Janet Malcolm famously despised biography. While she found journalism, with its mandate “to notice small things”, deliciously congenial, she thought biographical research led only to an “insufferable familiarity”, the fat volumes resulting from it being little more than processing plants in which “experience is converted into information the way fresh produce is converted into canned vegetables”. As for autobiography, that great literary craze of the late 20th century, it is misnamed. As she notes in Still Pictures, the slim book that is her last, it is a novelistic enterprise, and not to be trusted. Memory is patchy and partial. What does this or that story prove? The answer is: almost nothing, in the end. The gold is “dross”.
But memoir’s call is siren, and ultimately, not even Malcolm was entirely immune. Still Pictures, published posthumously (she died in 2021, at the age of 86), is a collection of short autobiographical essays: selective postcards of asperity and wisdom that she delivers with, if not embarrassment, exactly, then a certain amount of equivocation and avoidance. Not wanting to bloody herself too much on the rocks of disclosure, Malcolm cleverly deploys an old ally in the form of photography, about which she once wrote for the New Yorker. Most of these pieces, if not all, are sparked by the contemplation of fuzzy black and white images pulled from boxes in her attic – and doesn’t the camera always lie? The most brazen fabulist of them all, its near constant presence undercuts just about every line Malcolm writes.
