Salman Rushdie returns to the scene

“Where do you feel least safe?” the gun violence expert asked the crowd at the Chautauqua Institution amphitheater last July. This question held more than a hint of irony. Two years earlier, another speaker had been stabbed on that same stage in upstate New York, causing him injuries that nearly took his life.

Salman Rushdie, best known for his novels, has now turned to the genre of memoir to discuss that attack and its effect on him and his family. This is Rushdie’s second memoir. In 2012, he published Joseph Anton, a memoir about living under a fatwa—the 1989 order for his execution proclaimed by Ayatollah Khomeini, who deemed Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses blasphemous.

This new memoir, suitably titled Knife after the weapon used by Rushdie’s assailant, is a meditation on the meaning of the weapon itself, why the attacker might have wielded it, the damage it did to him, and how he experienced the aftermath. He describes the memoir as “a book I’d much rather not have needed to write.” He continues,