Fragments of a life: Janet Malcolm meditates on old family photographs

Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021, was one of her generation’s great practitioners – one might say agitators – of journalism and biography. She was a master of studies that are ostensibly about one thing, but are actually of a depth and range the reader is never entirely prepared for. Whatever topic she had in hand, you find her nudging at its limits, questioning its practices and accepted norms, turning what could, tediously, be described as a ‘gimlet eye’ on the irrational, emotional investment we have in those norms. A hallmark of her work is an extraordinary ability to (seem to) work her subjects out. There is something chilling about this gimlet-eyedness, something that makes you feel for the unsuspecting subjects who speak gamely into her tape recorder, confident in their control over the narrative. 

There is also an outsider air to Malcolm’s work – a kind of refusal of professional loyalties that saw her famously describe journalistic practice as ‘morally indefensible’ and admit to the ‘voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike’. Her dry humour can be as easy to miss as some of her takedowns, since all are delivered with a crushing matter-of-factness. 

There is, then, something a little disconcerting about reading Still Pictures, which is described as a memoir and is composed of meditations prompted by photographs – many of them from Malcolm’s own family collections. It’s as if a professor you had hopelessly admired from the back of the lecture hall suddenly invited you for a drink and started telling you about their childhood. There is something thrilling about it (after all, you have daydreamed about just such an encounter), but you’re not exactly having the scholarly conversation you’d imagined, and actually the intimidating distance of the pedestal was perhaps more comfortable.