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The Impossible Profession

Janet Malcolm and the travails of long-form journalism.

The Many Lives of Janet Malcolm

A new biography tells the story of one of America’s great masters of reportage.

Every journalist wants to claim Janet Malcolm as her own. A journalist’s journalist whose work is almost universally admired today, she is often held up as a great exemplar of literary reportage. In her introduction to a collection of Malcolm’s interviews—interviews so rarely given that the book contains the majority of her public conversations—Katie Roiphe recalls an end-of-the-semester party for her graduate program at which a student “printed out photographs of the writers we admire and cut their faces out in circles and put them on Popsicle sticks on the cake.” When it was time to cut the cake, everyone tried to claim the Janet slice.

The Absent Woman: The Genius of Janet Malcolm

I get it. If I had been at the party, I would have done the same. There is obviously a lot to admire in Malcolm’s writing, but there is also a kind of glamorous mystery she cultivated through her reclusive, incisive nature. The journalist Robert S. Boynton once warned people never to “eat in front of Janet Malcolm; or show her your apartment; or cut tomatoes while she watches,” unless you want “every unflattering gesture and nervous tic” to be “recorded eventually with devastating precision.” Vivian Gornick, in a review of Malcolm’s last book for this publication, similarly commented that “her sentences…were incredibly clean. Cold, clear, and clean.” And yet rarely did Malcolm apply those cold, clear, and clean sentences to herself.

If Malcolm’s enigmatic persona is part of her appeal, it is likely also what drew Eve Sneider to write The Absent Woman, the first proper biography of Malcolm, who died in 2021. When Sneider first read Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, she “knew nothing of the backdrop against which the book was written,” she tells us, “but I was curious about its writer, who wrote with terrifying precision.”

With The Absent Woman, Sneider attempts to uncover some of the secrets of Malcolm’s life, or at least to use what information is available to make some educated guesses. One of the first people to gain access to Malcolm’s archive at Yale, Sneider was also one of the lucky few who got to sit down with Malcolm for private conversations before she died. Running through how she came into her journalism career, stumbled upon each of her big stories, and wrote her way into The New Yorker as well as one of journalism’s biggest scandals, The Absent Woman examines the years before Malcolm became the venerated figure that she is today, while keeping sight of the ways that she unconsciously laid the foundation for the writer she would become. Part of the difficulty for a contemporary journalist writing about Janet Malcolm is confronting the fact that she was working at a time when the craft of journalism was very different. Gone are the days of the 60,000-word feature that would nearly fill a double issue of a magazine—as is the world in which a writer could become famous without cultivating a public image. Indeed, Malcolm’s entire way of doing journalism is a relic of the profession’s past. In other words, when we clamor for Janet Malcolm, we’re clamoring for a style of writing that we know we will never get to practice—for better and for worse.

Janet Malcolm was born Jana Wienerová in Prague in 1934 to a middle-class family who narrowly escaped the Holocaust in 1939, apparently after buying a Nazi official a racehorse in exchange for exit visas. Her family was “more Czech than Jewish,” and after arriving in New York City, they continued to view themselves that way. Changing their name to Winn, her parents sent Janet and her sister, Marie, to a Lutheran Sunday school and continued to speak Czech at home. They also moved to the Czech and German neighborhood of Yorkville in Manhattan. The Winn girls didn’t realize they were Jewish until they came home one day spouting antisemitic language and were told by their parents to stop. Even after Janet picked up English in school, she continued to feel like she was at a considerable remove from the world around her. She recalled as an adult a memory of her teacher saying, “Goodbye, children,” at the end of the school day, only to immediately feel jealous of whoever this classmate named “Children” was.

In The Absent Woman, Sneider cites Malcolm’s early sense of isolation as the germ of her eventual role as a professional outsider looking in: “Emigres,” she writes, “feel the gnaw of longing without necessarily knowing what they are longing for.” But Sneider’s account of Malcolm’s early life also gives us another clue to her well-known interest in the latent motives of others. Malcolm’s father, Josef, had been a neurologist and psychiatrist in Prague. In New York, he was temporarily forced to give up these specialties, but he continued to practice medicine for other Czech American families. While Josef wasn’t a psychoanalyst, as some writers have incorrectly stated, he was interested in Sigmund Freud’s theories, as many intellectuals at the time were—and as a family doctor, he perhaps also had to decipher the hidden sources of external maladies, mining those dark and mysterious places where the body and the mind often commingle. Trawling through Malcolm’s archive, Sneider also deduces that Josef had a creative side, writing short stories and making his way into “Prague’s literary scene.”

Only some of this information comes directly from Malcolm. She tended to avoid disclosing anything about herself or her family. A rare exception is Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, her only real work of autobiography and arguably her driest book, which was published two years after her death. “Biography can’t establish very much about interior life,” Malcolm once told an interviewer. But Still Pictures is the best we’ve got. Malcolm organized the book around a series of old family photographs. Among the many subjects she was laconic about was her father: She refused to say a single unflattering word about him. “The memories with a plot are, of course, the ones that........

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