'Still Pictures' by Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm was among the most interesting journalists of her generation, a scourge to the mediocre products of mass comm departments and an example for anyone who seeks to write beautifully, meaningfully. Her posthumous Still Pictures is a memoir built around a sequence of mostly family photographs. Malcolm’s family were secular Czech Jews who managed to arrive in New York before the Holocaust began. There are universal elements in her immigrant story, including her harsh realization that, when tossed into kindergarten, she had no idea of what was being said around her. At the end of each day, when the teacher said “Goodbye, children,” he assumed that “children” was the name of one of the girls in the class. She had to learn English on the fly.
Malcolm was wary of biographies or autobiographies, and likewise the power of journalists to warp reality by molding it according to their preconceptions and simplifying the complexity. Still Pictures is not a narrative of her life but an essay on memories, the scattered recollections (or lack of recollections) that constitute our own sense of who we were and are. Many thoughtful comments occur along the way. “We are each of us an endangered species,” she wrote. “When we die, our species disappears with us. Nobody like us will ever exist again.”
