Give Me Everything You Have

This is a compelling new avenue in the tell-all memoir arena. James Lasdun, poet and novelist par excellence, writes honestly and brutally about the time a creative writing student, seemingly spurned by his lack of motivation to be friends with her, stalked him visually online, turning his online space in a type of 'electronic terrorism', emailing him, his contacts, his employers, his other students, reviewers, agents and editors about what an awful man he was.

It's compelling. And brutal. And arrogant. But compelling all the same.

When Lasdun takes on a teaching job, he meets Nasreen who shows promise as a writer. After she accepts his offers to help her get her work seen by professionals such as his agent, things take a turn for the seedy when Nasreen accuses Lasdun through their email correspondence of sleeping with his students, except her. She accuses him of not helping to get her work published, and eventually of plagiarising her. What follows is a brilliantly compulsive barrage of emails and extrapolations of who and where Nasreen is, why she is cyber-stalking Lasdun and what he has done to bring this upon himself. We're left with a sense of complete and utter fear as her ability to torture him and reduce his reputation to the embers of sexual harassment, racism and jealousy, all through trolling him on the internet, that we start to see how the power of technology to bring us together has dangerous, dark side-effects. While Lasdun's motivation for writing such a memoir, and his inability to sustain the 'tension' of his real life, make for the occasional lack of balance in the book, it's a compelling story of our times, masterfully told.