The Absent Woman

An illuminating critical biography of one of our most influential nonfiction authors, New Yorker journalist Janet Malcolm.

Janet Malcom was a New Yorker journalist and titan of American letters. Unlike her peers Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, she avoided the personal fame that her renown might have brought despite making herself a character in her work. In The Absent Woman, journalist Eve Sneider, among the first researchers to access Malcolm’s archive, insightfully portrays Malcolm and delves into the people and themes that consumed her during a nearly sixty-year career.

From photography to psychoanalysis to how we tell stories, Sneider explores Malcolm’s obsessions through her manuscripts, lauded but controversial books, art, correspondence, and interviews with colleagues and friends. Examining Malcolm’s infamous trials with former Freudian psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, her provocative convictions about the nature of journalism, and her eventual turn to autobiographical writing, Sneider also grapples with the dilemma that attended much of Malcolm’s most famous work: the knotted ethics of depicting another person, even as she depicts Malcolm.

Divided into identities that Malcolm embodied—émigré, humorist, photographer, shrink watcher, defendant, writer, artist, and archivist—The Absent Woman illustrates the many ways in which Malcolm’s works were vehicles for understanding herself. The Absent Woman is a vivid, Malcolmian probe into the mind of one of the most elusive literary figures of our time.