Janet Malcolm: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

by Melville House (Editor), Katie Roiphe (Introduction)

A provocative collection of interviews with the sublimely talented author of The Journalist and the Murderer

The legendary journalist, Janet Malcolm, opened her most famous work The Journalist and the Murderer with the “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.”

Ever since its publication in 1980, she only increased her reputation as a devastatingly sharp writer, whose eye for observation is matched only by her formal inventiveness and philosophical interrogations of the relationship between journalist and subject.

Predictably, as an interview subject herself, she was an intimidating mark. In this collection, interviewers tangle with their own projections and identifications, while she often, gamely, plays along. Full of insights about her writing process, the craft of journalism, and her own analysis of her most famous works, this collection proves that Janet Malcolm is just as elusive and enlightening in conversation as she was on paper.

Genres: Nonfiction

127 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 7, 2022

Reviews

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several interviews with Janet Malcolm though she gave very few over the course of her illustrious career. The interviews tend to cover similar territory but it is interesting to see what was of interest to the interviewers. Malcolm's thoughtfulness and her deep thinking are in evidence here. For completists.

[Dhvani Parekh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and sweet: a good introduction to the journalist who I now wish to know more about.

The book is a collection of four interviews Janet Malcolm, the subject of the book, gave in her lifetime. She was a woman from my grandparents' generation, and one thing I admire about that generation is their stubborn insistence to do anything that they do properly. This was clearly evident in the nature of her interviews, most of them done via email, and in her being compelled to appear in a certain light. These interviews circled around her writings, writing persona or voice, literary style, events surrounding her writing career and the topics she chooses to write upon. She has an eclectic mix of books that had me curious.

I have not read a single piece by her yet, and perhaps the first one I'll pick is her most (in)famous one: The Journalist and the Murderer.

I like writers who tell the truth, or at least try to tell the truth. Truth isn't readily available, it needs to be sought, listened to, gleaned and fought for. It seems that Janet Malcolm did that and then comfortably put up the truth on display for all to see. She died a few years ago, but I can very well imagine her enjoying her last days in her New York apartment, with her floor to ceiling bookshelves lined up with alphabetically arranged, divided into genres books. One of her favorite characters is Elizabeth Bennett. Well, she had me there.

And all this, came from reading just about a hundred pages of a book of her interviews. Quite an impression it's made on me.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“All the time.” The last words in Janet Malcolm’s The Last Interview, a book which collects several interviews from Malcolm’s career building to her last (with the New York Times Book Review), are in response to the question “when do you read”. Her disposition as a furious lover of books, so palpable in her writing and her conversation, is one of many things I value so highly in her work. The interviews collected here are in many ways elliptical as a set, always coming back to the same things: Malcolm’s somewhat antagonistic relationship with journalism, her most famous quotes, her tendency to quote from herself and others in great length in interviews, achieving a kind of “collage effect”, and often, regrettably, the famous lawsuit brought against her in 1984 by Jeffrey Masson, which dragged on for over a decade and to some extent defined her in the public eye forevermore. Malcolm is warmer in her interviews than one might expect, though is no less careful nor concise than her prose. She is just as insightful, too: “Both the journalist and the psychoanalyst are connoisseurs of the small, unregarded motions of life”, she observes. Of her craft, “I'm definitely more a cabinetmaker than a tormented artist. Not that writing comes easy. I don't know about cabinetmakers, but I often get stuck.” And about the lawsuit, years later her perspective is fascinating, thrilling: “an experience I wouldn't have missed. It wasn't life threatening, and it was deeply interesting. It took me out of a sheltered place and threw me into bracingly icy water. What more could a writer want?” If someone could hook me up with the eleven-ish Malcolm books I haven’t got yet that would be great: my fascination deepens!

[Ruby]

Very interesting

[Kalysse · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to read this for school. 😒

[Sharon]

Fremont 070.44915 MALCOLM