Author(s): Janet Malcolm; Ian Frazier (Introduction by); Anne Malcolm (Afterword by)

Photography

For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books scrutinized the conventions of biography and reportage, revealing the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her penetrating gaze on her own life. This book is not so much autobiography as an encounter with identity through ordinary family photographs. Malcolm looks beyond the content of the image and the easy seductions of self-recognition, constructing an irregular memoir from memories that pose questions of their own. From her fitful early loves, to evenings with her father at the old Metropolitan Opera House, to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escapes the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Still Pictures delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led her to become a character in her own drama. Displaying the acuity, wit, and originality that led The Guardian to call Malcolm "America's finest nonaction writer," this brief volume is a memoir like few others in our literature. With an introduction by Malcolm's New Yorker colleague and friend Ian Frazier and an afterword by her daughter, Anne Malcolm.