Janet Malcolm

Czech-American · 1934 to 2021

Born Jana Klara Wienerova on July 8, 1934, in Prague, Janet Malcolm was the daughter of Josef Wiener, a psychiatrist, and his wife, Hanna. The Jewish family fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for New York in 1939, when Janet was five; her younger sister, Marie Winn, would also become a writer. Malcolm attended the High School of Music and Art and the University of Michigan, where she wrote for the Michigan Daily, and in 1953 married the critic Donald Malcolm; their daughter, Anne, was born in 1963. That same year she joined The New Yorker, writing at first about photography and domestic subjects before turning, in the late 1970s, to the long, exacting studies of psychoanalysis and journalism that made her reputation. Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981) and In the Freud Archives (1984) drew her into a decade-long libel suit brought by the psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, which a jury finally decided in her favor in 1994. In 1989 The New Yorker ran her two-part account of the writer Joe McGinniss and the convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, published the next year as The Journalist and the Murderer, the book that made her name synonymous with the uncomfortable ethics of her profession. She went on to write The Silent Woman (1994), on Sylvia Plath's biographers, The Crime of Sheila McGough (1999), Reading Chekhov (2001), Two Lives (2007), and Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011), among others, each turning her cool, unsparing eye on the gap between a story and the person who lived it. Widowed when Donald Malcolm died in 1975, she married her New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford that same year. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001, she died of lung cancer in New York City on June 16, 2021, at eighty-six.