The Absent Woman

A titan of American letters, Janet Malcolm was a writer with a far-reaching impact and cultlike following, even as she actively opposed being a literary celebrity. For The Absent Woman, journalist Eve Sneider, one of the first to be given access to Malcolm’s archive, creates a portrait of this notoriously private writer and her work, delving into the people and themes that consumed her over a fifty-year career. From questions of narrative form to cultural criticism, psychoanalysis, and the role of subjectivity, Sneider explores these obsessions of Malcolm’s through her manuscript drafts, lauded but controversial books, photographs, correspondence, art, and interviews with those who knew her. The Absent Woman grapples with the ethical questions of writing biographical profiles, which led to highly publicized trials between former Freudian psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson and Malcolm, and illustrates the many ways in which Malcolm’s essays and books were vehicles for Malcolm to understand herself.