We have all heard the recent stories about cyber-bullying ,
particularly among teenagers, but James Lasdun, the author of Give Me Everything You Have: On BeingStalked, had it happen to him in middle age for reasons that he spends most
of this book trying to figure out. Lasdun calls his stalker Nasreen (not her
real name) and first meets her in a creative writing class he teaches at an
east coast college. He likes her writing very much and gives her what he feels
are encouraging but entirely appropriate comments. When she contacts him again several years
later about reading the novel she has been working on he politely declines but
suggests she send it to a friend of his who is a literary agent.
In the following months, Lasdun and Nasreen initially engage
in what he feels are friendly emails he might send to other fellow writers, and
since he does admire her work and she is no longer his student he sees nothing
inappropriate in the exchanges. Things take a bizarre turn once the agent
passes on Nasreen’s book and her emails quickly start to become bizarre and
accusatory. Nasreen starts making anti-Semitic comments (Lasdun is Jewish) and
accuses him of taking her manuscript and selling parts of it off to other
writers. She also accuses him of setting up an alleged attack that happened to
her before the two had even met. Soon Nasreen’s wrath moves beyond emails and
she starts emailing the author’s colleagues and attacking his work and his
character on various websites, some of which have a wide readership.
Lasdun spends a large part of the book trying to investigate
if there was something he might have done to provoke any of this. Could an
innocent comment he made here or there have meant something more to her? He
also finds, somewhat surprisingly, that there are moments even when she is at
her most bizarre that he pities Nasreen. He goes to the police and the FBI
several times but never with much of anything in the way of results.
Ultimately, this book is not just a story about being stalked but one that
shows how much our legal system has not adapted to the age of the internet.
John
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