Caught in the Carousel

Stalker Girl

By Rosemary Graham
Viking

Stalker girl

“Some stalkers are quite benign,” the actor Daniel Craig once observed. “But,” he added, “finding someone in your garden at three o'clock in the morning holding a meat cleaver can’t be much fun.”

Although seventeen-year-old Carly Finnegan isn’t holding a meat cleaver in anyone’s garden at three in the morning, the main character of Rosemary Graham’s new book Stalker Girl is indeed a stalker. And it’s ruining her life.

To be fair, Carly’s life is initially ruined when Brian, her bass-playing, blue-eyed boyfriend in a band breaks up with her. Tired of her jealousy, her neediness and her inability to stop clinging to him, Brian tells Carly, “Things have gotten too intense.” Reading between the lines, Carly knows, as Graham tells us, “He meant she had gotten too intense.”

The death of teenage romance can result in a sickening spell of depression, self-doubt and bottomless sadness, but as those of us over forty know, it’s not the end of the world, it just feels like it is.

Okay, it really feels like it is.

But instead of sitting in the dark listening to Nick Drake and licking her wounds, Carly convinces herself that “break-up” merely means “break” and as she prepares to be reunited with Brian she pores over his old texts, follows his band with obsessive fervor on the internet and gazes at pictures of the two of them in happier times. Then she stops by the store where he works unannounced. This doesn’t go well at all. Then she calls his mom eight times. This, too, does not go well.

By the time Brian begins dating photographer extraordinaire Taylor Deen, Carly’s gone to pieces. In a twist on the shaky sobriety of conventional stalking, Carly has decided to opt out of stalking her ex-boyfriend and instead trains her eye on the new girl. And here’s the bad news for Carly: the new girl’s pretty great. She’s pretty, she’s good at Yoga, she speaks perfect Spanish, firemen flirt with her and she hails from a semi-famous family from Greenwich Village.

Starting with a yearning for just a glimpse of her face, Carly’s obsession with Taylor may begin with light curiosity, but it turns into nothing short of obsession. At one point, as Carly muses that perhaps she and Taylor played in Washington Square Park as kids, Graham writes: “That would be funny. Or sad, depending on how you looked at things.” Carly knows she should stop but she can’t and once she starts following Taylor it’s clear she’s going to play this out to its bitter end.

Aside from the notes Carly makes as she follows Taylor around and the embarrassing amount of time she wastes, the psychological damage of her dangerous new hobby is beginning to take its toll. For example, when she thinks back to a sexual tryst with Brian, a time that she confesses is her favorite memory of the summer, she sees Taylor in her place. Of this, Graham writes: “It was like she’d been deleted from her own memory.”

Graham tells us early on about Carly that, “She wasn’t always like this,” and from there offers a compelling back story that traces the genesis of Carly’s current self all the way back to her four-year-old self sitting in the sand in a beach-playing snapshot. Offering a generous series of insights over the next thirteen years—including her parents’ divorce and their ensuing relationships—Graham reveals that Carly’s as rooted in the past as the artifacts that her archeologist/professor father collects: “Something happened to her when she saw places where people lived thousands or even hundreds of years before, or touched things they touched.” Carly finds comfort in the past because there’s perfection in the places that are gone. And if she mourns the loss of her relationship with Brian and those perfect sun-kissed moments of summer romance, she equally mourns the crush of history, the press of time, the cruel roll of the universe that swallows those dreamy cities and leaves nothing but fragments behind.

Graham views of romantic fixation and youthful envy are wisely observed and she writes of the legal ramifications of stalking and the red-hot heat of public humiliation with alacrity and skill. A pitch-perfect cautionary tale of obsessive behavior, Stalker Girl is also an insightful and poignant story about how we always seem to be chasing the parts of ourselves that we think are missing.

—Alex Green