James Lasdun endured five years of unrelenting invective from a former student before he started writing about it.
What began as a friendly exchange of emails turned inexplicably sour, with “Nasreen” becoming obsessive, abusive and eventually anti-Semitic. Privately, then publicly, she accused Lasdun of using her life in his fiction, working as part of a Jewish literary cabal to sell her unpublished novel to other writers, and arranging for her to be raped. (“I will ruin him,” she writes.)
What is most impressive about Lasdun’s account of these five years is his ability to use such a traumatic situation as a tool for self-discovery. His tone is well-judged, his pacing expert. He does not turn misogynist, as I feared he might. His choice of digressive material is mostly impeccable: illuminating meditations on Chaucer, DH Lawrence and Patricia Highsmith are threaded into the narrative as a means of exploring the neuroses of Lasdun and Nasreen at once.
Though not without occasional oversights, Give Me Everything You Have is the work of a stalked figure watching himself still closer than his stalker.
