“In order to paint Nasreen as a mad woman with a powerful grudge, Lasdun takes an unnecessarily dry and impersonal tone, using supplementary texts on the nature of obsession to further his case. As he goes into his analysis, painting Nasreen as a stalker and himself as a heroic naïf, the more he starts to sound like Humbert Humbert, more complicit than innocent, more culpable than defensible.”
Like a Woman Scorned: On James Lasdun’s Give Me Everything You Have by Jessica Freeman-Slade
Our own Mark O’Connell spoke with James Lasdun about the story behind his new book. (Here’s a preview: it involves getting stalked.)
Along with these Web attacks, Nasreen had now started e-mailing organizations that I was professionally associated with. My literary agency in London received an e-mail accusing me of the familiar crimes. The Personals department of the London Review of Books, bizarrely, was sent an enraged e-mail heaping curses on me (Nasreen obligingly copied me on this). More recently, in the comments section under a review I published in The Guardian, she wrote: ‘Mr. Lasdun, your own personal life is a bad porn film and I’m sorry I didn’t sleep with you and so you had me raped and gave my work to Aipac babies for $. … ‘
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