Read Online Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: James Lasdun
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“conciliatory” emails always did, to continue calling me a thief if I failed to respond).
Sometime in the fall, Nasreen announced that she was going to move to California, where her family lived. The decision seemed to soften her tone. She appeared (though it’s hard to be certain) to be making fun of herself:
… I need to leave the East Coast where everyone is racist and crazy. Besides, I am unsafe here and the annoying trustfund hipsters raise my blood pressure.
Love,
Nasreen, the peace-seeking and relentless verbal terrorist.
There was even what appeared to be the beginnings of an explanation for her behavior:
I really hope you and Paula and Janice understand my bitter comments. I know you know what it’s like to be in character. I always have a hard time snapping out …
Being “in character,” presumably for her novel, wasn’t a very convincing explanation for her emails (there were no anti-Semites in her novel), but the fact that she seemed to think they needed to be explained seemed encouraging. It was December by now, and with the year winding down and Nasreen moving to the other side of the country, I was cautiously hopeful that the whole unpleasant episode might be coming to an end.
But my optimism was misplaced.
Over the previous year there had been a spate of novels and memoirs, some of them bestsellers, published by youngish women of Iranian origin. Many of these books, I gathered (I hadn’t read any of them), dealt with the period of the Shah’s downfall and the rise of the fundamentalists, which was the period Nasreen had been attempting to cover in her own novel.
Even the most well-balanced writers are prone to anxiety about their work being preempted by other books. I suffer from it myself. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to learn that Nasreen was unhappy about these rival publications. What was surprising, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been, was to find out how she intended to deal with this unhappiness.
“You and Paula pandered my work” was the first clear indication. Over the next few weeks, murkily, but with steadily growing conviction, Nasreen began to elaborate a theory in which I and various Jewish cohorts were guilty of deliberately preventing her from finishing her book so that we could steal her ideas and sell them to these other writers, most of whom happened to be Jewish as well as Iranian.
Like all conspiracy theories, this required constant adjustment in order to accommodate both Nasreen’s own shifting grievances and the obstinate bits of reality that stood in its way. Sometimes I appear to be acting alone; sometimes the complexity of the charges requires me to have been in league with one or both of my “yentas” (Janice and Paula), and sometimes the scale of my operation is perceived to be so vast that Nasreen is forced to link me to entirely new networks of co-conspirators, including, at one time, most of the faculty of the Morgan College writing program. So too with the authors we’re accused of helping: sometimes the denunciations focus on one in particular, sometimes two or more are grouped together, and there are periods in which I and my gang appear to be supplying as many as four desperate, unscrupulous writers with Nasreen’s material, all at the same time.
A kind of feedback effect occurs now, between the increasingly villainous scenarios Nasreen imagines and the pitch of her rage, each intensifying the other. “Janice gives you manuscripts…,” begins one,
that you type up in your boring trying-to-be-white style.
you are the downfall of a culture. go back to england. we don’t want you here.
[…]
We rule now, your ways are OVER. you’re all dying off …
get a toupe.
The emails become more apocalyptic in tone:
oh what will happen to you all … your stupid fortress … your stupid stupid life made from other people’s blood and sweat …
More overtly threatening:
X [one of the Iranian authors] is fucked. And if you have something to do
Sometime in the fall, Nasreen announced that she was going to move to California, where her family lived. The decision seemed to soften her tone. She appeared (though it’s hard to be certain) to be making fun of herself:
… I need to leave the East Coast where everyone is racist and crazy. Besides, I am unsafe here and the annoying trustfund hipsters raise my blood pressure.
Love,
Nasreen, the peace-seeking and relentless verbal terrorist.
There was even what appeared to be the beginnings of an explanation for her behavior:
I really hope you and Paula and Janice understand my bitter comments. I know you know what it’s like to be in character. I always have a hard time snapping out …
Being “in character,” presumably for her novel, wasn’t a very convincing explanation for her emails (there were no anti-Semites in her novel), but the fact that she seemed to think they needed to be explained seemed encouraging. It was December by now, and with the year winding down and Nasreen moving to the other side of the country, I was cautiously hopeful that the whole unpleasant episode might be coming to an end.
But my optimism was misplaced.
Over the previous year there had been a spate of novels and memoirs, some of them bestsellers, published by youngish women of Iranian origin. Many of these books, I gathered (I hadn’t read any of them), dealt with the period of the Shah’s downfall and the rise of the fundamentalists, which was the period Nasreen had been attempting to cover in her own novel.
Even the most well-balanced writers are prone to anxiety about their work being preempted by other books. I suffer from it myself. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to learn that Nasreen was unhappy about these rival publications. What was surprising, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been, was to find out how she intended to deal with this unhappiness.
“You and Paula pandered my work” was the first clear indication. Over the next few weeks, murkily, but with steadily growing conviction, Nasreen began to elaborate a theory in which I and various Jewish cohorts were guilty of deliberately preventing her from finishing her book so that we could steal her ideas and sell them to these other writers, most of whom happened to be Jewish as well as Iranian.
Like all conspiracy theories, this required constant adjustment in order to accommodate both Nasreen’s own shifting grievances and the obstinate bits of reality that stood in its way. Sometimes I appear to be acting alone; sometimes the complexity of the charges requires me to have been in league with one or both of my “yentas” (Janice and Paula), and sometimes the scale of my operation is perceived to be so vast that Nasreen is forced to link me to entirely new networks of co-conspirators, including, at one time, most of the faculty of the Morgan College writing program. So too with the authors we’re accused of helping: sometimes the denunciations focus on one in particular, sometimes two or more are grouped together, and there are periods in which I and my gang appear to be supplying as many as four desperate, unscrupulous writers with Nasreen’s material, all at the same time.
A kind of feedback effect occurs now, between the increasingly villainous scenarios Nasreen imagines and the pitch of her rage, each intensifying the other. “Janice gives you manuscripts…,” begins one,
that you type up in your boring trying-to-be-white style.
you are the downfall of a culture. go back to england. we don’t want you here.
[…]
We rule now, your ways are OVER. you’re all dying off …
get a toupe.
The emails become more apocalyptic in tone:
oh what will happen to you all … your stupid fortress … your stupid stupid life made from other people’s blood and sweat …
More overtly threatening:
X [one of the Iranian authors] is fucked. And if you have something to do
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