Since this past spring, the Defector book club has had one name in our collective mouth: Janet Malcolm. Even before we went James Baldwin mode, we were yakking about The Journalist and the Murderer, and had Barry not smartly pointed out that we were forgetting about Wings Week, it would have been M is for Malcolm last month. But no matter! It's finally time. We are going to read one of Malcolm's earliest works, In The Freud Archives.
I personally have not read any Malcolm, only this great Bookforum piece on The Apartment and her history of smooching, though she's as revered as any American journalist of the past half-century. In what is surely a stunning, charming tribute, I did some reportage for this announcement post and asked Brandy Jensen what Malcolm's deal was.
"Janet Malcolm is probably, and perhaps deservedly, most famous for The Journalist and the Murderer, her ambivalent, reflective, sometimes seething account of convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald’s libel suit against journalist Joe McGinniss," Jensen wrote me. "In the afterword of that book, Malcolm reveals, in a dryly funny fashion, that she herself has become embroiled in a libel suit, filed by one of the subjects of her previous book, In the Freud Archives. Obviously, I need to read that book."
In The Freud Archives tells the story of three scholars engaging in some sort of scholarly battle—the NYRB page uses the phrase "Oedipal drama," which is enough of a hook for me—and as Defector's Head of Subscription Strategy Sean Kuhn is reading it right now, I asked him what Freud's deal was. "So far (~60% of the way through)," he wrote, "Malcolm has laid back and let a small cast of overeducated, repugnantly self-centered would-be tyrants execute palace intrigue maneuvers on each other."
I'm so in, and hopefully you will be too when we meet to discuss the book two weeks hence on Wednesday, August 21. That's not that far away, but I trust you can do it, as the book isn't terribly long. See you soon!
