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    Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
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    Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
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    Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
    Audiobook7 hours

    Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked

    Written by James Lasdun

    Narrated by Robin Sachs

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, Give Me Everything You Have chronicles the author's strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled "verbal terrorist," who began trying, in her words, to "ruin him." Hate mail - much of it violently anti-Semitic - online postings, and public accusations of plagiarism and sexual misconduct were her weapons of choice and, as with more conventional terrorist weapons, proved remarkably difficult to combat. James Lasdun's account, while terrifying, is told with compassion and humor, and brilliantly succeeds in turning a highly personal story into a profound meditation on subjects as varied as madness, race, Middle Eastern politics, and the meaning of honor and reputation in the Internet age.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateFeb 12, 2013
    ISBN9781624062421
    Author

    James Lasdun

    James Lasdun was born in London and now lives in upstate New York. He has published two novels, as well as several collections of short stories and poetry. He has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times, T. S. Eliot, and Forward prizes in poetry, and he was the winner of the inaugural BBC National Short Story Award. His nonfiction has been published in Harper's Magazine, Granta, and the London Review of Books.

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    Reviews for Give Me Everything You Have

    3/5

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    • 3/5
      This is his side of being stalked by a former student via the internet. He is detached as he tells the stalking tale. It maddened me. Why didn't he change his e-mail address? Why didn't he go to the local police first? I didn't care about the stalking part. It was unresolved by the end of the book.What made the book worth reading was when he left the stalking part behind and told stories of his father, of Jerusalem, his train ride, and history of places and people he met. I got lost in those stories. His writing was excellent.
    • 4/5
      James Lasdun is one of those extremely rare writers who can write superb fiction, poetry and non-fiction, in this case a memoir of being stalked by a former student. While his prose might seem quiet and understated he has the ability to the felicitous word, the one that makes you shiver because it is so precisely what must be said. This is a departure for him but one necessitated by the disruption of his life when a young Iranian woman, who he had gone out of his way to help, became obsessed and demonic, not only to him but to the editor he recommended her to. There is a middle section in which Lasdun takes a train ride by himself out West to visit DH Lawrence's last home and during the trip we are privy to Lasdun's extraoridnary and unsparing ability to tease out themes and reactions in a way that reminded me of the meticulous unpacking that Freud demonstrates. It does not matter that I agree, that is immaterial, but the process indicates how he thinks and that was perhaps the most impressive quality of the book - how he thinks. He did not as far as I could tell do himself any favors nor hide any faults. He realizes too late that he colluded in the friendship, even to the point of the power relationship between the friendship. He enjoyed her attention until he didn't enjoy it anymore as she set about ,as she says, trying to ruin him. The book, however, weakens at the end in his exploration of the anti-Semitism of the assault, not because it isn't true but because he begins to recede from view. The subject matter, his trip to Israel, etc overpower the more intimate aspects of his self-revelation.
    • 2/5
      I would never have thought a memoir sold as the harrowing account of a man stalked by a former student could have so much self-important navel-gazing and so many irrelevant digressions. Lasdun comes off as a pretentious, arrogant, entitled jerk, which I can't imagine was his intention. He went through something tough, and I would have been interested to learn about it, but instead I'm wading through whole sections of "unrelated things I thought about on the train." Ugh.Another complaint: it's like a man had to be stalked and a man had to write about it for stalking to be taken seriously, when women are the likeliest victims of stalking, and by far the likeliest victims of violence from it. Lasdun is getting a lot of annoying and cryptic emails. That sucks. She even posted negative book reviews on his novels on Amazon and Goodreads! The horror! But where's the context? There's never a note that other people also experience this or how it can escalate. I'm not asking for a lit review chapter here, but maybe a lit review paragraph so we can understand the scope of the problem? Or does he not realize the problem exists outside of his inbox?
    • 3/5
      The premise of Lasdun's book is inherently fascinating and very timely in this society's advent of cyber-stalking; it had the potential to be utterly engrossing. However, Lasdun has a few fatal flaws, namely numerous gregarious diversions and a lack of self-awareness of his own rather guilty part in the entire stalking event. The emanation of Nasreen's relationship with Lasdun is very much encouraged by Lasdun, and the realization of that within the first few chapters rather ruined the book for me.
    • 2/5
