Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, by James Lasdun
In 2003, English writer James Lasdun taught a fiction workshop at a college in New York City. The star of the workshop was a woman in her 30s he calls “Nasreen”, who was working on a novel based on her family’s experiences in pre-revolutionary Iran. “There are seldom more than a couple of students in any workshop who seem natural writers, and they aren’t hard to spot,” Lasdun writes in the early pages of his memoir, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. “It was evident to me, after a few paragraphs, that Nasreen was one of them. Her language was clear and vigorous with a distinct fiery expressiveness in the more dramatic passages that made it a positive pleasure to read.”
