In Conversation: David Remnick, David Salle, Katie Roiphe, and Zoë Heller on Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory

Laura Hoptman:
Thank you all for coming. Welcome to The Drawing Center. I'm Laura Hoptman, the executive director, and tonight's panel discussion celebrates the posthumous publication of Janet Malcolm's memoir, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, published by FSG and available for purchase in the lobby.

We're excited to hear this really distinguished group on the life of this acclaimed writer, journalist, and artist. And it's because of this last vocation and the body of collages that Malcolm made and that will be included in our upcoming exhibition, Of Mythic Worlds: Works from the Distant Past through the Present, that we are hosting this event tonight. That exhibition, a preview of which you see hung around you, is a curatorial project by independent curator, Olivia Shao, who's here tonight. Thank you Olivia for including Janet Malcolm's collages along with works by Georgia O'Keeffe and Jo Baer, Andrei Tarkovsky and Jack Whitten, 19th century Shaker women and Roland Barthes to create a one of a kind curatorial experience from a little more than 50 remarkable works on paper, some of which you see surrounding you tonight.

The conversation this evening will be moderated by David Remnick, who we were just saying needs no introduction, but I'm going to do it anyway. He's the editor of the New Yorker and has been so since 1998. He joined the magazine after a decade as Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, my hometown paper, and is in addition, the author of several books, including The Bridge, King of the World and Lenin's Tomb, the last for which he received a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Under his leadership, the New Yorker has been the country's most honored magazine, winning 55 National Magazine awards and in a first for any magazine, six Pulitzer Prizes. And I know that Mr. Remnick didn't do it alone and a lot of the people who helped him get there are in the room tonight.

David is joined on the panel by, directly to his left, Katie Roiphe, the Director of Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU. She's the author of a number of books, including The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism on Campus... I should have not had to have read that... and most recently, the Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London, The Violet Hour, In Praise of Messy Lives, and most recently, The Power Notebooks that came out in 2020. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, Harpers, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many other publications. Next to Katie is Zoe Heller, yet another author who doesn't need any introduction. She's a journalist and an author of three wonderful novels...Everything You Know, The Believers, and Notes on a Scandal... and she lives here in New York City. Finally, last but not least, I'm happy to introduce my friend, the artist and longtime Drawing Center board member, David Salle. In his long painting career, David has defined what's become known as the postmodern sensibility, and you did it with works that combine abstraction and figuration; appropriation; jokes, conceptual and perceptual; drawing; cartooning; montage and so much more. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at major museums here and abroad, and David is also a regular contributor to the New York Review of books, where he writes on visual art with an elegant incisiveness and a sharp criticality that is also evident in his paintings. A collection of David's essays called How to See, Look, Talking and Thinking About Art was published by Norton in 2016.

We are grateful to Anne Malcolm, Janet Malcolm's daughter, and Lauren Roberts, senior publicist at FSG, for partnering with us to bring this wonderful program to The Drawing Center. And I'll just conclude by sharing that lead support for the exhibition and the accompanying publication, both called Of Mythic Worlds, has been provided by the Burger Collection in Hong Kong and the TOY family, along with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Generous funding was also provided by the ADAA Foundation, our friends in the art galleries, the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, Lonti Ebers, and Gagosian. Additional support is provided by the Director's Circle of The Drawing Center.

And now it's my great pleasure to introduce David Remnick.

David Remnick:
First of all, I'd like to say I'm sorry that we're lacking some seats, but I think it would please Janet Malcolm no end to know that this event was crowded like the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1964. That's the first reason she'd be pleased, and that she didn't have to come to the event. But we miss her dearly. Janet died in June of 2021, and from a parochial point of view was one of the most remarkable New Yorker staff writers in the history of the magazine. But we aren't being parochial at all tonight. Useless Tilly is taking the week off.

What I'd like to get at tonight in this short time that we have with these remarkable writers and artists is a sense of what made Janet Malcolm the literary, and journalistic, and human presence that she unforgettably was and remains. The occasion, of course, is the publication of Still Pictures, a form of prismatic, allusive, elusive, and telling autobiography by a writer who was deeply suspicious of the form of autobiography and biography and who, not incidentally, spent some of her youth as a critic of photography.

So let's start with this. Zoë, Still Pictures is what Janet wrote in lieu of a more standard autobiography, not that we'd expect her to write a standard anything. Why do you think she ended up opting for this more elliptical form of autobiography?

Zoë Heller:
I think she wrote herself about what she found difficult when she started out trying to do an autobiography. She said she didn't, as her characters had always done in her pieces, auto fictionalize. I got the sense reading that piece that she found there was something slightly embarrassing about the whole idea of turning yourself into a character and all the difficulties she often spoke about in terms of transforming reality into narrative was even more difficult when it was your own life. When you're interviewing a subject, you gather up your data and your research and you try and construct something out of it. But in this case, you have the whole thing. You have too much.

