How kind of you to stop by! Thanks for your interesting comments — I knew about Janet Malcolm’s legal troubles after The Freud Archives, but somehow didn’t connect them to this book. Of course I can imagine that would be a reason for her to connect with Sheila’s story.

I thought one of the things that this book did exceptionally well was to convey how irritating Sheila was, and how the people connected with her case might have been hard on her because she was frustrating to spend time around. It sounds like that was your experience too!

It was not a sexy book at all. Also, hi! I am delighted to see you here, as ever, because you are lovely! Also No. 2, read a different Janet Malcolm book than this one, for I believe her other books are frequently very wonderful.

Yeah, well, I didn’t expect this to be awesome, and indeed I selected it to read on the assumption that I wouldn’t care for it. I’m sure whatever one I read next will be excellent once more. I’m not passing any judgment on Janet Malcolm. Everyone’s got to have a dud, right?

Oh Ana, you have to. I think that you would love it, seriously, and then all the rest of the blogosphere would read it too because you would be so persuasive about it.

Yes, skip it! Malcolm’s done better things.

As it happens, I knew Sheila McGough very well, long ago, having worked for her for six months in 1970, when she was editor of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. (She and her two assistant editors occupied one large room.) The book refers to her having gone to law school, after having tired of seeing her subordinates leave to go to law school. I was one of them.

I felt and still feel very sorry for Sheila, although she and I did not get along personally. I thought that her sentence — four and a half years, if I remember rightly, was disproportionately long, given that it was a first offense, and a white-collar crime. The only explanation I could come up with was that the judge was enraged at her complete and total denial of any responsibility for anything. I thought that she had fallen into the clutches of a con man. I thought that if she had thrown herself on the mercy of the court, saying that she had fallen in love with a rascal and had been led to engage in practices that she would never otherwise have considered, and that had cost her her career and her reputation, she might have been spared prison. My guess is that her pride prevented that.

The story is sad, maybe even tragic, but in my opinion, not for the reasons Malcolm gives — that is, an innocent person railroaded to prison for a crime she did not commit — but for a much older story, a person beguiled into wrongdoing out of love.