But Malcolm found a way not to choose—to admit to her limitations in a way that transformed them into something wonderful, something unique, and she did it with so much style and intelligence that the rest of us can only put our pencils down and call it a day.
She was one, but I was never able to think of her as just “Janet.” She was always her full name in my mind.
Similarly, when I invited her to attend a lecture that was going to be held near her house, she replied, “Dear Alice, thanks for thinking of me, but I don’t think so.
One afternoon, over tea, I showed her how to use emojis, and she was thrilled at the prospect of sending a horse to her granddaughter, whom she spoke of lovingly all the time.
Janet—I’ll try to drop the last name, though it feels strange—wrote my favorite books I’ve ever read.
There is a scene in a Profile of Eileen Fisher where Fisher realizes, to her obvious dismay, that her attempt to exile one of her house cats has been seized upon by Malcolm as a minor sign of some obscure character flaw.
The “silent woman” is the poet Sylvia Plath, though her tumultuous life is not Malcolm’s subject so much as the inciting incident for a grand exploration of biographical writing.
What Malcolm set out to find, when she started reporting, was why so many of Plath’s biographers found themselves at bitter loggerheads with both Plath’s widower, Ted Hughes, and his fussbudget sister, Olwyn, who tightly guarded the Hughes/Plath estate.
I said to her once, “You are a writer I read to learn from,” which is an embarrassingly earnest thing to say, but I admired her, and it was true.
Her manner was a little severe, though, so that I always felt I hadn’t read enough or learned enough to begin a conversation that she might be interested in having.
I met her in 1975, when I was twenty-three and a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and she and her husband, Gardner Botsford, were visiting her sister Marie Winn and Winn’s husband, Allan Miller, at a house, in the Truro woods, that Winn and Miller had rented.
A person as exceptional as Malcolm was something like an archive of sensibility and thought, one that is irreplaceable, and when such a person dies it is, as John Updike said, of William Maxwell, as if a library has burned.
Like being irradiated, like cleaning your filthy glasses, like plunging your bloated brain in cool water, like watching the pure fundamental geometry of social presentation and deception be revealed for the first time by a manipulative and absolutely unerring god.
The second thing I did was search my e-mail to find out when we were last in touch—too many months ago, in the first wave of the pandemic—and then to read through some of the messages she’d sent over the years.
I moved to New York to go to journalism school just a few months before “The Journalist and the Murderer” was published; and I read it, as we all did then, with the shock of the new.
When my missing cat returned the day after our cancelled lunch, I took a photo of my gleeful son lying beside her as she slept off her stupid irresistible adventure, then e-mailed it to Janet.
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