Author(s): Janet Malcolm

Biography | Marianne's Book Talkers

The final work of one of the greatest non-fiction writers of the last century is a stunningly original memoir and a moving exploration of family history

For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing towards the artifice that underpins both public and private selves.

In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own life.Beginning with the image of a morose young girl on her way from Prague to New York in 1939, to fitful early loves and her fascination with what it might mean to be a 'bad girl', Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escapes the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family.

Later, she delves into the world of William Shawn's New Yorker and the infamous libel trial that saw her become a character in her own drama.

Written with Malcolm's peerless skill and sharp wit, this memoir from a titan of American letters is unlike any other.

CONSTANT READER STAFF REVIEW: MARIANNE

The world lost one of its keenest observers when we lost Janet Malcolm in 2021. What a gift to have one last book to enjoy! After a lifetime of reportage on everything from duelling psychoanalysts and the ethics of journalism to art, photography, and beyond, in her final work Malcolm turns her writer’s eye upon her own history.

Born in Prague in 1934, Malcolm grew up in the milieu of Czech Jewish refugees in Manhattan in the 40’s and 50’s, and came into her writerly powers at The New Yorker, in an illustrious career that was not without controversy.

Inspired by photographs in her collection (Malcolm was also an accomplished photographer and visual artist – some people really can do it all!) these insightful, sad, funny vignettes explore the nature of biography and memory, and ask what it means to tell the story of a life.