The Eerie Similarities of Life and Novel

NYS Writers Institute Fellow James Lasdun is the subject of a New Yorker blog piece about the eerie similarities between his new memoir of being stalked, Give Me Everything You Have (2013) and his earlier novel, The Horned Man (2002).

“The fact that I had written a novel, The Horned Man, in which a college instructor believes he is being framed for a series of sex crimes, gave the situation a piquancy that didn’t escape me,” Lasdun writes, “though I was in no condition to enjoy it.”

We, however, are in a condition to “enjoy” such ironies, if only because we have the luxury of observing them from a safe distance. Well, relatively safe. It is a peculiarly arresting aspect of this exquisitely written memoir that much of its horror derives from how easily we can see ourselves (or anyone) falling prey to just the kind of harassment he suffers.

More in the New Yorker:  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/04/what-has-he-done-on-james-lasduns-memoir.html

Lasdun currently leads two free community workshops for the Institute, one on fiction and one on memoir:

http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/workshop.html