Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
This memoir-as-cautionary-tale starts innocently enough in 2003 with established novelist and poet Lasdun (Seven Lies, 2005) teaching a fiction workshop at a New York City college. His students include an unassuming though strikingly talented Iranian woman in her thirties. Slowly, even as teacher and student warm to one another over a novel she has begun to write, their relationship begins to unspool, the student pressing ever harder for a romantic relationship, while the happily married professor, though flattered by the advances, demurs with equal force. If her e-mails tell the age-old story of unrequited love, devolving from early girlish innocence (“I’m sorry if I got screwy on you. Please laugh.”) to embitterment (“I also believe you are on medication instead of dealing with why you and most Jewish people are sadistic”), they’re married to a technology that can spread a lie worldwide in a nanosecond, while offering little cover for anyone so defamed. Lasdun delivers a thoughtful account of what went horribly wrong. --Alan Moores