At one point or another, The New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm construed each profession or art form she wrote about as a mug’s game. She asserted that the “crowning paradox of psychoanalysis is the near-uselessness of its insights,” though she filled her work with Freudian tropes and paradigms. (She herself spent eight years in analysis.) The presumption of innocence underlying criminal trials had a “hollowness” that called the whole judicial system into question. Biography was a genre that Malcolm practiced and investigated, and she has now become a subject of it with the publication of Eve Sneider’s The Absent Woman. But all biography struck Malcolm as “transgressive,” an “impertinence”; its readers would be better off accepting that “if anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self.” Which isn’t to say that readers should favor autobiography. The “original sin” of that undertaking is to wallow in “memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification—and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them.”
The quotations above come from five books produced over five decades, and this catalog of futility and ethical compromise does not even include Malcolm’s most famous animadversion, which she lobbed against her own craft and calling: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” These words open The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), Malcolm’s account of the lawsuit brought by Jeffrey MacDonald (the murderer, an Army captain convicted of killing his wife and children) against Joe McGinniss (the journalist working on a book about him), who’d maintained MacDonald’s cooperation by writing him letters that conveyed the clear impression that McGinniss believed in his innocence. The book McGinniss finally published, Fatal Vision, squarely affirmed MacDonald’s guilt.
This literary treachery seemed to agitate Malcolm more than the slaughter of MacDonald’s family. It was all of a piece with her certainty that nonfiction writers made reality and fact as pliable as they are for attorneys facing off in a courtroom. Journalistic accounts of trials all impose falsely coherent plotlines on actuality. According to Malcolm, nonfiction is always aspiring to the authoritative “completeness” and seeming inevitability of fiction. (Notice that the notorious first line of The Journalist and the Murderer, which lays down a universal law, has a cadence similar to the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice.) In The Silent Woman (1994), her study of the ever-multiplying biographical literature about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Malcolm took things further: “The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.”
[David A. Graham: Janet Malcolm the magician]
Journalists were outraged by Malcolm’s account of MacDonald versus McGinniss not just because of what she included in the long New Yorker articles where The Journalist and the Murderer first took form, but also because of what she omitted: the fact that she herself was then embroiled in litigation launched by Jeffrey Masson, a flamboyant psychoanalyst whose professional adventures she had chronicled while massaging and repositioning interview quotations from him beyond accepted norms. She could produce tape recordings of most of the quotations in their raw form, but a handful of the more inflammatory ones were in written notes that she couldn’t locate; in the first of two trials, she was found guilty of libel.
Malcolm insisted that her adaptive techniques had once been “a commonplace of New Yorker nonfiction” composed by writers such as Joseph Mitchell, who brought his subjects to levels of articulateness they couldn’t reach by themselves. In an afterword to The Journalist and the Murderer, an appendage necessitated by the uproar over the New Yorker articles, she argued that “when a journalist undertakes to quote a subject he has interviewed on tape, he owes it to the subject, no less than to the reader, to translate his speech into prose.” This is at wild variance with all mainstream journalistic ethics. The written genre in which characters, for the reader’s convenience, speak better than they would in real life is, of course, the novel.
However much Malcolm acknowledged the queasiness she felt about her own participation in journalism, she barreled ahead. She could not have pulled off her mental acrobatics and compelling portraiture without a brilliant mind and a wickedly piercing style. During John Roberts’s Senate confirmation hearings in 2005, the “constant play of expression on his features put one in mind of nineteenth-century primers of acting in which emotions—pleasure, agreement, dismay, uncertainty, hope, fear—are illustrated on the face of a model.” The best of her observations merit something beyond Alexander Pope’s famous phrase: They’re not things oft thought but ne’er so well expressed; they’re things probably never before thought at all. Consider these remarks about having really good seats at Il Trovatore :
The inequality of audience experience is intrinsic to the performing arts and unique to them. Literature and painting and sculpture are mediums of equal opportunity. A rich reader’s experience of Anna Karenina is no more intense than a poor one’s. The hedge-fund owner and the secretary see exactly the same Raft of the Medusa. But only the hedge-fund owner gets to see the expression on Azucena’s face when she relives throwing the wrong baby into the fire.