And the other thing is I think that, rather like the collages, it's a release. It's a holiday from narrative. It's a way of doing something that's more allusive. You don't have to come to conclusions. You put some things together and say I wonder, rather than that journalistic nightmare of what's my take? What's the conclusion?

David Remnick:
Katie, what do you think of the form of the book?

Katie Roiphe:
Well, I think she chose this scrap booking form. I agree with Zoe. I think it was very allusive for her. It allowed her to evade going too deeply into anything. We were just talking about a moment when I was interviewing her where she changes the subject. Every time we got to something that I desperately wanted to get farther into, she would say, "That's not a conversation for right now." And in a way, this form where she annotates these photographs allows her to dart in between topics, to move off of one the minute she gets close to something she doesn't want to delve into.

And she also talks about how, I think, she uses this form as a way of expressing some of her doubt about autobiography. I think this book is in a way a criticism of autobiography, and she's often representing the past as something we have to work very hard to understand, that most memoirs pretend there's an easy relation they have with their past selves. And she talks in the book about how there's a box of old, not good photos. And it's such a wonderful self-deprecating sly Janet idea, that autobiography itself is old, not good photos, and all we can do is look at one and say what was going on? And that's the mood of the book, I think.

David Remnick:
One of the things about her is that she's engaging in a form that in some way she doesn't believe in. Why would you do such a thing?

Zoë Heller:
That's all you've got. I think part of what her occasional critics got wrong was the idea that she was saying journalism is bad, journalists tell lies. Or the law is bad, people tell stories in court. I think her point was more, stories are all we have, but it's a good thing that we should understand their deficiencies.

David Remnick:
Which makes her a postmodernist of some kind.

Zoë Heller:
I guess.

Katie Roiphe:
And I think she was also drawn to challenges and the fact that she found autobiography so difficult. She turned this graceful little autobiography into this elegant, as you say, meta critique of memoir itself and of memory itself. And she uses this book to gracefully suggest that our past selves are strangers, and she's often rigorously interrogating her own memory. I can't possibly remember this. She talks about how memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly. That's a quote. And that's the point of what she's saying here, is she's not directly or rudely attacking other memoirists, but she really is attacking the project of memoir in a way Mary McCarthy did in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, that occasional memoirs do. But this one really is, I think, in that tradition of a memoir that questions what our memory can really do.

David Remnick:
David, you had the experience and lived to tell the tale of being profiled by Janet Malcolm. And Janet, I don't know if she planned on doing this from the get-go. I suspect not. But that became a formal experiment rather than it being a standard profile in which there is an opening scene and then we go back and we get the life story and then we catch up, and all these various forms of profile that have become almost codified over time. The profile of you is called Forty-One False Starts, and it's what's in the business called 41 leads and then they're abandoned. When you picked up The New Yorker the week that that came out, or maybe during the course of the checking process, were you a little surprised?

David Salle:
It's a long time ago. I can't remember exactly. I'm pretty sure Janet had told me that she was experimenting with a form, and she was trying to find a form which in some way approximated what she thought of as my working process. So it was a double faint in a way. I mean, I think it served all kinds of purposes for just on the page not to have to conclude these stories, but to let them simmer altogether. A lot of people had issues with that form. I don't know why. I thought it was interesting. Why shouldn't she try something out of the ordinary? It seemed appropriate, and I think it's held up and probably it's now formed a model for other people too.

David Remnick:
So when you see this new book and you see the use of the visual and then married to short essays or however, what do you make of it as a reader, as a form?

David Salle:
What's interesting about using the photographs as a prompt, since so many of them are, as she says, tiny, two by three inches, vintage black and white prints. And then as they're reproduced in the book, you can't see anything. She's essentially just... It's on her authority that this story's being told. So we are obliged to go with it. I find that very interesting and funny.

And as Katie said, everyone said, the book is full of things like, of course, I have no memory of that. I have no memory. I don't remember his name, if I ever knew it. I must have met them, but I can't remember. It's full of acknowledgement of life's blank walls and cul-de-sacs. And I don't know if she says this in the book directly, but it seems like one of the subplots is, this is what I can remember now. This is what sticks. This is what feels important today.

I don't see it so much as a critique of the project of memoir or autobiography per se, but as simply a continuation of Janet's lifelong project of using the psychoanalytic model to interrogate pretty much everything everyone says about themselves or anyone else for that matter. There's the story that we tell each other or tell ourselves or tell the world. And then there's the other story, which is the story that comes out in the so-called Freudian slip or whatnot. And that's the thing that she was just unbelievably attuned to the way certain people can hear frequencies that are greater, higher or lower than the normal. She could hear that. I mean, she had the analytic ear, and that is, of course, the thing she could do for other people as a lifelong project, that she could do it for herself is really interesting. And it makes it so touching and poignant, I think.

