In “Still Pictures” Janet Malcolm turns her pen on herself

Janet Malcolm was a journalist who famously compared journalists to con men, “preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness…and betraying them without remorse.” She was a biographer who skewered the “voyeurism and busybodyism” of biographies. In her books and articles, mostly for the New Yorker, Malcolm used her pen like a knife, trimming fat and gutting pieties. She died in 2021, but her distinctive voice lives on in the syllabuses of writing classes around the world.