Malcolm had an aphorist’s desire to turn anything she apprehended into an across-the-board truth. A steady snow of inclusivities—“every,” “all,” “we,” “always”—falls upon her pages:
Children are always feeling secretly ashamed or anxious.
All families of suicides are alike.
There is a law of human nature—let us call it the Confidant’s Law—that dictates that no secret is ever told to only one person; there is always at least one other person to whom we feel compelled to spill the beans.
One usually waits in vain for a single example to support these ostensibly omnipresent phenomena. And yet, Malcolm’s mordant power of tone makes a reader register and silently assent to a great deal of this ex cathedra stuff. Her style alone keeps her worthy of our attention. But the particular way she challenged assumptions of objectivity is what makes her a figure intriguing enough to merit her own biography. In her exposés of literary malpractice, she was unafraid to use some of the very manipulations she was decrying. The writs she issued to others were also blank checks made out to herself.
Sneider’s subtitle, The Genius of Janet Malcolm, makes one fear a book of fangirl gush, probably the last thing Malcolm herself would have wanted. One flinches further upon learning that Malcolm had invited Sneider to tea after she, then still a Yale undergraduate, curated an exhibition of Malcolm’s papers in the university’s Beinecke Library. But seven years after that tea, Sneider, now a contributor to The New York Review of Books, has produced a book that assembles the biographical facts about Malcolm with admirable brevity, if not always precision. As for her subject’s writing, Sneider more or less concurs with a widespread verdict: “Malcolm acolytes will tell you that she is everywhere and nowhere within her work.” If traditional literary biography seeks to illuminate the work through the life, this one mostly reverses direction. The Absent Woman is a play on the title of Malcolm’s Plath book, and a kind of challenge that Sneider issues to herself and to readers: Go find the person in the books she wrote.
Sneider’s voice is a lot breezier than Malcolm’s (whose isn’t?). The casual coarseness of her texting generation’s style (“pissing other people off,” “a little fucked up”) makes one imagine her blithely dropping crumbs on Malcolm’s carpet during that tea. Sneider does share a few basic techniques with her subject, such as taking the reader along on her research, making the work on the book part of the book itself. She also breaks into the first person (“I would be remiss not to mention”) when that seems useful.
Sneider tells us that Malcolm arrived in the United States, a Jewish Czech refugee, along with her parents in July 1939 (not a moment too soon), when she was almost 5 years old. Members of the Winn (originally Wiener) family assimilated with considerable speed and success, even as they remained closely tied to their fellow Czechs in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood; Jana, now Janet, continued to speak Czech with her parents. In 1951, she went off to the University of Michigan. The most surprisingly titled chapter in The Absent Woman is “The Humorist,” which covers Malcolm’s writing and editing for the school’s frolicsome undergraduate magazine, The Gargoyle. When Sneider mentions a later New Yorker colleague who said Malcolm “has not one drop of humor—not one,” she interprets the comment as “ironic,” but a reader of Malcolm’s work will find little to support such an interpretation. Cold wit abounds, but precious little warmth and laughter.
Before leaving Ann Arbor, Janet Winn married Donald Malcolm, her editorial predecessor at The Gargoyle. After graduation, the two moved to Washington, D.C., where both wrote for The New Republic, and a few years later to Manhattan, where each began a long association with The New Yorker. Now the mother of a young daughter, Malcolm wrote about shopping and interior design before becoming the magazine’s photography critic. Sneider observes that Malcolm’s “writing on photography could be read as a commentary on her own craft. She was fascinated by the medium’s quest for realism, by its murky relationship to truth-telling.” Donald died young, in 1975, by which time Janet had already begun an affair with Gardner Botsford, another New Yorker editor. She insisted to William Shawn, the magazine’s top editor, that Botsford continue to edit her stories even after she married him.
Sneider properly gives a great deal of attention to Malcolm’s style, characterizing it as “terrifyingly sharp,” “commanding,” and “cutting.” There is such a subzero severity to it that on the rare occasions when Malcolm uses an exclamation point, it’s as if someone else has plunked an emoji onto the page. One friend of hers noted that “the impersonality of how she writes is really the personality.” But Malcolm saw even the chilly projection of impersonality as just another self-interested construction. As she put it in The Silent Woman, “writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness. The pose of fair-mindedness, the charade of evenhandedness, the striking of an attitude of detachment can never be more than rhetorical ruses.”
