Review by Booklist Review
Janet Malcolm (1934--2021) was distinctly brilliant and inquisitive, prone to irony, and frequently controversial. Her crisply argued, surprising, and mind-altering books are electrifying. This posthumous, delectably personal volume is a gift to all who have been happily provoked by her cutting observations, refusal to play nice, and mordant wit and a boon for every reader in search of superbly precise memoiristic essays. Each piece here is prompted by an old photograph, including one of young Malcolm and her parents on a train in Prague in 1939 as they escaped the looming Nazi horrors. The sharply etched, amusing, and frank essays that follow dissect their lives in New York City within a circle of fellow Czech émigrés. But even as Malcolm presents keenly detailed and acerbically analytical tales of her past, she stresses memory's unreliability and the folly of autobiography. At the start and close of this piquing collection, friend and fellow writer Ian Frazier and daughter Anne Malcolm pay vivid homage to Malcolm as a wizard of demolishing understatement who reveled in "horsing around" on the page to riling and profound effect.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this evocative posthumous memoir, journalist Malcolm (Nobody's Looking at You: Essays), who died last year, deconstructs her identity through an analysis of family photos. A photo taken in 1939 shows five-year-old Malcolm and her parents on a train leaving Prague just before the start of WWII, which triggers hazy recollections of her first year in America: "The image of a Beatrix Potter book... remains as a single unclarifying memento of the house in Brooklyn." A photo of Malcolm's teacher at the after-school Czech program she attended in Manhattan evokes sympathy: "We were too young to be kind in return to someone so weak." The author also addresses her career, including a lawsuit brought on by the subject of a 1984 New Yorker article who sued Malcolm and the magazine for libel. The case, which Malcolm won in 1994, caused Malcolm to rethink how other people perceived her: "It was at trial that the influence of the New Yorker proved to be most dire." Witty ("I was infected early on with the virus of romance") and reflective ("The glitter of memory may be no less deceptive"), this is a monument to a master of her craft. (Jan.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In this posthumous memoir, sharp-eyed, much-celebrated New Yorker staff writer Malcolm takes a look at an interesting subject: herself. Given her fondness for overturning convention, it's no surprise that she doesn't offer a standard chronology but instead presents her encounters with family photographs. With a 50,000-copy first printing.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Snapshots of a life of artistic creation. Journalist Malcolm (1934-2021), a photographer and collage artist as well as an award-winning writer, uses images of family and friends to create a memoir as elusive as it is revealing. "Autobiography," she wrote, "is a misnamed genre; memory speaks only some of its lines." Looking at photographs of herself as a child, of her parents and sister, she often admits to the vagueness of her recollections. "Most of what happens to us goes unremembered," she observes. "The events of our lives are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories." What she does remember coheres as a portrait of the émigré Czech community in New York in the 1940s. She and her family came to the U.S. in 1939 and settled in Yorkville, where her father, a doctor, treated the immigrant community in that upper Manhattan neighborhood. Besides public school--as a teenager, she went to the High School of Music and Art--Malcolm was sent to learn Czech; but though her parents wanted to ensure her connection to her heritage, they only belatedly told her she was Jewish. She and her sister were dismayed: "We had internalized the anti-Semitism in the culture and were shocked and mortified to learn that we were not on the 'good' side of the equation." Malcolm portrays her father as kind and patient, her mother as needy and volatile. Family life was happy, but "all happy families are alike in the pain their members helplessly inflict upon one another, as if under orders from a perverse higher authority." If some memories are swathed in the innocence of childhood perception, some seem deliberately obscured. "I would rather flunk a writing test," Malcolm admits, "than expose the pathetic secrets of my heart." What she does expose are sharp observations rendered in the precise, stylish prose that earned her acclaim. A graceful meditation on memory. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
