THE ABSENT WOMAN

A biography of one of the 20th century’s most famous journalists.

Unlike contemporaries such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm (1934-2021), the longtime New Yorker writer, “was disinterested in being a celebrity.” Sneider, an author and former editor at Wired, speculates that this was because Malcolm was always “a member of the minority”: “[a] woman, a Jew, and an émigré.” Yet she became a member of the New York literary scene and a prolific nonfiction writer with works that made her controversial in her day but a hero to later generations. Sneider began studying Malcolm’s work when she was a student at Yale in 2018. She was fascinated by archive documents pertaining to Malcolm’s personal life, from her certificate of American citizenship—she was born in Prague—to her letters’ “moments of quiet revelation,” most notably an exchange between her and Philip Roth during “his splashy divorce from the actress Claire Bloom.” Sneider has now produced this admiring biography that “puts materials from Malcolm’s archives and episodes from her life in conversation with her published work.” She covers all the major points: Malcolm’s family’s move to New York in 1939 after the Nazis invaded Poland; her education at the University of Michigan, where she wrote for and edited The Gargoyle humor magazine; her two marriages, first to classmate Donald Malcolm and then to Gardner Botsford, her New Yorker editor; her fascination with photography and collage; and the story behind her two most famous pieces, In the Freud Archives, which led to a 12-year legal battle in which she was sued for libel, and The Journalist and the Murderer. Sneider is clearly a fan. At Yale, she mounted an exhibit of items from Malcolm’s archive that Malcolm liked so much that she invited Sneider over for tea. Whatever one’s take on Malcolm, she was one of the 20th century’s more consequential journalists, as this book amply demonstrates.

An appreciative retrospective of the life and career of a literary trailblazer.