By the time I learned who Janet Malcolm was, it turned out that I had been circling her for some time. What I mean is that I had known about her work—I had read some of her articles in college classes and for pleasure, had had her books recommended to me by more than one beloved professor—but I just never had any reason to note the byline. If you are among those in the know, this may sound ridiculous to you. When you know of Janet Malcolm you spot traces of her everywhere. You understand that she was a titan of American letters—a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Book Award finalist, and the list goes on. You register her far-reaching influence. You can see that she was running circles around everyone else. But if you don’t know to look for her name, it is easy to miss.

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This was by design. To say that Malcolm was disinterested in being a celebrity is an understatement. She was actively opposed to the idea. While other prominent writers in her milieu—Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Renata Adler—became recognizable names and faces, the literary It Girls of their day, Malcolm generally did what she could to stay out of view. She didn’t like to talk about her work. She almost never posed for photos, sat for interviews, or did readings. When she and Didion both celebrated their eightieth birthdays in 2014, New York Magazine wanted to run a joint tribute, and Malcolm said no. Even for a rare appearance, a live conversation in 2012 with the writer Katie Roiphe at NYU for The Paris Review, she insisted on reading a pre-written interview transcript aloud rather than speaking off the cuff. “There was something sublime and deranged about this arrangement,” Roiphe later wrote of the event, “but there was also an elegance to her solution: She had found a way to be both present and not, at the same time.”

Above all, she was fixated on the realities of a writer’s subjectivity long before it was commonplace or fashionable for journalists to interrogate the limits of their own perspective.

There are a number of possible explanations for Malcom’s notorious reticence. A woman, a Jew, and an émigré, she was always a member of the minority, though she didn’t dwell on it. She was also a late bloomer: She didn’t publish her first piece of reported long-form journalism, the kind of writing for which she would become known, until 1978, when she was forty-three years old. And then in 1984, Jeffrey Masson, a Sanskrit scholar, a psychoanalyst, and the subject of Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives, sued her for libel, tarnishing her image even though she eventually won the suit. Concurrent to the legal battle—which lasted over a decade, all in—Malcolm published The Journalist and the Murderer, a long piece of reporting about another journalist who was sued by a subject. The opening sentence of Malcolm’s piece—“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”—quickly became one of journalism’s most controversial and oft-quoted lines (a reviewer once referred to it as Malcolm’s Law). Her peers went berserk, both because she had come for their profession and because she had neglected, at first, to acknowledge the obvious overlap between her choice of subject and the events of her own life. They called her a tattler, a backstabber, a cop, “journalism’s school slut.” As soon as she was able, Malcolm retreated from the public eye.

But she never stopped writing. In fact, the years when Malcolm was facing Masson in court and taking a beating from members of her profession in the pages of their publications were the most productive years of her writing life. She profiled artists, wrote laser-focused criticism of books and photography, and published multiple long-form journalistic pieces that would come to be recognized as exemplars of the genre. Her work shared some DNA with the New Journalists, who used literary techniques such as inserting themselves into their work to write nonfiction as vivid as fiction, but went somewhere else entirely. Thanks, perhaps to a long-standing interest in psychoanalysis, she was intensely focused on the inner lives of her subjects, the psychological dynamics playing out in the scenes she witnessed, and the morality of the work she was doing.

Above all, she was fixated on the realities of a writer’s subjectivity long before it was commonplace or fashionable for journalists to interrogate the limits of their own perspective. Regardless of the subject, each piece she wrote was also an examination of how people tell stories—about themselves and on behalf of others—and of the ethical morass of any act of narrativizing. In her writing, she explored these questions with a provocative sure-footedness that made her easy to criticize during the years she was taking the stand, and a hero to many—a true writer’s writer—in the decades that followed.

When I first became properly aware of Malcolm in 2018, this thorny metacommentary was a source of intrigue. She was there but not there, famous but also shrouded in mystery. At the time I was a student at Yale University, fascinated by journalism, Freudians, and the detritus of other people’s lives—three varyingly niche interests I shared, as it turns out, with Malcolm. In 2013, she had sold her papers to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. But when I started studying them five years later, they were just being opened to the public, making me one of the first people to spend time in the Janet Malcolm archive.

Each day that year, I descended into the library’s subterranean reading room—a place Malcolm also spent time in the early 2000s while working on a book about Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein—to sift through the contents of another messy box of her papers. I learned to read her handwriting with ease and grew familiar with the turns of phrase she would use in short faxes to friends or the stern tone she would take when an editor had gone against her wishes. Above all, I learned to be patient while examining overfilled boxes of messy, confusing, repetitive, and frequently boring papers.

Accordingly, Malcolm acolytes will tell you that she is everywhere and nowhere within her work.

Much of the materials—which Malcom had prepared for their sale to Yale—seemed, at first, to pertain strictly to business. But the more time I spent in the archive, the more her personal life started to seep in around the edges. I found official documents from her childhood—Czech papers, her certification of American Citizenship, her middle-school report cord, stowed in an unsuspecting envelope between thick folders of miscellaneous correspondence. I stumbled on carefully typed instructions for the house sitter about how to adequately look after her prized plants and cats. I began to see how draft upon draft of the same page or paragraph (Malcom would frequently try writing out a passage four or five different ways in order to even start to get it right) tells a story of the writer at work.

