Unlike her peers Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, New Yorker journalist Janet Malcolm avoided the personal fame her renown might have otherwise brought. In The Absent Woman, journalist Eve Sneider, among the first to access Malcolm’s archive, insightfully portrays this enigmatic writer and the people and themes that consumed her during a nearly sixty-year career.

Examining Malcolm’s infamous trials with psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, her provocative convictions about journalism, and her eventual turn to autobiographical writing, Sneider grapples with the dilemma at the heart of her subject’s work: the knotted ethics of depicting another person, even as she depicts Malcolm.

Divided into identities Malcolm embodied – émigré, humourist, photographer, shrink watcher, defendant, writer, artist, archivist – The Absent Woman is a vivid, Malcolmian probe into the mind of one of the most elusive literary figures of our time.