Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:
Janet Malcolm was mainly known for her work — her incisive profiles of often unwitting subjects — and for much of her life, she tried to keep it that way. She rarely gave interviews, and when she did, she preferred to answer questions in writing, presumably to edit out the Freudian slips that did in so many of the people she wrote about.
In 2018, a Yale student named Eve Sneider sent Malcolm a request to talk about her work, and received a characteristic demurral in response. “I just never do that,” Malcolm replied. “I feel my writing must speak for itself.” That changed in 2019, after Sneider put together an exhibit of materials drawn from Malcolm’s archives, which Malcolm had sold to Yale’s Beinecke Library. Over the next couple of years, they met several times and continued to correspond, an experience that Sneider describes as “disorienting and wonderful.”
More here.
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