Reader's backstory first: of Rushdie's novels, I've read Midnight's Children (fascinating, but something keeps me at an emotional distance to all the characters), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (loved that one, my favourite of the books of his I know), The Moor's Last Sigh (somehow here I don't have the emotional distance problem while seeing it in it all the virtues of MC; MC is supposed to be the big masterpiece, but if I had to reccomend or reread one of the two, I'd go for the Moor every time); I browsed through but couldn't connect with The Ground Beneath Her Feet at all, which is why I didn't read it properly; haven't tried any of the later novels; I did read, enjoy, mentally argue with but was always entertained by his essays. The Satanic Verses I haven't read, but at some point want to get around to it. I am old enough to remember the so called "Rushdie affair" unfolding in real time, as an adult. The only conversation about Rushdie entirely unrelated to the fatwa on him I can ever recall having was with the Indian writer Shobha Dé, who was hostile towards him for what struck me as competitive reasons. (Basically it was about which of them depicted Bombay/Mumbai better. She said he didn't know the current day city at all but wrote about the Bombay of his childhood, not the Mumbai of the present. Also she resented that he was seen as representative for Indian writers when he spent most of his life, including his adolescence, in the West and thus to her was a British writer.) So I approached his memoirs about the years he spent with a death sentence because of a book - the title is the alias he was forced to adapt - with great interest.

( Once upon a time, there was a writer )