Publishers Weekly
10/24/2022
In this evocative posthumous memoir, journalist Malcolm (Nobody’s Looking at You: Essays), who died last year, deconstructs her identity through an analysis of family photos. A photo taken in 1939 shows five-year-old Malcolm and her parents on a train leaving Prague just before the start of WWII, which triggers hazy recollections of her first year in America: “The image of a Beatrix Potter book... remains as a single unclarifying memento of the house in Brooklyn.” A photo of Malcolm’s teacher at the after-school Czech program she attended in Manhattan evokes sympathy: “We were too young to be kind in return to someone so weak.” The author also addresses her career, including a lawsuit brought on by the subject of a 1984 New Yorker article who sued Malcolm and the magazine for libel. The case, which Malcolm won in 1994, caused Malcolm to rethink how other people perceived her: “It was at trial that the influence of the New Yorker proved to be most dire.” Witty (“I was infected early on with the virus of romance”) and reflective (“The glitter of memory may be no less deceptive”), this is a monument to a master of her craft. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
Superb . . . While [Malcolm's] writing in these passages remains restrained, as it always was, they bear an unwonted intensity of feeling, seemingly held just barely at bay . . . [Still Pictures] unavoidably calls to mind the enduring power of another émigré, the novelist W.G. Sebald, who made similar use of photographs . . . [The] final, splendid, most personal work of her long career.” —Charles Finch, The New York Times Book Review
“[Still Pictures] may be the world’s most elegant annotated photo album . . . Each sentence, in true Malcolm form, turns out masterful . . . The collage artist puts fragments next to each other to make meaning, or spark energy, and this is what Malcolm does in Still Pictures . . . She is writing about the difficulty we have evoking our former selves, the many ways in which they are strangers to us.” —Katie Roiphe, The Atlantic
“Possessed of charm and delicacy.” —Vivian Gornick, The Nation
"[Still Pictures] is a characteristically Malcolmian work, reflecting on and resisting the conventions of the form in which she writes . . . It is as though we are sitting next to her in her living room as she flips through a family album . . . Part of the pleasure of this memoir is simply in getting to know her a little bit more . . . The other part is in reading new sentences by Janet Malcolm. They land like the opening lines of classic novels—hard, shining, immovable truths." —Elizabeth Winkler, The Wall Street Journal
"[Still Pictures] gains from its oddly off-centered quality—cantilevered, perhaps, as so many of [Malcolm's] books are . . . A self emerges from this elegant though fragmentary volume." —Michael Gorra, The New York Review of Books
"[An] evocative and distinctive final book—an unusually succinct and thought-provoking personal memoir that manages to capture so much of what made Janet Malcolm so unfailingly interesting." —Heller McAlpin, NPR
"[Still Pictures] is a testament to those attributes Malcolm most admired (and relied on her journalistic subjects to lack): dignity, discretion, craft, and control." —Sam Adler-Bell, The New Republic
“Wondrous, revealing, fascinating, and confounding glimpses of an extraordinary life." —Ann Levin, The Associated Press
"Malcolm was one of our greatest writers, which makes the lesson of Still Pictures only the more poignant. Her final volume proves that even the finest chroniclers can still be leveled by their own lives, and that the memories that make us human are the foggiest and most ephemeral." —Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times
“[Malcolm’s] crisply argued, surprising, and mind-altering books are electrifying. This posthumous, delectably personal volume is a gift to all who have been happily provoked by her cutting observations, refusal to play nice, and mordant wit and a boon for every reader in search of superbly precise memoiristic essays.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist
"[An] evocative posthumous memoir . . . Witty (“I was infected early on with the virus of romance”) and reflective (“The glitter of memory may be no less deceptive”), this is a monument to a master of her craft." —Publishers Weekly
"[Malcolm exposes] sharp observations rendered in the precise, stylish prose that earned her acclaim . . . A graceful meditation on memory." —Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
08/01/2022
In this posthumous memoir, sharp-eyed, much-celebrated New Yorker staff writer Malcolm takes a look at an interesting subject: herself. Given her fondness for overturning convention, it's no surprise that she doesn't offer a standard chronology but instead presents her encounters with family photographs. With a 50,000-copy first printing.
JUNE 2024 - AudioFile
This brief series of recollections by the late NEW YORKER writer, journalist, and photographer Janet Malcolm is narrated authoritatively by Maria Tucci, who captures the self-revelatory tone of Malcolm's memories. The text is a series of reactions to the snapshots and photos that precede each chapter. Most of the early parts, though honey hued, are candid appraisals of her upbringing and émigré parents, Czech Jews who left their homeland in 1939 to avoid the horrors. Malcom worked for the NEW YORKER for 58 years and penned some unique pieces, including IN THE FREUD ARCHIVES, for which Jeffery Masson sued her. Their decade-long legal dispute forms the most fascinating section of the audiobook. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2022-10-05
Snapshots of a life of artistic creation.
Journalist Malcolm (1934-2021), a photographer and collage artist as well as an award-winning writer, uses images of family and friends to create a memoir as elusive as it is revealing. “Autobiography,” she wrote, “is a misnamed genre; memory speaks only some of its lines.” Looking at photographs of herself as a child, of her parents and sister, she often admits to the vagueness of her recollections. “Most of what happens to us goes unremembered,” she observes. “The events of our lives are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.” What she does remember coheres as a portrait of the émigré Czech community in New York in the 1940s. She and her family came to the U.S. in 1939 and settled in Yorkville, where her father, a doctor, treated the immigrant community in that upper Manhattan neighborhood. Besides public school—as a teenager, she went to the High School of Music and Art—Malcolm was sent to learn Czech; but though her parents wanted to ensure her connection to her heritage, they only belatedly told her she was Jewish. She and her sister were dismayed: “We had internalized the anti-Semitism in the culture and were shocked and mortified to learn that we were not on the ‘good’ side of the equation.” Malcolm portrays her father as kind and patient, her mother as needy and volatile. Family life was happy, but “all happy families are alike in the pain their members helplessly inflict upon one another, as if under orders from a perverse higher authority.” If some memories are swathed in the innocence of childhood perception, some seem deliberately obscured. “I would rather flunk a writing test,” Malcolm admits, “than expose the pathetic secrets of my heart.” What she does expose are sharp observations rendered in the precise, stylish prose that earned her acclaim.
A graceful meditation on memory.
