Janet Malcolm
Janet Clara Malcolm (born Jana Klara Wienerová;[1] July 8, 1934 – June 16, 2021) was an American writer, staff journalist at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist who fled antisemitic persecution in Nazi-occupied Prague just before it became impossible to escape.[2] She was the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984), and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990). Malcolm wrote frequently about psychoanalysis and explored the relationship between journalist and subject. She was known for her prose style and for polarizing criticism of her profession, especially in her most contentious work, The Journalist and the Murderer, which has become a staple of journalism-school curricula.
Janet Malcolm
Jana Wienerová
July 8, 1934
Prague, Czechoslovakia
June 16, 2021 (aged 86)
New York City, US
American
1
Marie Winn (sister)
Early life[edit]
Malcolm was born in Prague in 1934, one of two daughters (the other is the author Marie Winn), of Hanna (née Taussig) and Josef Wiener (aka Joseph A. Winn), a psychiatrist.[3][4] She resided in New York City after her Jewish family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939, fleeing Nazi persecution of Jews.[5] Malcolm was educated at the High School of Music and Art, and then at the University of Michigan,[5] where she wrote for the campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily, and the humor magazine, The Gargoyle, later editing The Gargoyle.[5]
Reception[edit]
Malcolm's penchant for controversial subjects and tendency to insert her views into the narrative brought her both admirers and critics. "Leaning heavily on the techniques of psychoanalysis, she probes not only actions and reactions but motivations and intent; she pursues literary analysis like a crime drama and courtroom battles like novels," wrote Cara Parks in The New Republic in April 2013. Parks praised Malcolm's "intensely intellectual style" as well as her "sharpness and creativity."[31]
In Esquire, Tom Junod characterized Malcolm as "a self-hater whose work has managed to speak for the self-hatred (not to mention the class issues) of a profession that has designs on being 'one of the professions' but never will be." Junod found her to be devoid of "journalistic sympathy" and observed: "Very few journalists are more animated by malice than Janet Malcolm.”[32] Junod himself, however, has been criticized for a number of journalistic duplicities, including a smirking piece in Esquire which outed the actor Kevin Spacey,[33] as well as a similarly homophobic faux profile of the singer Michael Stipe.[34]
Katie Roiphe summarized the tension between these polarized views, writing in 2011, "Malcolm's work, then, occupies that strange glittering territory between controversy and the establishment: she is both a grande dame of journalism, and still, somehow, its enfant terrible."[5]
Charles Finch wrote in 2023 "it seems safe to say that the two most important long-form journalists this country produced in the second half of the last century were Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm."[30]
Personal life[edit]
Malcolm met her first husband, Donald Malcolm,[8] at the University of Michigan. After graduation, they moved to Washington, D.C., where Malcolm occasionally reviewed books for The New Republic before returning to New York.[5] Donald reviewed books for The New Yorker in the 1950s and 1960s[35] and served as a theater critic.[5] They had a daughter, Anne, in 1963.[5] Donald Malcolm died in 1975.[5]
Malcolm's second husband was long-time New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford,[5] a member of the family that had originally funded The New Yorker.[8] The author of A Life of Privilege, Mostly: A Memoir,[36] Botsford died at age 87 in September 2004.[37]