‘I hope it sticks to them like a tick’: A writer’s gift to her stalker

Author and artist Ella Baxter has a request for her stalker. She wants the person who drove her to enrol in self-defence classes; to research how to survive an acid attack; and to spend evenings checking the locks on her windows, to read her new novel. “I hope it sticks to them like a tick. I wrote it for them. I hope they read it,” Baxter says, all defiance.

Her rage at the harasser who sent her violent and sexually explicit letters is palpable, and anger pulses through her second novel Woo Woo. But before fury, there was fear. The kind that turned everything charming about her cottage-style home in Melbourne - the walled garden and multiple entryways - into chinks in her armour. That cast a cloud over the publication of her award-winning debut novel New Animal, turning shadows at book signings into threats.

The first anonymous letter arrived at Baxter’s home about four or five years ago. A handful more followed over the next 18 months. They were sexual and threatening and suggested the writer knew intimate details about her life. Baxter had been a victim of sexual assault, and she lived in Melbourne in the suburb where Jill Meagher was murdered, and across the road from the park where Eurydice Dixon was murdered, so violence against women felt even closer to home.

“It was profoundly scary. The fear, the paranoia and the constant feeling of not being safe, not at my home, at work, anywhere. It makes you see everything as a threat,” Baxter says. “I look back at that time and I just have so much sadness. I felt like I was living just terrified all the time.”

Baxter says police analysed the letters but found no forensic match, and suggested she mix up her routine, not post on social media and enter and leave her house in different ways. Self-defence classes only made Baxter feel weaker. No matter how many times she checked the locks in her house, they never felt secure. It was at the height of her fear, when she was home alone and pregnant with her first child, that Baxter started writing Woo Woo. The words were initially driven by helplessness, but they soon became an unexpected reprieve, and better yet, a form of revenge.

“The only thing I could do, and the only way I had power, was to write. Everything I tried to do to get a feeling of agency in the real world fell flat, and so writing the fictional story of this other woman was addictive. It made me feel amazing,” Baxter says.

The novel, Baxter says, offered her a way to seize control. She could break down the classic binaries of victim/stalker. She even went “full method”, buying a ski mask when she was writing from the perspective of a stalker.

“By the time I was stalked, I was in my 30s and I felt like I had at least 15 years of just appalling behaviour from men backed up, and I just felt how, like, how dare they? I just felt wildly furious at it. That my safety could feel so precarious at any given time...How dare you make me feel this way in this world in my life. I’d just had enough. I’d had it up to pussy’s bow, I was done.”

The resulting novel, Woo Woo, is about hitting the “enough”. The story follows “conceptual and multimedia” artist Sabine in the days leading up to the launch of her first solo gallery exhibition F—k You, Help Me, which will feature the dark gothic skins for which she is known, at the prestigious Goethe Gallery. One night an unknown man smiles and waves at Sabine from her garden, and then continues to stalk her, sending her letters, watching her from afar, leaving signs of himself in her house. Terrified of the person she calls the “Rembrandt Man”, Sabine seeks to reverse the story in which he is the pursuer, and she is pursued.

Her chef husband Constantine thinks Sabine is suffering a “prolonged psychosis” and expresses concern about “her inability to deal with pressure”. But Sabine is out to get revenge. And not just against her stalker, but against a society that makes her feel small and unsafe. Sabine, and the story, spiral into a kind of chaos. But is she insane, or is her response to the world the only sane one?

There’s been a trend of “woo woo” women in literature lately, think Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, Julia May Jonas’ Vladimir and Miranda July’s All Fours. Women who don’t want to fit the script of motherhood, middle age or wifedom. They’re women who defiantly burst out of their boxes, in stories layered with humour, aggression and trauma.

Baxter’s Woo Woo too is also a satire of the art world, the way artists are expected to sell themselves as much as their work. Ahead of a launch, a gallerist warns Sabine to narrow down her description of her art to a digestible soundbite: “I’m going to give you two words, okay? Here they are: surreal and sublime.”

It’s a world with which Baxter is familiar. Similar to Sabine’s fictional art, Baxter’s art focuses on masks, and the line between appearing and disappearing. There are her Cocoons, sculptures made from natural material in a swaddle shape; her Death Shrouds made from antique linen and silk and intended to cover the deceased before burial or cremation; and her Timids, grotesque masks which she says are “exclusively for timid people”.

‘I did know that putting it in the world might be a risk, but it was one I was willing to take.’

Ella Baxter

Although timid is not something Baxter feels right now. The typical advice is that you should not engage with stalkers, break the connection rather than enforce it (and before you ask, no, Baxter hasn’t seen Baby Reindeer). At first, Baxter didn’t intend to publish Woo Woo out of fear it would trigger her stalker, but after the traumatic birth of her first child, she says she felt invincible.

“I just thought I’m going to publish this because it’s such a f--- you, and it’s got so much of my energy and fear and fury and art. And I feel like as I was writing Sabine making art from her fear, I was making art from my fear and we were like next to each other punching this thing out. I did know that putting it in the world might be a risk, but it was one I was willing to take.”

Baxter hasn’t been contacted by her stalker in years. In the aftermath of the letters, she launched her own investigation into the writer’s identity, studying stalker psychology and handwriting analysis. She discovered more about the person from the stamps they used, and the words they repeated.

“By doing that I was able to get a rough idea of the age of the person, the nationality, and the intent and I feel like I now have a pretty good sense of who it is but I haven’t said anything about that or acted on it because I just want to sit on that information,” Baxter says. The person, she believes, is in her close circle.

And if they do read all the way to the end of Woo Woo, they’ll find, on the final page, an acknowledgment just for them: “The fear and distress and fury they brought into my life has led me to make my proudest work to date.”

Woo Woo (Allen & Unwin) is out now.

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