When you know of Janet Malcolm, you spot traces of her everywhere. You understand that she was a titan of the written word - a longtime New Yorker staff writer, member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and National Book Award finalist - with a far-reaching impact and cult-like following. But if you don't know to look for her name, it is easy to miss - unlike some of her contemporaries, Malcolm was actively opposed to being a literary celebrity, even while famously controversial for challenging the notion of journalism's objectivity.



The Absent Woman plumbs the Malcolm archives to uncover a portrait of this notoriously private writer and her work, and of the people and themes that she was consumed by in her over sixty-year career. From questions of narrative and truth to criticism and psychoanalysis to her decade-long case with Jeffrey Masson and the attacks she got from other critics, Eve Sneider reads Malcolm's obsessions in essays and books alongside her photographs, correspondence and episodes from her life - and illustrates the many ways in which Malcolm's writing about other people was a vehicle for her to understand herself.



Eve Sneider curated the inaugural exhibit from Malcolm's archive as a Yale senior. Sneider's work has been published in WIRED, where she was an editor, as well as in The New York Review of Books and Lapham's Quarterly. She lives in Brooklyn.



A delicious examination of Malcolm's formidable body of work, taking us deep into her writing process and showing, brilliantly, how she ticked.



There will surely be many books written about the late Janet Malcolm, one of our greatest journalists and intellectuals, but none may surpass Eve Sneider's The Absent Woman. Sneider was one of the first writers to dip into Malcolm's archive, and she has written a penetrating, even thrilling study of a woman who didn't want to be studied. She has profiled the great profiler, and it's a treat to behold.