#FridayReads, May 3–James Lasdun’s “Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked”

#FridayReads, May 3–Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, novelist James Lasdun’s nightmarish memoir is a literary yet realistic account of how he came to be cyber-stalked by a former student. No matter what Lasdun has done over the past several years, from contacting police to ignoring the woman he calls Nasreen, she has continued to make him the target of her ceaseless anti-Jewish hatred and twisted paranoia, emailing venomous messages to him with numbing frequency, posting vicious rumors about him, impersonating him to his contacts and in online forums, implicating his literary agent and colleagues.  Despite these invasions of his personal space, Lasdun has prevailed, in his own way. The book is rich with allusions to such literary sources as Gawain and the Green Knight, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel,  The Penitent,  and Lasdun’s own novel, The Horned Man. A disturbing yet compelling chronicle. I want to read more of Lasdun’s work, because whatever one may say about this horrible experience with Nasreen, he’s also a terrific writer whose sentence-making is continually engrossing.