Okay, I gotta blog my thoughts on this thing...
...because tweeting back and forth with Jim Hines isn't the best forum. :)
First, read this.
Tl;dr executive summary: Author has first book published, is by her own (post-facto) admission behaving like a Crazy Obsessive Author. Receives scathing review on Goodreads, goes a bit off the deep end with tracking down the reviewer. Determines review is probably an alias, stalks likely actual person, goes to her house, engages with her on the phone. All kinds of weirdness.
My first thought: YES, AUTHORS SHOULD NOT DO THIS.
Anyone who thinks I'm defending this author can fuck right off. She did the absolute wrong thing on many levels.
But Jim asked the question of what was the Guardian's purpose in running the article? I can't speak for the Guardian, but here's what I read into it:
It is easier to avoid getting into trouble in the first place if you know what leads to it.
The author's biggest mistake was not when she went to the reviewer's house. (That was her biggest wrongness and stupidity, which is not the same as a mistake.) Bear with me here; I'll explain.
The review was, according to the author, scathing and inaccurate. And instead of reacting like a professional, experienced author, she reacted like a normal fucking human being who gets upset when someone tells lies about her.
The mistake was that she then engaged with the reviewer.
At that point, she's in the rabbit hole and falling. She draws the attention of someone who, from context (inaccurate and scathing review, per author) seems either not too smart or not too sensible. The warning signs are there, that this reviewer may well have mental issues of some sort. And no one has any way of knowing what sort (if any), or how engaging with her will play out.
So there's the mistake. There's the point where the rest of it becomes inevitable. Because once you start to dig and discover that this reviewer is (apparently, as presented by the author) a notorious internet troll, the desire to keep digging and find out who they are grows. And as the pieces start to emerge and suggest that the reviewer is operating under an alias and created persona, then who the hell wouldn't want to follow up that mystery? Certainly not a writer, one of that notorious breed of people who are curious about everything and do research as part of their job.
And then it snowballs, from drunk-Googling all the way down to the author going to the reviewer's house, ostensibly just to put a face to the reviewer, and to show the reviewer that she, too, is a human being, not some sort of un-hurtable AI who writes books.
Yes, that is a very, very, very bad idea. But it is also the product of momentum.
Yes, the author could have at any time come to her senses and said, "WTF am I doing? I need to let this go. I'm being obsessional." But the nature of obsessional behavior is that people can't let it go. (People condemning this author? Please consider that you may be condemning someone for having a mental illness.)
So me? I think this is a good article. Writers talk all the time about "don't engage with critics." That's great for theory, but as all writers also know, there are no absolute rules. "Don't engage with critics" has as much weight as "Don't write in omniscient voice": it's just a dictate from on high, meaningless without context.
This article in the Guardian provides context. It is a warning from the author herself: Don't do what I did. She acknowledges that her behavior was driven by bad decisions and unhealthy thinking. Notes that her friends tried to stop her at every turn. And in the end concludes that it didn't do for her what she had hoped: she got no closure, no resolution, no acknowledgement from the reviewer of the harm she (the reviewer) had done.
It's a bloody Shakespearean tragedy, that is. Main character is mortally slighted, goes a bit off the deep end, solves nothing. We should be glad there isn't a drowned girl in a pool in Denmark.
So the lesson of the article: Don't engage with reviewers, because what you do to yourself might be far worse than what their review did to you.
Learn from the mistakes of others, before you make them yourself.
ETA: Jim, to answer your twitter question about context: I think the author provides it herself. Right up front she says "In the months before my first novel came out, I was a charmless lunatic." She's noting that authors can behave irrationally. I read that as an acknowledgement that all her actions were irrational. Thus my "this is a warning, don't act like me" interpretation.
ETA2: Jim writes a very thoughtful post on this subject here. Go read it. It's good stuff.
ETA3: My response to Jim on his blog:
"I tend to see things in terms of what I should learn from them, so that certainly colors my interpretation. :)
"I absolutely agree that Hale doesn't seem to have learned the right lesson herself. Her distress at the end is that she didn't get the resolution she wanted (i.e., for the reviewer to date--er, I mean, become friends--with her). Hale clearly still thinks she was justified in her actions."