Someone is stalked in my new book but 13 years ago it happened to me

I’ve been in two minds about telling this story. Being a writer can be a revealing thing; inevitably, parts of your own life bleed into your work. But the benefit of writing fiction is that you can change the context so that details aren’t recognisable any more. You can keep your true stories to yourself.

Pip Drysdale was a young singer-songwriter living in London when she first met her stalker.Credit: Katie Kaars

So the temptation to write something less vulnerable here has been ... strong. But deep down, I know I need to do it, both for you and for me.

You see, someone is stalked in my new book, and 13 years ago, it happened to me.

I was a young singer-songwriter living in London, and one night, as I was headed into a party, a man who’d been talking to me outside grabbed my arm before I could close the door. I’d been polite but was done, so I gave him a copy of my CD so he’d have to let go. In hindsight, that was my first big mistake: now he knew my name.

It started in seemingly benign ways: random Skype calls and DMs from him talking about my lyrics. I started running into him on my way home from work. I told myself maybe he lived nearby.

Then he started turning up closer to my house. When I saw him, I’d cross the street or try to walk by. Once he grabbed me and tried to make me dance with him, and when I refused, he said, “If you don’t let me lead you in the dance, how do you know what the marriage will be like?” As I walked away, he angrily reeled off facts about me, from my middle name to what school I’d attended, my parents’ postal address and what I’d said in interviews.

For women, it feels as if there’s an invisible line: on one side, if you say something too soon, you risk being seen as melodramatic.

PIP DRYSDALE

If a friend had confided this, I’d have encouraged them to report it immediately. But when it was happening to me, it didn’t seem that simple. What if they thought I was making too much of a fuss? Or looking for attention? Because particularly for women, it feels as if there’s an invisible line: on one side, if you say something too soon, you risk being seen as melodramatic. On the other side, you’re blamed for not asking for help earlier. Either way you’re doing it wrong; as the victim you’re being judged and graded. But the punchline is that nobody can tell you exactly where that line is.

So I did nothing. I rationalised it away, and told myself he was harmless — if misguided — and would eventually get bored. Besides, what if I went to the police and it somehow inflamed him? So it continued.

He started contacting venues where I’d performed, saying he was my manager. He asked brands to sponsor me. He blogged about me. His DMs now included poetry and comments about my clothes and what kind of underwear I should wear. Fake social media profiles in my name started appearing. When I caught sight of him in person, he was always lurking closer and closer to my home. I felt paralysed: while every fibre of me wanted to block and report him, I thought that if I knew what he was thinking, at least I could see what was coming.

Then another DM dropped: “I bet you never thought someone would take your lyrics as a call to action.”

I wrote a lot of songs — about heartbreak, love, death — so there was no way I could know which lyric he was referring to. But whatever it was, I knew it wasn’t good. Because if he was misreading my lyrics and using them against me, what did that mean he’d do next? That was what finally mobilised me to call the police, who thankfully took me seriously.

This is what inspired the premise for my book, The Close-Up. The protagonist, Zoe Ann Weiss, is a novelist who wrote a thriller about a stalker. Soon she gets a stalker of her own who starts re-enacting all the plot twists in her novel, but with Zoe as the victim. In short, the stalker uses her art as a weapon against her.

As for me, soon afterwards, I moved back to Australia. The vast ocean between us seemed to stop him, but the experience changed me: it made me scared to be seen, overly careful of what I shared online or in interviews, anxious at every festival or book signing. Hell, I still make sure I know exactly where my exit route is when I sit down. And frankly, I’m done with it. I want to live a life that’s full and rich, not one that runs on fear. So writing The Close-Up was my way of owning the experience, of taking control of my own story.

But if I could go back in time and tell myself one thing, it would be this: make a fuss, the biggest fuss you can. Make everyone uncomfortable. Because the fear of “being melodramatic” is a far bigger threat to our collective safety than we know. It’s time to stop scrutinising victims and what they “should” say or do, even when those victims are ourselves. It’s time to instead start scrutinising perpetrators, to move that line to the point where none of their behaviour is OK.

But more than that, it’s time that collectively we make that line visible, really damned visible. So everyone knows exactly where it is.

The Close-Up (HarperCollins) by Pip Drysdale is out now.

Get the best of Sunday Life magazine delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. Sign up here for our free newsletter.