Above all, I became obsessed with the letters. Malcolm understood the appeal: “Only when he reads a subject’s letters does the biographer feel he has come fully into his presence,” she once wrote.  As with the rest of her papers, much of the correspondence in Malcolm’s archive was nominally about work. But even letters exchanged with a peer or editor contained moments of quiet revelation. While she appears in her published writing as a terrifyingly sharp, often dispassionate observer of other people—one critic wrote of her journalism, “Not content simply to tell her subjects’ stories, she believes it is a writer’s responsibility to judge them”—notes to and from sources reveal her humanity.

She was genial. She was interested in her subjects’ day-to-day lives. She cared deeply about what they thought of her writing while also recognizing that she couldn’t control their reactions. Though she wrote at length about the fraught ethics of the journalist-subject relationship, she could get beyond it: It was not uncommon for her to stay in touch with people after she was done writing about them. Some even became good friends.

My experience of combing Malcolm’s archive was as intimate as it was unsettling. I grew fiercely attached to her while working on a project that I sensed she would not be happy about. Much of Malcolm’s writing touches on the strange voyeurism and uncanny attachments that develop when you’re writing about someone else. “Biographical research leads to a kind of insufferable familiarity,” she once observed in an essay about the Bloomsbury Group. Or, of the genre on the whole, “It is an unholy practice, the telling of a life story that isn’t one’s own on the basis of oppressively massive quantities of random, not necessarily reliable information.” Reading these words at night after a day spent poring over her drafts, letters, invoices, and assorted scribbles was at once funny and discomfiting. I could see, from my own experience doing the thing Malcolm purported to hate in her own archive, that she as almost certainly right.

Adding another layer of strangeness to the whole exercise was that Malcolm was, at the time, still alive and well, going about her life in New York City, and not just a disembodied voice on the page in my imagination. I just didn’t have access to her. Early on in my research, I had written to Malcolm asking if she would speak to me as part of the project for which she had become my subject. It should come as no surprise that she rebuffed my request. “I’m so sorry, but I must say no to your proposal of talking with me about my work,” she replied. “I just never do that. I feel my writing must speak for itself. As Isadora Duncan said, ‘If I could talk about it, I wouldn’t have to dance it.’ ” This was a version of the same response Malcolm gave to the vast majority of her would-be interviewers: The work speaks for itself. And if she’s not speaking, it also speaks for her. Okay, I figured, why not take her at her word? What does the work say about the writer behind it?

As in her archive, one must dig a little to find Malcolm in her own writing. Until the very end of her career, she almost entirely avoided writing squarely about herself. As she once remarked to a friend, “No, I don’t think I will ever do a book in which I have to do all the talking—too strenuous. “Even when she finally wrote a memoir in the last years of her life, she structured it around a series of family photographs, which she appraised with her characteristic degree of remove.

Accordingly, Malcolm acolytes will tell you that she is everywhere and nowhere within her work. She pops up or interjects when you least expect it: to mention her psychiatrist father in passing, to inquire after the well-being of a cat. The critic James Wood once tellingly said that she moves around her subjects “like a janitor at an orgy.” She regarded everyone with the same cutting, distanced gaze. But she didn’t exempt herself. Every piece she wrote about someone else—which is to say, nearly every piece she wrote—told two stories simultaneously: the story of the subjects, and the story, always fraught and often veiled, of her retelling.

For example, in The Silent Woman, her 1994 account of the writers jockeying to tell the story of Slyvia Plath, Malcolm lays out the uneasy positions of Plath’s many biographers, friends-turned-memoirists and even a former flame before revealing, some seventy pages in, her bias  toward on in particular. “My narrative would be revisionist,” she wrote, implicating herself in the very problem—that is, the inability of any biographer to see her subject clearly—that she was diagnosing.

Or, near the end of her 2017 profile of the liberal political journalist Rachel Maddow, Malcolm leaves in a strange exchange wherein she becomes fixated on a distant relative to whom the news anchor has little, if any, connection. Then she lays the rhetorical move bare to her subject, and thus to her readers: “When I told Rachel of my fascination with Ben Maddow and of my feeling that by inserting him into a piece that was supposed to be about her I was imitating her forays into left field, she nodded in agreement. “It seems as inevitable as it is wrong that Malcolm should try her subject’s reportorial style on for size.

Once, upon reading Malcolm’s 1999 legal drama The Crime of Sheila McGough, the writer Ruth Gay, a close friend, observed appreciatively that “the world according to Janet” served as a kind of “compass” for the story. “Someday,” she wrote, “I hope you will write more directly about ‘the world according to Janet.’ I feel as if I am always just getting tantalizing glimpses. And I would like to know more.” Reading Malcolm’s writing in search of Malcolm herself feels something like this. You see just enough of her to glimpse a personality (observant, clever, biting), but the details are sparse enough that you are always hungry for more. She’s not hiding but she’s not firmly there. She’s dancing around the margins. She’s reminding you that you can never trust your narrator, that journalists care more about the story than the people who populate it (and who make their work possible), but she isn’t exactly spelling out where she sits in that unholy equation or why she has chosen to devote her life to work that she evidently thinks is so riddled with flaws.

