![]() ![]() ![]() In the last chapter of her life, before she died of lung cancer, at the age of 86, in 2021, Malcolm did, however, try to give a little writerly love to her own past. Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection.’ Forty years of performative anonymity, of encouraging others to talk for her involved and involving portraits of lives in the New Yorker, had, she said, left their mark: ‘I see that my journalist’s habits have inhibited my self-love. It is, for profile writers like Malcolm, easy enough to create an ‘I’ that can ask questions, that can be the driver of the plots of other people’s lives harder to become a subject herself. ![]() In her ‘Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography’, a short essay she wrote for the New York Review of Books in 2010, Janet Malcolm observed that she became a journalist ‘precisely because she didn’t want to find herself alone in the room’. ![]()
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