Join the book launch for Eve Sneider’s The Absent Woman, an illuminating critical biography of one of our most influential nonfiction authors, New Yorker journalist Janet Malcolm. Sneider will be in conversation with Alexandra Schwartz.
From photography to psychoanalysis to how we tell stories, Sneider explores Malcolm’s obsessions through her manuscripts, lauded but controversial books, art, correspondence, and interviews with colleagues and friends. Examining Malcolm’s infamous trials with former Freudian psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, her provocative convictions about the nature of journalism, and her eventual turn to autobiographical writing, Sneider also grapples with the dilemma that attended much of Malcolm’s most famous work: the knotted ethics of depicting another person, even as she depicts Malcolm.
Divided into identities that Malcolm embodied—émigré, humorist, photographer, shrink watcher, defendant, writer, artist, and archivist—The Absent Woman illustrates the many ways in which Malcolm’s works were vehicles for understanding herself. The Absent Woman is a vivid, Malcolmian probe into the mind of one of the most elusive literary figures of our time.
Eve Sneider is a writer based in Brooklyn. She has written for Wired, where she was an editor, New York Review of Books, and Lapham’s Quarterly. She is deputy editor at Poets & Writers.
Alexandra Schwartz is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes frequently on books and the arts, and is a host of the magazine’s flagship culture podcast, Critics at Large. She is a winner of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, awarded by the National Book Critics Circle.