Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. By Salman Rushdie. New York:  Random House, 2024,  224 pp., $28.00 hardcover. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. By Salman Rushdie. New York:  Random House, 2012,  656 pp., $20.00 paperback.

When I first read Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton, I confess that I did not have a favorable response to the author. The guy practically invented the humble brag, found too much delight in being part of the in crowd, and erred on the side of being self-serving in characterizing his role in relationships. After reading his new, briefer memoir, Knife, I decided to go back and reread Joseph Anton, and this time I mustered much more empathy for him. It is not difficult to figure out why I had this change in perception. Salman Rushdie had experienced something universal, that is, having a deepest fear, but also something rare, having his deepest fear come true.

Joseph Anton exhaustingly details the years of contending with the infamous fatwa, issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, in reaction to Rushdie's (1988) novel The Satanic Verses. The memoir documents his rocky path, contending with stressful moves from safe house to safe house, the vicissitudes of feedback from the British government and the security personnel assigned to him, and the hopes and disappointments that the fatwa would be undone. He endured having his book burned and his life threatened. Knife tells a profoundly different story,

focusing on the brutal, incompetent but almost lethal knife attack by a lone individual. It then moves onto the aftermath as Rushdie was recovering, which includes mention of his positive therapy experience with Dr. Justin Richardson, the current director of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (more on this later).

The title, Joseph Anton, is taken from the first names of Rushdie's favorite authors, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, and provides distance from a first-person perspective th