Free Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun

with this, you are too …
    More bitterly sarcastic:
i hope the money is worth it
when should i expect to see the rest of my work stolen?
    More firmly accusatory even in their moments of apparent lucidity:
I’m sorry I fell in love with you but I don’t understand why you’re punishing me with the books that have come out
    More wide-ranging in their vitriol, as in this group email addressed to me, Paula, and Y (another Iranian writer, somehow involved in our conspiracy):
Y, keep your cunts-on-a-leash away from my material. […] You’re all pathetic, and I’ve had enough of your thievery. If you don’t have a single thought of your own and your little empty-headed heiresses don’t either, spare the American reader. But do not touch my work. I know what you’re all up to and so do writers much more influential than anyone in your circle of crows.
    More menacing in their demands for compensation:
I want every cent …
of what James made in “ghostwriting” from my emails for Z [another “buyer”] the whore. Or else I’m going to make him pay in other ways.
    And more fantastically comprehensive in the evils they attribute to me:
Boycott this man, for God’s sake. He’s the reason behind terrorism.
    By now, early 2008, I was beginning to feel seriously harassed, though it was still the tone of the emails rather than the content that was getting to me: the violent hatred they projected, rather than the accusations themselves. These latest ones, in particular, seemed too self-evidently preposterous to worry about. I was even a little relieved that they were as wild as they were. Who could possibly take seriously this idea that I was some kind of literary racketeer who had stolen her material in order to sell it off to other writers? It was too ridiculous to pay any attention to. I also felt, despite the widening embarrassment it entailed, protected by the growing number of people Nasreen now appeared to have in her sights. By this time she had copied me on emails she’d sent not only to Janice and Paula but also to several other writers and teachers she considered part of my conspiracy. These emails reserve their worst venom for me, but since they also attacked the recipients, they gave me a feeling of safety in numbers, at least on this particular front.
    But I was forgetting the principles of assymetric warfare. I was forgetting my own observations about weakness as a source of strength, powerlessness leveraged into power. And I was forgetting the spirit of fair play that prevails among most people, whereby anyone claiming to have been victimized must be listened to with an open mind, however far-fetched the claim and however honorable-seeming the alleged victimizers.
    “ James’s Amazon Reviews, read em! ” runs the heading of the email Nasreen sent out on the morning of December 30, 2007. The email begins, in taunting parody of the tones of authentic victimhood: “I hope I’m not in trouble for speaking the truth…”
    I logged, very warily, on to Amazon.
    The review, under the byline “ a former student of lasdun ,” was posted on the page for my book Seven Lies . I’d never quite believed in the sensation you read about in novels of print swimming before a character’s eyes at moments of high agitation, but that was precisely the effect. Words seemed to undulate as I looked at the screen. Phrases came in and out of focus: “… writers who teach at mfa programs like mr. lasdun…” “… my work was stolen…” “… after I told him I was raped while trying to finish my novel…” “… he used my writing (emails to him) in that story…”
    Even with these preliminary reiterations of the familiar charges, I had the sensation that a new order of harm was being inflicted on me. First the private attacks had been extended to form that little intimate theater of mortification comprised of my colleagues and acquaintances, and now a window had been opened up to the wider world. As if conscious of