      Lasdun is a writer who teaches writing at colleges when not traveling for research into his next writing project. In one class he had a student named Nasreen who showed promise in the novel she was writing. He offered to give her advice. She may have taken his help as meaning more that that. When rejected, she turn to a venomous attack on him via social media to the point of attacking others who he relied on for his career- editors, publishers, agents. It would made a great magazine article, but a book? To fill the many pages we learn a great deal about Judaism which Lasdun does not practice and we are taken on trips to Israel and Kansas via the travelogues he includes here.
    • 3/5
      As someone who has been stalked twice, once by a student, this was gripping and often uncomfortable reading for me.
    • 3/5
      This is James Lasdun's true story of being cyber-stalked for years by an ex-student whom he calls Nasreen. His initial friendliness and interest in her work were misread by Nasreen as expressions of love, though Lasdun was and is happily married and denies any flirtatious behavior. When he started receving increasingly suggestive emails he tried to back off from the relationship, only for Nasreen to oscillate between violent messages of love and even more enraged cries of hatred and revenge, mixed with anti-semitism. 'I will ruin you,' she wrote, and made every attempt to do that over the years with a stream of messages to colleagues, institutions and literary websites accusing Lasdun of plagiarism of her work and (somehow) rape by proxy. Lasdun has spent many years not only trying to get her to desist but also having to repair the reputation Nasreen has made every effort to tarnish.I read this account as part of some research I am conducting on erotomania. I found it interesting, initially compelling, though eventually Nasreen's rantings became wearisome to me (imagine how Lasdun must have felt having to suffer them day after day). Other reviewers have found Lasdun's diversions into literature and Jewry tedious but on the whole I thought the analogies he found to his situation in such varying works as 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' and 'Strangers on a Train' quite illuminating. His own train journey, where he confesses to sexual temptation and guilt, is introspective writing of real quality. I admire his honesty in examining his own motivations and shortcomings. The book meanders and eventually peters out in Jerusalem - I thought his attempt to associate the balled-up messages posted in the crevices of the Western Wall with Nasreen's barrage of emails unconsciously self-aggrandising and grandiose as a metaphor. This is too clearly the author in search of an ending which has not presented itself in real life. I read this account as part of some research I am conducting on erotomania. I found it interesting, initially compelling, though eventually Nasreen's rantings became wearisome to me (imagine how James Lasdun must have felt having to suffer them day after day). Other reviewers have found Lasdun's diversions into literature and Jewry tedious but on the whole I thought the analogies he found to his situation in such varying works as 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' and 'Strangers on a Train' quite illuminating. His own train journey, where he confesses to sexual temptation and guilt, is introspective writing of real quality. I admire his honesty in examining his own motivations and shortcomings. The book meanders and eventually peters out in Jerusalem - I thought his attempt to associate the balled-up messages posted in the crevices of the Western Wall with Nasreen's barrage of emails unconsciously self-aggrandising and grandiose as a metaphor. This is too clearly the author in search of an ending which has not presented itself in real life.
    • 4/5
      Give Me Everything You Have is an erudite, peripatetic memoir of the author's cyber-bullying (which is not to trivialise, but what happens to Lasdun is not really stalking). Though it loses steam in the last quarter, it's a nonetheless fascinating recollection, held together by Lasdun's charisma and intelligence.After a talented graduate of his writing class resumes contact, Lasdun, a somewhat introverted even awkward writer, finds himself beginning an exciting new friendship - a rareish event. Unfortunately, Nasreen, the new friend, is not as stable as she first appears, and soon starts living up to the book's title. This is not a typically "stalker" memoir. There's not a whole lot of narrative, and almost nothing in the way of suspense. What Lasdun supplies, however, is a passel of literary and historical allusions, and a winning - and frank - authorial voice. In attempting to make sense of what's happening to him, Lasdun can't help but parse events through his lenses as writer and critic. Allusions and rich histories bloom, by turns compelling, funny, sad. And Lasdun can't help deconstructing and assessing these byways, leaving the creative connection of the writer, and the shrewd dissection of the critic. This is abetted by his frank - and frankly charming - confessions. Lasdun is bemused to be an object of obsession, viewing himself as neither sexy nor dynamic. Rather, he sees himself as a shy, some awkward if not actively bumbling figure. Wise in classics and metaphor but not so much the sturm und drang of human relations. His willingness to confront his own self-image - and his own foibles and feelings - make the book a far more honest affair than most confessionals. The fact he possesses the vocabulary and knowledge to articulate both help greatly. This lack of drive to the novel does slow it down in the last quarter, however, as Lasdun takes his biggest digression into antisemitism on the whole and a trip to Jerusalem he takes as a freelancer. Sad to say, this section reads like a bit of a fill-in for length, and bears the stale hint of recycling about it. Whilst it's possible the Jerusalem trip may have had a huge impact on his thinking about the bullying, and a huge impact on his life at the time, the addition felt a little forced and meandering to me. Still, this was the only point in what was - by its very nature - a very digressive book, and the good outweighs this small mar.
    • 5/5
      Even the digressions are beautifully written. All the detail of how the stalking developed make it absolutely understandable