Fragments of a life: Janet Malcolm meditates on old family photographs

Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021, was one of her generation’s great practitioners – one might say agitators – of journalism and biography. She was a master of studies that are ostensibly about one thing, but are actually of a depth and range the reader is never entirely prepared for. Whatever topic she had in hand, you find her nudging at its limits, questioning its practices and accepted norms, turning what could, tediously, be described as a ‘gimlet eye’ on the irrational, emotional investment we have in those norms. A hallmark of her work is an extraordinary ability to (seem to) work her subjects out. There is something chilling about this gimlet-eyedness, something that makes you feel for the unsuspecting subjects who speak gamely into her tape recorder, confident in their control over the narrative. 

There is also an outsider air to Malcolm’s work – a kind of refusal of professional loyalties that saw her famously describe journalistic practice as ‘morally indefensible’ and admit to the ‘voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike’.