Still, Malcolm’s choice to position herself this way says plenty on its own. By making the journalistic “I” its own obviously and self-consciously subjective character, she was reminding her readers that every creative choice in a give piece of her writing—each detail recorded, letter quoted, subject interviewed, question asked—is a product of her position, not just as a writer, but as a person in the world. “We are all in our work,” she once pointed out to a wary subject mid-interview. “What I write here will probably have a lot more to do with me than it does with [other] people. “As she became more established, this trademark posture became a source of fascination unto itself, prompting curious readers to look at, rather than away from, their strange and unreachable narrator. “With its subtext of ‘Look at me looking at me looking at them,’ it isn’t voyeuristic, as Malcolm proposes, but an act of a more solitary sort,” one reviewer wrote of The Silent Woman. “It leaves me wanting a biography of the brilliant but unreliable Janet Malcolm.”

Spending time with a person whose writing I knew so well was both disorienting and wonderful.

The first writing of Malcolm’s I read was her work on psychoanalysis, and because of this I had the idea of transference lodged in my mind from my earliest encounters with her. Here’s Malcolm on the subject: “The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain.”

With this in mind, I began to see the facts of Malcolm’s life cropping up across her work, not just in those moments where she employed the first person but also in the details she chose to highlight about her subjects, and even in the stories she chose to tell. It seemed undeniable that writing about other people was a way for her to parse aspects of her own life and mind. I became fixated on the idea that the people Malcolm wrote about and was close to overlapped with certain identities she embodied herself: the émigré, the humorist, the photographer, the shrink watcher, the defendant, the writer, the artist, and the archivist.

Malcolm was hardly oblivious to what was going on here. “How can one see all the ants on the planet when one is wearing the blinders of narrative?” she asked in The Silent Woman. The problem of the nonfiction writer’s subjectivity was one of her central fixations. Still, she couldn’t help but partake. Just look at The Silent Woman. The premise of the book is paradoxical in a classically Malcolmian way: It is simultaneously a condemnation of the genre of biography and a literary biography unto itself. In it, she likens the biographer to a burglar, describing the way they rifle through the detritus of someone else’s life—notably, their papers—picking and choosing details as they see fit to tell a story that is almost entirely one of their own making. She’s almost imploring her readers to read her work the same way.

At the end of The Silent Woman, Malcolm visits the home of a source named Trevor Thomas and finds it to be monstrously, unbearably cluttered: appliances and objects are strewn everywhere, the kitchen so jammed full that there is no room left in it to prepare a meal. She comes to see the house as a metaphor for the entire project of writing. “This is the way things are, the place says. This is unmediated actuality, in all its multiplicity, randomness, inconsistency, redundancy, authenticity,” she writes, in what could just as easily be a description of an archive. The task of the writer is to clean house, to make sense of an unbearable mess of junk. “But this task of housecleaning (of narrating) is not merely arduous; it is dangerous. There is the danger of throwing the wrong things out and keeping the wrong things in,” she opines. “Once one starts throwing out, it may become hard to stop. It may be better not to start. It may be better to hang on to everything.”  Every piece of writing is ultimately about the writer, what you choose to leave in or throw out. This makes for perilous work. But Malcolm knew from experience that it was also pretty irresistible.

As part of my research, in 2019 I began work on an exhibit of materials from Malcolm’s archive, which would go up in the entry of Yale’s main library that spring. I will admit that I was drawn to the idea of putting on a show in part because of its obvious irony: I would embody the biographer Malcolm took pains to admonish, a writer who burglarizes someone else’s life, puts it on display, and makes it her own. I was sure that Malcolm would hate the exhibit if she ever saw it. I rationalized the project by telling myself she was the one who had sold her papers to Yale. She had to know that they would be used by someone else. And anyway, the odds of her schlepping up to New Haven to see the show seemed pretty slim.

So you can imagine my surprise when I received an email from her out of the blue some months later, bearing the subject line “from Janet Malcolm,” like I wouldn’t clock her AOL email address right away (Despard9, named for one of her cats). She had been to see the show. “I dreaded going to see it,” Malcolm wrote. “I thought it would embarrass me, and instead it delighted me.” Would I like to come over for tea?

Over the two years that followed we met several times and stayed in touch, sharing essays we’d written and books we’d read. Spending time with a person whose writing I knew so well was both disorienting and wonderful. I had not expected that Malcolm would be the type to speak candidly about her friends and family or to ask me about my love life. The first time we met, Malcolm asked me if she seemed in person the way she had in her papers. She did, and I told her so. But as she knew better than anyone, we’re all inventing our own versions of the people we spend time with, in life and in writing, and biographers are among the worst culprits. My research informed these encounters just as my own proclivities and anxieties determined what I looked for when I pored over Malcolm’s papers, and the details I choose to write about now. My rendering of Malcolm is just that: mine.

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From The Absent Woman. Used with the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton and Company. Copyright © 2026 by Eve Sneider