When Robyn Harding became an author before the age of social media, she would get the odd email of support from readers. But that has since changed.
“They didn’t feel the sense of entitlement to tell you what they think all the time,” she told CBC’s North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher.
“Over the years, I felt like [messages from the public] got a little bit darker.”
The past two years, in particular, she said, have gotten bad; people swearing at her, accusing her of being involved in conspiracy theories and calling her names.
“When I’m sitting in my living room with my family and I check my phone and there’s something like that there, it just feels so invasive and so upsetting.”
And while this may sound unusual to some, it’s become the norm for many people whose names and work are available to the public.
People who go out of their way to attack others on the internet have inspired her latest thriller, The Haters, about a writer who is terrorized online.
LISTEN | The inspiration behind The Haters:
North by Northwest18:20Vancouver author Robyn Harding on her new thriller “The Haters”
Vancouver author Robyn Harding’s newest thriller “The Haters” follows a debut novelist experiencing targeted online harassment.
Camryn Lane, the protagonist, is caught up in online reviews and unsettling emails. While she’s similar to Harding in some ways — she lives in Vancouver and is an author — but in others, they’re quite different, Harding said.
Camryn, a single mother and high school counsellor, writes a novel centred around a teen storyline and is accused of using private information from kids at her school to inspire the tale. That’s when everything goes wrong, and when she should be celebrating her first book being published, Camryn is dealing with something more sinister.
After a particularly bad experience with an unknown sender of sorts, Harding started asking fellow writers about their experiences.
“Everyone had dealt with something like that,” she said. “All the women, not all the men necessarily. I do feel like culturally, we are very comfortable telling women what they’re doing wrong and what they need to improve.”
Penning a book about online trolls was scary, Harding said, as she worried she might be giving those very people ideas for the future.
Camryn’s downfall in the story is responding to the hateful messages, Harding said.
That’s something the seasoned author would never do.
“We’re all told by our publicist never to do that,” she said.
“I wanted this character to … make some really bad choices, and she makes it worse. But it’d be a pretty boring book if she just sat there and took it like we always do.”
Online bullying
While Camryn is bullied online, so is a student at her school. A video of a teen in a compromising position is circulating online, and police become involved to try to get the kids involved to talk.
Harding said that part of the book was inspired by real-life cases of cyberbullying, including what happened to Carson Crimeni, a 14-year-old B.C. boy who died after overdosing on drugs. His family has said other teens mocked him and took video of him, rather than helping him.
And while she said she’s not necessarily trying to teach anyone a lesson with the story, she does see fiction as a way to try to understand such horrific behaviour.
“Look at the case of Under the Bridge,” she said, referring to the new series about what happened to Vancouver Island teenager Reena Virk.
“I was at a dinner party, and a friend of mine said, well, I won’t watch it. And I said, I will watch it because I feel I am learning more about the victim, about even in this case, the perpetrators.
“I do think there is room to develop compassion and a deeper understanding.”