Janet Malcolm: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
“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,” wrote Janet Malcolm. The provocative assertion by the New Yorker essayist outraged the stolid, unimaginative tribe of journalism school graduates. And yet, her statement eventually found its way into mass comm curricula.
Her frankly expressed insight should have surprised no one. Like many of the best journalists, Malcolm never studied journalism but brought deeper learning, broader understanding, into a field that can easily sink into hackwork. The Last Interview and Other Conversations collects five discussions conducted with Malcolm in the final years of her life. She died in 2021.
Perhaps her acute awareness of how journalists can deliberately or inadvertently distort the meaning of any quote led Malcolm to prefer interviews by email. The format allowed her to think out her answers and leave a digital record to easily correct any misrepresentations. As the daughter of a psychiatrist, she was aware of Freudian and other slips and wasn’t going to be tripped up. In the intro to her interview with Malcolm, the Paris Review’s Katie Roiphe wrote, “This particular style of communication had the reassuring old-fashioned quality of considered correspondence.” She adds, “it is like Malcolm herself—careful, thorough, a bit elusive.”
In her thoughtful responses, Malcolm questions the process by which writers construct a view of reality through imposing themselves on their subjects. So it was with great care, as she describes it, that Malcolm undertook her biography of Sylvia Plath, The Silent Woman. Instead of the pose of objectivity, “I presented myself as a biased observer, like everybody else.” What stunned some ideologues was her bias in favor of Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, usually the villain in feminist account of the poet’s life and death.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Likewise, in her The Crime of Sheila McGough, about a lawyer framed as the coconspirator of a corrupt businessman, Malcolm sorted through the many ways the legal process can warp the truth and injure the innocent. In trials by jury or judge, “verdicts are not reached in a state of detachment.” The perception of the defendant can eclipse the search for what happened in the minds of jurors just as biases distort the reporting of journalists.