Malcolm affected these postures herself, and on occasion she could be almost cruel in the pursuit of some small thematic end. In The Silent Woman, she describes a visit to the home of one source, an elderly man who decades earlier had spoken with Plath the night before she died. Her prolonged description of the house’s awful filth and hoardings is apparently justified by how it “stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing”—namely, the need to rid one’s “vastly overfilled mind” of all but the essential points before starting. One has to ask whether this famous scourge of nonfiction’s distortions didn’t sometimes use metaphor only to crush reality beneath the gallop of her own hobbyhorses.
[From the April 2004 issue: Sylvia Plath, domesticated goddess]
If Malcolm, who died in 2021, had a “late style,” it was somewhat looser, less guarded. In her 70s, widowed and living by Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, she continued to make and exhibit collages in which text and photographic images sometimes combined in a process vaguely akin to the one she uses in Still Pictures (2023), a posthumously published memoir that allowed Malcolm to approach her own memories obliquely, through family photographs. Those physical objects seem as if they should offer factuality, or at least clues that unassisted memory cannot. But like letters and trial transcripts and so many tools of the trades that Malcolm scrutinized, the pictures sometimes let her down. Examining one snapshot of her very young self, taken several years before her first conscious memory, she writes, “No feeling of identification stirs as I look at her round face and thin arms and her incongruously assertive pose.”
The profile writing that she collected in Nobody’s Looking at You (2019)—which includes portrayals of the pianist Yuja Wang, the clothing designer Eileen Fisher, and the three sisters running Manhattan’s Argosy Book Store—tended toward the gentle and appreciative and even the self-mocking. (In the Fisher portrait, she hears herself “babbling about the ethical dilemmas of journalism.”) These articles don’t always go very deep; there’s no mystery to solve or fraud to expose. They come from a writer whose incandescent energy has subsided to a more ordinary professional level.
Sneider herself admits that Malcolm “threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall” when trying to justify her tampering with Jeffrey Masson’s interview quotes. Even admirers of Malcolm will concede this and likely wish that Sneider herself were more skeptical, less tolerant, than she appears to be of some of Malcolm’s peculiar behaviors and explanations. A year after the second trial, as Sneider summarizes it, “Malcolm’s two-year-old granddaughter Sophy pulled an inconspicuous red notebook off a bookshelf in her country home that, at long last, contained the handwritten notes she had been missing throughout the lawsuit. Three of the five quotes Masson took issue with were now more solidly on the record.” She seems to accept this story at face value, and perhaps it’s true. But if you had been involved in the fight of your life for what Sneider rightly describes as “twelve long, trying, tedious years,” wouldn’t you have at least run your hand along every bookshelf in your city apartment and country house to make sure that you hadn’t inadvertently put the crucial missing notes somewhere in your library? Without any expression of unease, Sneider informs us that Malcolm “opted not to part with the little red notebook” when she sent her papers to Yale; she instead supplied “photocopies of the relevant pages.”
Sneider correctly cites “control” as a core feature of Malcolm’s presentation, because at least the appearance of control (and its resultant authority) remains even when Malcolm is engaged in small fiddlings and concealments, or in her signature overstated generalizations. (Pronouncements that Sneider calls “bold” might better and more often be labeled “bald.”) Malcolm learned to discard one persona for another not only on the page but during her great legal crisis. Long after her courtroom troubles were over, she paid tribute to Sam Chwat, the acting-and-speech coach who helped her achieve a measure of vindication at the second Masson trial, in 1994, where she was cleared of libeling the psychoanalyst. She regretted how, at the first trial, well trained in the “accustomed New Yorker manner”—reticent and remote—she “came across as arrogant, truculent, and incompetent.” For the second trial, Chwat got her to address the jury, instead of Masson’s lawyer, when she was being questioned. He also orchestrated a makeover of her wardrobe, moving her from “skirts or trousers with jackets in black or subdued colors” into “pastel-colored dresses and suits, silk stockings and high heels, and an array of pretty scarves.”
The metamorphosis didn’t just succeed legally; it appealed to Malcolm in a visceral way. Chwat’s “gentle correction of my self-presentation at trial,” she wrote in a New York Review of Books essay, “took me to unexpected places of self-knowledge.” It convinced her that she could perform the tricks whose exposure continued to be her life’s work.
This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Journalist and the Manipulator.”