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Janet Malcolm

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Commentator

The Resume

    (July 8, 1934-June 16, 2021)
    Born in Prague, Czech Republic
    Birth name was Jana Wienerova
    Journalist for ‘The New Yorker’
    Wrote ‘Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession’ (1981), ‘In the Freud Archives’ (1984), ‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ (1990), ‘The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’ (1994), ‘Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice’ (2007), and ‘Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial’ (2011)

Why she might be annoying:

    She was a journalist who declared, ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.’
    In Esquire, Tom Junod wrote, ‘Very few journalists are more animated by malice than Janet Malcolm.’
    She was sued for libel by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, who claimed she made up quotes attributed to him in ‘In the Freud Archives.’
    She was unable to find the disputed quotes on the tapes of their interviews.
    A year after the trial concluded, she claimed to have found a notebook with the quotes while playing with her granddaughter. (Masson’s reaction: ‘This is the adult version of ‘the dog ate my homework.’ Except in this case, the dog is regurgitating the notes after twelve years.’)
    She once called herself ‘the fallen woman of journalism.’

Why she might not be annoying:

    When she was five, her family fled Europe to escape Nazi persecution of Jews.
    After a decade of court proceedings, a jury found in her favor in the libel suit, concluding that, whether or not the quotes were invented, more evidence would be need to rule against her. (Perhaps they agreed with Newsweek’s assessment, ‘What Malcolm does have on tape is more than enough to make Masson look silly.’)
    The Paris Review noted that ‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ ‘is now taught to nearly every undergraduate studying journalism.’

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 7 Votes: 28.57% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 2 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 174 Votes: 51.72% Annoying