JANET MALCOLM

Insights from the late, legendary journalist.

Given the praise written about Malcolm upon her death in June 2021, one could be forgiven for not knowing she was “pilloried by my fellow journalists” for her most notorious piece of nonfiction writing, 1990’s The Journalist and the Murderer, which starts with the incendiary quote, “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.” Today, that book is considered a seminal piece of long-form reporting. Readers unfamiliar with Malcolm’s work will get a sense of her importance from the five interviews collected in the publisher’s latest entry in their Last Interview series. The book’s title conversation is the puniest, a skimpy 2019 entry in the New York Times’ “By the Book” section. The meat of this volume is the other four interviews, conducted for Salon, the Believer, the CBC’s radio program Writers and Company, and the Paris Review. There’s a lot of repetition, with multiple references to Jeffrey Masson, the psychoanalyst who sued Malcolm for libel over In the Freud Archives; that incendiary quote, which appears four times; the themes of betrayal in her work; and more. Readers keen to find out why, as Paris interviewer Katie Roiphe wrote, Malcolm is “both a grande dame of journalism, and still, somehow, its enfant terrible,” would be advised to read her books. But there are memorable insights, as well—e.g., when Malcolm talks about “the inequality between writer and subject that is the moral problem of journalism as I see it”; her conviction that nonfiction writers learn “the devices of narration” from novelists; and the sexism she encountered, as when she notes a “male chauvinist teacher” who “clearly preferred the boys in the class.” Roiphe provides the introduction.

A limited yet entertaining introduction to a doyenne of the fourth estate.