When I’m stuck—and I’m stuck all the time—I look at “Forty-one False Starts,” Janet Malcolm’s Profile of the artist David Salle. The piece is a strange paean to the fact of journalistic fallibility. You will never capture a subject’s real likeness. There are too many possible beginnings to choose from, too many ways to write a sentence, to disclose a detail or share an observation, and settling on one possibility forecloses all the others. But Malcolm found a way not to choose—to admit to her limitations in a way that transformed them into something wonderful, something unique, and she did it with so much style and intelligence that the rest of us can only put our pencils down and call it a day. It is a triumph disguised as failure, and the performance of the piece is unrepeatable: like the writer who wrote it, one of a kind. —Alexandra Schwartz
There are certain people for whom a first name doesn’t quite suffice, even in the minds of their friends. It feels obscene to claim Janet Malcolm as a friend. She was one, but I was never able to think of her as just “Janet.” She was always her full name in my mind. I’ve never met a person (or read the work of a person) who was so assuredly herself. Her brilliant books are nearly most amazing for what they leave out, which is everything that didn’t interest her. There was nothing dutiful in her writing: if she didn’t care about some element of a story, she just didn’t include it. She was this way in person, too, growing quiet when a conversation turned in a direction she found boring. “You can scarcely believe such people exist!” was a line I heard her say multiple times, in reference to figures she found foolish. Such a dignified and damning way of expressing distaste: doubting someone’s very existence.
Her self-assurance had a way of making life seem so straightforward. A little more than a year ago, I was telling her about the book I was writing, wringing my hands about various people who wouldn’t talk to me. Her advice was simple: “Forget about them. Just write about the people who will talk to you. That’s what I do.” It felt like a revelation. Similarly, when I invited her to attend a lecture that was going to be held near her house, she replied, “Dear Alice, thanks for thinking of me, but I don’t think so. xxxJ” I’m not sure if I’ve ever received a more inspiring or instructive e-mail.
This all makes her sound austere, but she wasn’t. She was sneakily very funny, loved to gossip, and was fascinated by fashion magazines—delighted by their absurdity. When she found out I had met the owners of a Maine summer house that once belonged to the psychoanalyst Kurt Eissler (a character in “In the Freud Archives”), she grilled me for details about them. One afternoon, over tea, I showed her how to use emojis, and she was thrilled at the prospect of sending a horse to her granddaughter, whom she spoke of lovingly all the time. She was reserved and intimidating, but when she was charmed by something it really showed.
Janet—I’ll try to drop the last name, though it feels strange—wrote my favorite books I’ve ever read. It was a privilege to know her, and I wish she were still here. I’ll miss her a lot. —Alice Gregory
There’s a line in the first paragraph of “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” Janet Malcolm’s Profile of Ingrid Sischy, where she describes the formidable interior of the art critic Rosalind Krauss’s apartment: “Each piece of furniture and every object of use or decoration has evidently had to pass a severe test before being admitted into this disdainfully interesting room.” Malcolm identifies her own interest not merely in what is on display but in what is not, in everything that has been “found wanting,” all of the regular pedestrian items that Krauss has summoned the strength to refuse. Malcolm continues, “No one can leave this loft without feeling a little rebuked: one’s own house suddenly seems cluttered, inchoate, banal.”
Malcolm had to have known that this had the ring of self-portraiture. She couldn’t help but notice the clumsy ways in which we reveal whatever it is we find darkly wanting about ourselves. In some of her later work, it’s clear that her subjects understood, if helplessly, what they had got themselves into. No one is capable of exercising the kind of self-control that could entirely banish the expression of private vanity, weakness, clutter, banality. There is a scene in a Profile of Eileen Fisher where Fisher realizes, to her obvious dismay, that her attempt to exile one of her house cats has been seized upon by Malcolm as a minor sign of some obscure character flaw. Fisher repeats her justifications—that, although the cat lives outside, he remains the healthiest of her cats—but she seems to realize that even her defensiveness has given something away. A few years ago, Malcolm and I met for a coffee at a bakery near her home. As we sat down, I made an idle, pointless remark about how I’d passed the particular establishment for years and had never gone inside. I knew, even before I finished speaking, that I was saying something just to say something. Malcolm, fully in character, made no attempt to hide her puzzlement. “That’s strange,” she said, and paused. “It only opened a week ago.” —Gideon Lewis-Kraus
So much of Janet Malcolm’s work lives permanently in my mind. But the book that I return to, again and again, is “The Silent Woman” (1994), which grew out of a New Yorker piece of the same name. The “silent woman” is the poet Sylvia Plath, though her tumultuous life is not Malcolm’s subject so much as the inciting incident for a grand exploration of biographical writing. As with most of Malcolm’s work, the book is a delicate but dizzying seesaw ride: Malcolm believed that biographical writing is, at its core, an unethical, “transgressive” endeavor. And yet, there she is, writing a meta-biography about a horde of Plath biographers, who attempt to squeeze the poet’s kaleidoscopic existence between covers.
What Malcolm set out to find, when she started reporting, was why so many of Plath’s biographers found themselves at bitter loggerheads with both Plath’s widower, Ted Hughes, and his fussbudget sister, Olwyn, who tightly guarded the Hughes/Plath estate. The biographers, Malcolm found, were wholly unsympathetic to Hughes, blaming him for Plath’s depression and even for her death. Malcolm makes clear that she believes this a reductive conclusion (“A person who dies at thirty in the middle of a messy separation remains forever fixed in the mess,” she wrote), but she avoids tidy judgment. What keeps me coming back to “The Silent Woman” is that, every single time I read it, my sympathies waver. I find myself warming to Hughes’s cause, then to Plath’s, and then I hear Malcolm’s stern voice telling me that choosing sides is exactly the kind of behavior that she distrusts. The joy of the book lies in watching her puzzle through the big questions, asking whether she should be poking around in another woman’s secrets at all, constantly implicating herself while pushing ahead. Her roiling self-examination was its own kind of poetic pursuit. —Rachel Syme
Janet Malcolm belonged to a realm of writers that I aspire to be part of and assume I’ll never join. I said to her once, “You are a writer I read to learn from,” which is an embarrassingly earnest thing to say, but I admired her, and it was true. Besides, when praise is genuine, why stint on it? Her thinking was precise and of an exceptionally high order. She had an ability to find an intriguing line of words to fit her intriguing and almost always singular line of thinking. She was also mischievous and liked to make a kind of smackdown assertion—a signature trait, as anyone who has read “The Journalist and the Murderer” knows. In that book, by writing about a particular set of circumstances she had made them general, and she had made them signify ideas.
She was small and fine-boned. I saw her once on the subway, and among the rest of us her fragility was startling. She looked like a slight and elegant figure among the brutes. She had a wide face and eyes that looked directly into yours. I saw her expression as estimating, and I was always a little afraid of her, but I don’t know if I should have been. Her manner was a little severe, though, so that I always felt I hadn’t read enough or learned enough to begin a conversation that she might be interested in having.
I met her in 1975, when I was twenty-three and a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and she and her husband, Gardner Botsford, were visiting her sister Marie Winn and Winn’s husband, Allan Miller, at a house, in the Truro woods, that Winn and Miller had rented. The house was on Horseleech Pond, just back of the ocean and the dunes, in the heart of the National Seashore, and secluded, in the midst of pine and oak woods. I met Allan and Marie that summer, liked them very much, and was in the habit of showing off by driving the police car into the woods to visit them. One time when I did, Janet and Gardner were there. There is a sort of commemorative photograph of that summer in which everyone is lined up, yearbook style, outside the house, and I in my police uniform am a type of prop. I wish I had it now, but I’ve lost it.
It is impossible to imagine when we are young who we will become if we live a long and interesting and, in Malcolm’s case, consequential life, of the effects of decades of reading and looking and conversation. A person as exceptional as Malcolm was becomes something like an archive of sensibility and thought, one that is irreplaceable, and when such a person dies it is, as John Updike said, of William Maxwell, as if a library has burned. People such as Malcolm who appear to be so much themselves are rare and inspiring, and the loss of such a person is an impoverishment. —Alec Wilkinson
Like being irradiated, like cleaning your filthy glasses, like plunging your bloated brain in cool water, like watching the pure fundamental geometry of social presentation and deception be revealed for the first time by a manipulative and absolutely unerring god. Every time I read “Forty-one False Starts” I want to run around and scream, remembering what’s possible. —Jia Tolentino
Upon hearing the news of Janet Malcolm’s death, the first thing I did was cry. The second thing I did was search my e-mail to find out when we were last in touch—too many months ago, in the first wave of the pandemic—and then to read through some of the messages she’d sent over the years. Generous words, amused words, helpful words. I’d had to cancel a lunch we’d scheduled because of a domestic crisis: my cat had gone missing, days before I was due to move houses. Janet, a cat-lover, offered advice—had I tried putting up flyers? She’d done that many times in similar situations. “They are completely unpredictable. Many scenarios are possible,” the e-mail read. One of her own cats had been trapped for several days inside a neighbor’s empty house—reduced, she assumed, to sustaining itself by drinking from the toilet. “It sometimes takes them a long time to get back from some stupid irresistible adventure,” she wrote: the perfect conjunction of adjectives.
I knew Janet as a byline long before I knew her as a colleague. I moved to New York to go to journalism school just a few months before “The Journalist and the Murderer” was published; and I read it, as we all did then, with the shock of the new. As a personage, on the page, she was daunting: fiercely smart, relentlessly analytic, with a cool precision in her turn of phrase. I could have skipped J-school and just read Janet instead. And, in fact, reading her work has been a career-long education: in piece after piece, she offered an ongoing lesson in how to listen, what to listen for, and how to build an unassailable structure. She was in every respect daunting.
As a colleague, though, she was immensely warm and supportive. One of the peculiarities and strengths of an institution like The New Yorker is its intergenerational breadth, with the possibility of friendship and enlightenment extending across the decades. In her eighties, Janet could be as excited by the work of colleagues in their twenties as they were dazzled by her storied accomplishments. The acute openness and receptivity that characterized her stance as a reporter also informed her generous approach as a colleague, and in that respect, as in so much else, she was an indelible inspiration. When my missing cat returned the day after our cancelled lunch, I took a photo of my gleeful son lying beside her as she slept off her stupid irresistible adventure, then e-mailed it to Janet. “His lovely smile tells the story,” she wrote back. “And her all tuckered out pose sort of tells hers.” How terrible it is to lose Janet, with her peerless capacity for seeing the story, and for telling it. —Rebecca Mead
