Janet Malcolm's posthumously published quasi-memoir is succinct and thought-provoking — and manages to capture so much of what made her so unfailingly interesting.
writer Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021 at age 87, was a journalist who interrogated her own methods and motives as assiduously as she questioned her subjects. She continued this practice right through her last book.is a series of recollections triggered by old snapshots. Among the issues Malcolm explores are the vagaries of memory and the challenges of writing about oneself impartially.
Malcolm was also distrustful of biography, and even more wary of autobiography. The inherent conflict between journalistic objectivity and narcissism gave her pause. In a 2010 essay about autobiography for, she wrote of memory's"autism" and"its passion for the tedious." She concluded:"Memory is not a journalist's tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly.
By poring through old snapshots — many of fellow homesick Czech refugees and émigrés who became part of her parents' circle — Malcolm constructs a picture of the family's early years in America. What also emerges is an oblique view of the transformation of Jana Wienerovna into the Americanized, no-longer-Jewish Jan Winn and, finally, Janet Malcolm.
Along the way, Malcolm, who was quick as a child to label people uninteresting, explores the fact that interesting things can happen to even dull people.
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