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.