Admire Rushdie as a writer and a champion – but don’t forget he is a man of flesh and blood | Nesrine Malik

In the struggles of many decades, we have asked the novelist to carry the weight of our anxieties. Can we now just let him be human?

In a 2017 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David launches his idea for a new show on Jimmy Kimmel's talkshow. It is to be called Fatwa! The Musical - a Broadway rendering of the Salman Rushdie affair. This angers an ayatollah in Iran, who issues a fatwa on David's life. All his backers vanish, he walks around in a disguise unable to live his life, and hires an overly paranoid, aggressive bodyguard, who also has very demanding taste in food and thread counts.

Fed up, David seeks out, and is granted an audience with Salman Rushdie. In a terrific coup, the man who receives David is played by Rushdie himself. Rushdie sits David down, chides him for being afraid and tells him the biggest secret about being the subject of a fatwa - fatwa sex".

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist