Revived review : RIP Janet Malcolm 1934 - 2021****It's true, every time I think about this book I tremble with awe and reverence. It's like major parts of the whole thing about how human beings are human are here in its little pages. All the stuff that goes who are you really and anyway who is the I asking this question and what do these marks signify on these pages which apparently relate to people who used to be here but now aren't and why that should matter anyway, don't we have other more pr...

THE WHOLE IDEA OF BIOGRAPHY IS NAUSEATINGJanet Malcolm likes to trash entire genres of writing. Famously, on journalism she saidEvery journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.In this book she trashes biography which she tells us is an inherently revolting thing, pandering to our worst voyeurism.The biographer’s business, like the journalist’s, is to satisfy the reader’s curiosity… he is supposed to go out and b...

I found Janet Malcolm's non-biography/biography on the Plath/Hughes estate battles so gripping that I finished it in two sittings. Admittedly, this was not the book I was expecting (thought what I was expecting I'm not entirely sure of), but it read very intimately, very quickly, and very bitingly. Though Malcolm admits on several occasions that she leans on the Hughes "side" of the drama--and she would, seeing as she's cleverly evading the trappings of conventional biographical strictures with

It's a shame that the first time I'd ever heard of Janet Malcolm was for the libel case she was involved in back in the 1980s. The lawsuit is a staple of media law curricula around the country, and as a result, almost every journalism student has heard of Malcolm, but for all the wrong reasons. (I'm not trying to defend her against accusations of libel, because I don't know enough about the case and what really happened to say one way or the other.) She is a writer of great clarity and style whi...

A wonderful book. It tempts me to make statements like "a classic of the genre" but in fact, I don't read enough biography to know, and this is in any case something of an anti-biography, or a biography of biography itself. Somehow, despite being a biography of a genre I don't read, it was absorbing and a page turner. But it was not sensationalist, even about a sensationalist case. It is more concerned with its own moral quandaries.Without having really deep-dived into the whole Plath/Hughes deb...

Honestly, I could give two shits about Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes. I've never read The Bell Jar, although I've heard it's quite good. My interest is in Janet Malcolm, the way she has insinuated herself into one of the great battles of modern literature, taking as her subject not so much Plath or Hughes or Plath & Hughes, but their memories, the way they are written about and argued about.Poets, like politicians it seems, have partisans. And while such folks allow themselves to have a personal inv...

Smartest book on biography I've ever read. Purports to be about Plath and Hughes but it really about the history of Plath/Hughes biography, and about the project of writing a life more generally. Fascinating, insightful, and some lovely writing. Some representative good bits: "The freedom to be cruel is one of journalism's uncontested privileges, and the rendering of subjects as if they were characters in bad novels is one of its widely accepted conventions." Quoting A. Alvarez on Ted Hughes: "T...

I found this provocative, really smart, and fascinating. It's pretty much an anti-biography, questioning from the start the whole enterprise of writing--or reading--a biography, on ethical grounds, and also because of the interpretative leaps and elisions required to present what appears to be a coherent rendering of a life. Which Malcolm stubbornly refused to do; she includes her doubts, her sense of her own biases--even her errors, in the interesting endnote added after the original publicatio...

The whole psychodrama of the "Hughes vs. Plath" literary industry is deeply boring to me, despite my love for the work of both poets, so I wasn't expecting much from The Silent Woman . . . but it turns out that Janet Malcolm is in agreement re: the inherent lameness of that topic, and so she instead produced a brilliant and original analysis of biography-writing, self-creation, the publishing industry, and literature as such (along with, almost as an afterthought, insightful readings of Plath's

Not a biography but an essay on biography using the famous platform of Hughes/Plath. Way to market something most people wouldn't have read if it was called "Vagaries of the Biography."Plath and Hughes were picked over again, nothing new here, the other 5 well known bio's have done it before.It did interest me that Malcolm sided with the Hughes.Olwyn may have been protective of Ted but she was also a bully and easily as difficult and unpleasant as Sylvia is accused of being.And Ted, yes, he's ha...

This is a kind of meditation on biography, on the impossibility of the enterprise in any serious sense. I mean, we crave them, we study celebrity, but even with the journals, the drawings, the poems, the essays, and novel, we see different people, contradictory, and the plain of public and critical opinion is so heated that we realize with her help that we have no idea who she was, and no idea what her marriage was to Hughes. This doesn't stop us from obsessing about it, me included, we seem to

“In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction … only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.”This book confirms it: I am an unabashed Janet Malcolm fanboy. I can’t get enough of her sleek little letter bombs, masked by the genteel New Yorker house style, all dressed up in her patented, surgical prose: erudite, witty, cutting, and ever-so-elegan...

