in a legal system that was against her at every turn. At one point in court, Todd told her, “You’re going to regret this,” in a threatening tone and nothing came of it. The combination of fact and fiction here ends up being very potent.

A powerful, riveting account about a woman being victimized by a modern-day monster.