Flirting with Danger

Photographer: David Newby for The Guardian

I bought The Guardian yesterday because I wanted a tear sheet of my picture, modelling Denim. I can access the paper online  but I like old fashioned tear sheets.
I read the magazine with great interest, I usually enjoy the various columns and articles. I was struck by the piece written by James Lasdun, Flirting with danger.
It is an account of being stalked by a former student of his. Apparently, it has been going on for five years now. Lasdun, a writer, who often engages in teaching writing workshops to graduate students,  has now written a book "culling her emails", after all, something she accused him of doing all along to boost his writing since they met, which he has eventually done. The piece is a plug for the forthcoming book, a fictionalised account of what Lasdun experienced. I am saying this because it is so easy to lose sight of such details. I do not for a moment doubt the distress that being stalked would have caused Lasdun, but I would like to go a little deeper because there is much I find unconvincing in this story. Unusually, I left a comment to this effect on The Guardian piece, amidst a chorus of the old  "kill the witch" - here taking the form of either diagnosing extreme mental illness, on the basis of Wikipedia's definitions,  or  proposing ways "to punish the criminal".

The distress goes both ways, I believe that Nazreen too is highly distressed and this book will definitely worsen her condition of distress. I find it hard to believe that after being arrested twice - a major shock for her-  she was not offered some form of therapy, at the very least some CBT (not that I think CBT is particularly effective, but at least it allows one to consider other forms of therapy). I find it hard to believe that the stalking continues - in any case he certainly has not stopped reading her emails and drawing on them for his book.
Nazreen is, he says, a gifted writer. And a woman. It is this combination that raises alarm bells for me
Lasdun is writing this to clear his name. As a writer, he does not seem to be so talented after all, as the characters in this 'real-life' novel come across as rather shallow.
But what I find worrying is the use of the trope of 'the mad woman', the 'hysteric' (here obsessional and delusional). I can't help thinking  of Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic and how we still badly need to deconstruct patriarchal metaphors and sexist assumptions.
We don't really know what really went on, we only know Lasdun's account. Let's not forget that people will buy the book titillated by the excerpt and Lasdun will make a profit. If this is meant to be a 'real-life' novel by someone who calls himself a writer and even teaches other people how to write, I would expect it to be written with greater sophistication and insight, with a less partisan view and without encouraging a "kill the witch" attitude in the readers - less of a rehash of Fatal Attraction, in other words.


(Model: Alex B)