Lasdun who is nasreen

But I did feel there was something more than just that. Complicity is very much something I wanted to explore in my book—my own complicity in this situation and the idea of complicity in general. To adapt D. All of them are people who at least at one time admired her greatly for her charm and intelligence… It seems incredibly sad and wasteful that someone with so much potential can be this destructive.

A lot of commenters at the bottoms of articles and interviews by you have mentioned being harassed by her, but no names are named. And the fact that there are all these people surprised me—I thought there was just a half dozen of us, all writers.

But there are perhaps more. James Lasdun : I did hear about that Facebook page, though I have no idea who set it up. As you say, there turn out to be quite a number of these.

All of them are people who at least at one time admired her greatly for her charm and intelligence, and were stunned at the way things developed.

It seems incredibly sad and wasteful that someone with so much potential can be this destructive. The question, though, is where does it leave you to acknowledge that? Then years later, when there were death threats, I had to go to the FBI.

She fascinates me because she is someone whose worst fears constantly come true—like this interview—through the power of dark will and imagination. She accuses me of stealing her work, being an accomplice in her rape, causing her mental breakdown—these issues all hit home in a terrible way. And it seems like this person was a real writing student, a journalist, a professor, a yoga teacher—all things that she shared with me.

James Lasdun: Really interesting to hear how closely your experience resembles mine—the same threats, the same incredibly upsetting accusations, even the same absurd business of having to do a reading under guard. And that fascination, too—the sense of confronting someone possessed of formidable powers.

One wants to ignore it all, but the relentlessness of the attack makes it impossible, and at a certain point the nature of the threats and accusations make it a matter of necessity to do something about it. James Lasdun: She first mentioned you to me in—I think—early , as one of four writers of Iranian descent to whom I and my supposed gang of Jewish literary thieves had sold her work. Did she ever spell out what it was we were supposed to have sold you?

She certainly never did to me. I think she just wanted to smear—throw a lot of mud in the hope that some of it would stick. Did you feel responsible to them? James Lasdun: After Nasreen began making threats of actual harm against me and my family, I felt that there was no longer anything to be lost by going public and that it might even help matters.

Paula certainly had misgivings, but we discussed them and when she came to the reading that launched the book she seemed okay with it. The extraordinary difficulty of doing anything about the problem was always mind-boggling to me. After I completed the book, her threats to me did actually escalate to a level where the detective on the case felt he might be able to have her extradited [across states] to face charges.

Guernica: So how do you imagine the story will end? The ending of the book is of course not the end of your story with Nasreen, though as you say one can hope it might end now. One thing I found myself compelled to explore while writing the book was the effect of my silence on Nasreen.

One never knows. To contact Guernica or James Lasdun, please write here. As with many things in life, there might not be a satisfactory resolution to this terrible era for Mr. Shit just happens, as in The Horned Man , when Lawrence, having benevolently left money in his office for Trumilcik, who may be camping there at night, returns to find the bills replaced by a coiled turd. The theme of exchanges and equivalences sets the Nasreen story in motion, too: Lasdun offers career help; in return she shits all over him and plants fart jokes on his Wikipedia page.

Would it be fair to say that Lasdun authored both these spiteful tormentors? At the very least, they inhabit the same aesthetic universe. And if Lasdun cuts Nasreen to suit his authorial disposition, it goes both ways.

Nasreen produces a running commentary on her tactics, as if stalking were a form of performance art and she were an innovator in the field. Lasdun, too, acknowledges the creative dimensions of her mischief-making exuberance. Preposterous though it sounds, she becomes a kind of muse. Things grind to a halt toward the end, understandably, I suppose, as nothing did ever resolve: The harassment was still ongoing as the book went to press.

The locale allows him to reflect on his attenuated Jewishness—the Muslim-Jewish hostilities evoked by Nasreen make this unfortunately germane—but without her around, the writing seems to deflate. One never knows. At times he has a powerful desire to hide his face in public, as if he is guilty of the acts Nasreen says he is. Ultimately Lasdun comes to believe that sanity is fundamentally helpless against insanity. A crazed person is simply more motivated, persistent, and focused on her task than a sane person can ever be in self-defense.

Mostly this inquiry comes off as the excessive self-questioning of an individual prone to overthinking and guilt. Nasreen was, in lay terms, crackers. But Lasdun tries to see his voluble teacherly praise and his talk of his empty apartment through her eyes. Nasreen read the story when it was published, and it may, Lasdun thinks, have fed her delusions of being robbed by him.

Lasdun comments:. People are always in various stages of different dramas when you encounter them: freshly embarked on some, halfway or more through others. And you, the stranger, entering the picture in all your blundering innocence, may well be the catalyst for some long-awaited climax. Eventually, the FBI does order Nasreen to lay off, which, after five long years, inhibits the abuse but does not end it completely.

Perhaps this is the difference between being a man and a woman. Physical violence would have been my own top worry.

He has been put through a great deal of unnecessary suffering, but now he has taken charge of the story; he is no longer letting Nasreen fully set its terms. There were times while reading Give Me Everything You Have that I thought so, and I felt exhilarated, as if my team had come from behind to take the lead on the soccer field. But when I examined this feeling, it deflated rather abruptly. As a lifelong bookworm, a person in love with print, I would feel as if something between two covers has a solidity and an authority that supersede the ricocheting delusions of the internet.

But how many other people think the way I do?