Skip to content

Tag: Janet Malcolm

Review: In the Freud Archives, Janet Malcolm

Published 17 Jan 2014 by Gin Jenny

For my second entry in Ana and Iris’s Long-Awaited Reads Month, I read Janet Malcolm’s book In the Freud Archives. When I discovered Janet Malcolm back in October 2011, In the Freud Archives was the book of hers that appealed to me the most. For one reason or another, I didn’t get to read it until Christmas vacation.; and I think I might have liked it better if I’d read it sooner. I am not exactly disillusioned with Janet Malcolm, but I’m not not disillusioned with her. Her writing remains as beautifully clear and elegant as I ever thought it…

Continue readingReview: In the Freud Archives, Janet Malcolm
4 Comments

Review: Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Janet Malcolm

Published 29 Nov 2012 by Gin Jenny

I think what I love about Janet Malcolm’s biographical writing is that she’s not, properly speaking, writing a biography. I don’t have a lot of patience for biographies (Oscar Wilde biographies excepted); even the best ones tend to have moments where they’re plodding along through the question of what subjects the person took at university, and how they got on in their first job and their second job and their third job before discovering what they were truly meant for. Janet Malcolm — in The Silent Woman and now in Two Lives — is writing not the story of her…

Continue readingReview: Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Janet Malcolm
13 Comments

Review: The Crime of Sheila McGough, Janet Malcolm

Published 6 Nov 2011 by Gin Jenny

Have you heard anything bad about Janet Malcolm yet? If so, now would be a good time to tell me! The first flush of love from The Silent Woman has worn a little bit off, The Crime of Sheila McGough was not that good, and I haven’t had a chance to get another Janet Malcolm book out of the library. The Crime of Sheila McGough is about a lawyer who was indicted for, I don’t know, some sort of dishonest practices. She was lawyering for a small-time con man, the con man stole from the wrong guy, the guy got…

Continue readingReview: The Crime of Sheila McGough, Janet Malcolm
11 Comments

Review: The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm

Published 8 Oct 2011 by Gin Jenny

Before I commence the promised raving about The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm’s book about (sort of) Sylvia Plath, I will state my position on Sylvia Plath. I like some of her poems a crazy lot and some of her (extremely famous) poems (like “Daddy”) not that much at all. I have read very few Ted Hughes poems but have always disliked the ones I did read. One time when I saw the two of them referred to as “the Hugheses” in a modern college syllabus, I became massively enraged on Sylvia Plath’s behalf. I think Ted Hughes was a cad…

Continue readingReview: The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm
19 Comments