I am blown away by this book. Janet Malcolm is a hell of a writer. This is not so much a book about Sylvia Plath as it is a book about the nature of biography, and what it means to die and have everyone you have ever known (and many you have never known) construct and reconstruct and entirely fabricate your life from fragments. This is a book about the creation of the legend of Sylvia Plath, genius housewife poet, wronged woman, Lady Lazarus who rose from the dead and ate men like air, patron sa...

a biography about biographies and specifically about the Sylvia Plath cottage industry. what is truth? The responsibility of the biographer vs the irresponsibility of the journalist. and that the reasoned 'truthful' 'responsible' biography is paint drying dull; dishwater dull, when compared to the salacious memoir.Extra complicated when Plath herself presented so many versions of herself; so many 'selves'.I am just a vulture. A relative newcomer to the Legend that is Plath and Hughes/Hughes and

"The questions raised by the passage only underscore the epistemological uncertainty by which the reader of biography and autobiography (and history and journalism) is always and everywhere dogged. In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination. When James reports in The Golden Bowl that the Prince and Charlotte are sleeping...

"In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination. When James reports in THE GOLDEN BOWL that the prince and Charlotte are sleeping together, we have no reason to doubt him or to wonder whether Maggie is 'overreacting' to what she sees. James's is a true report. The facts of imaginative literature are as hard as the stone that...

I've read several of Malcolm's books,I like the lucidity of her writing,and I like how she includes information about the process of writing. This book isn't so much about Plath, a trivial figure in the world of literature,as it is about the battle between waring camps of biographers,and the process of writing. And some of the rules and ethics of the various types of writings. Much of her work is in the genre of Tracy Kidders book,The soul of a new machine,which is about the process. And the ma

I loved this book! In exploring the process of biography & the Sylvia Plath legend, it teaches you a lot about her and Hughes but also about both the difficulties of trying to tell someone's life story--fact, fiction, truth, speculation, etc.--especially when that person is dead and people close to him/her are still alive. Great read!

i came to this book wishing to know sylvia plath and perhaps ted hughes. in the process, i learnt a bit more about ted hughes but almost nothing new about plath herself. it is, in fact, a biography about biographical writing. but even then, this was enjoyable. very much so. except now i will have to read the other biographies since clearly this is not going to help me in my research much.

How is it that I never read Janet Malcolm (beyond the occasional New Yorker article) before? I was prompted to do so by Malcolm's recent passing. The Silent Woman is Malcolm's look at the thorny, problematic nature of biography. What better subject than Sylvia Plath and, by extension, Ted Hughes (Plath's husband who has been routinely vilified in most of the biographies written about the his poet wife)? The widely accepted narrative is that Plath, a tortured, unhappy artist, was pushed over the

The Silent Woman is a book about writing biographies, specifically the industry of writing biographies about the American poet Sylvia Plath (and inevitably, about the disintegration of her marriage to the English poet Ted Hughes, which led her to ending her life). As Plath's writing was strictly autobiographical, Malcolm's book ponders the ethics of writing a biography about someone whose family and friends are still alive at the time of writing (even though the subject herself is dead) and rais...

Five stars for Sylvia Plath, three stars for Ted Hughes.

Janet Malcolm is my newest favorite provocative journalist. What Jessica Mitford did for the prison and funeral industries, Janet Malcolm is doing for biography and journalist. I started out with The Journalist and the Murderer and moved on from there. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) ma...

Janet Malcolm seems to delight in sneering at everyone and everything (including biography itself) but never enough to seem nasty. It is a celebration of the fickle, self-centred, multi-faceted nature of human beings as much as it is about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.'The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not a negligible one, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living.'I love the picture she builds up of the 'players' in the legend of Sylvia Plath. They mainly get torn a...

This is another book that I associate with a particular moment in my life. I read it all in one night, I think, in my dorm room. The prevailing theory in my class about this one is that Ms. Malcolm was er... interested in Mr. Hughes.

Some quite refreshing perspectives on the art of biography but the writer clearly is, as she states, for the Hughes side of the story which leads to unevenness and at times an attempt to vilify Sylvia Plath and romanticize Hughes and gloss over his affairs.

Reading this taught me absolutely nothing about Sylvia Plath, even less about Ted Hughes, but instead a billion details about all the people who were involved in writing her biographies. That's not what I came for though.

Interesting. Not brilliant. No great insights into the biographical form, despite what was promised. Maybe I expect too much.

A great literary investigation that sort of blows the whole notion of biography out of the water. Very memorable. I'd read Janet Malcolm on just about anything.

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