Give Me Everything You Have

The writer and critic James Lasdun is the author of several collections of stories, including It’s Beginning to Hurt, two novels, including The Horned Man, three and soon to be four poetry collections, including Landscape with Chainsaw, and most recently a memoir about being stalked by a former writing student, Give Me Everything You Have. In this new book Lasdun explores how his nurturing relationship of a particularly talented student, Nasreen – which he openly states bordered on flirtation at times – unexpectedly turned into obsessive campaign of abuse and anti-Semitism. Here he speaks to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about how culpable he feels in this unresolved situation, the story about D. H. Lawrence denying a seductress that gives him hope and why finding a close reader can sometimes be a curse.