Katie Roiphe:
Yeah, it's interesting because when I did my Paris Review interview with her, I said, was your writing influenced by psychoanalysis? And she said, no. And I pushed a little back, which I was very scared to do, but I did. And she really was adamant on that. She was like, nope, it just didn't have any influence on my work at all, no matter what you say. That's where we left it. But I think, of course, you're right. And one of the things that's so interesting is just her obsession with the self as an unreliable narrator, that everybody is fabricating all the time. And she talks in that piece Zoë referenced earlier about not wanting to write a puff piece about herself, her allergy to that idea. And I think that constant interrogation of what's beneath the surface, what was really happening in the room that I didn't really understand, her great respect for the fact that people really rarely have control of their own narratives or even the remotest understanding of them and her humility before the project of how do I even describe this thing that happened to me in my life?

But I do think of course she was influenced by psychoanalysis and that that analytic, that idea of what's accidentally revealing, is something that obsessed her. But it was a comic moment because she just wouldn't admit that.

Zoë Heller:
Well, she instructed us not to trust artists when they're talking about their own work. I mean, you point that out in your piece about her, that she would say, well, of course, so-and-so Rauschenberg says this, but clearly that's not what's happening here. And I think there are several times actually where she talks about her own work and you think, no, Janet, that's not what's going on at all. And that would be a case in point, the psychoanalysis plays no part. What are some other ones? Oh, I always disagreed with her on the idea that it doesn't... She came to the conclusion that it didn't actually matter who was asking the questions of a subject. The subject would deliver the same spiel whatever. And I was like, baloney. It's clearly not the case.

David Remnick:
Why baloney?

Zoë Heller:
Because we know that, I think, she got stuff from people in her particular way. We were just laughing before about the great skill of being able to remain silent at the crucial moment, which she had down. But yes, I think that she was a very skilled interviewer and she got stuff out of people that other people wouldn't. And generally as a rule, clearly there are some connections in interviews that work where you extract stuff, and somewhere the chemistry is not right and they remain a stone. So I just didn't buy that at all. And I'm not sure she did really.

Katie Roiphe:
Well, she also really was adamant about her own not being extraordinary. So one of the things she disliked about autobiography, she talks about how she doesn't like the fact that someone writing an autobiography has to have this preternaturally natural faith in their own extraordinariness, and she didn't want to ever admit that she was extraordinary in any way at all. So she has to always claim that she's just standing in. She's just sitting there. She happens to be sitting there doing this interview. So I think that's part of that way of being in the world.

David Remnick:
I'd love to know, David, what the process was like of working, maybe the word is with her, but being written about by her. How did it happen? How often did you see her? What were the sessions like? Did it change over time?

David Salle:
The conversation with Janet went on for such a long time, more than two years as I recall. At a certain point, probably stupidly on my part, I forgot she was writing about me. We were just having a conversation. We were just hanging out.

Katie Roiphe:
Really?

David Salle:
I mean, clearly she didn't miss anything and wasn't... I mean, I guess that's not entirely true. I mean, I always knew that she was who she was, but it went on way longer than it really needed to and I'm sure she had way more material than she needed just after a couple of months. But she kept coming back to the studio and I kept coming to visit her, and we kept having lunch and doing other things, going to galleries and whatnot. I think maybe she was looking for something in particular that wasn't forthcoming. But I think the fact that she was writing about the art world, which attracted her and maybe even fascinated her, but it was something that she was trying to figure out what the ground rules were for how people behaved in that milieu, which I think she totally got. But what I remember long after the piece came out, and this will in a way... I'm actually divulging a confidence, which I don't know if I should, if it's ethical or not, but she's not here to get me into trouble.

David, I don't want to imply that I was allowed to check my quotes because I wasn't. But there was one quote where I was talking about someone else's work and there was a critic who... I mean, I'm exaggerating for dramatic or comedic effect... was almost a self-appointed bête noire to me, and Janet went to investigate what that antagonism was about. So I said something like, well, what I really want to know is what does this critic like? He hates all of this other stuff. What does he like? Because that's in a way the thing that matters. So we looked at what he liked and we were both a little deflated. We had this fantasy that wouldn't it be great if he actually discovered all these great artists who were unjustly ignored and he was right? But that wasn't actually the case.

So I am quoted in the piece as saying something like, I went to see the work and it was just so tiny. And we wrangled over that word because maybe it wasn't my first expression when she read that because I was allowed to react to quotes where I was talking about another artist because that was the one taboo. And I said, oh, that may be tiny. It was just so tiny. And she was never happy with the word and suggested some other things, other small. But we agreed tiny actually expressed what I was trying to say, that it was the contrast of the expectation and the diminution to the final little tiny thing that we were looking at.

Here's the point of the story. Three years later when the piece was anthologized, or maybe the second time that it was anthologized, Janet called me up and said, I know the word. I know the word. She had been looking for the right synonym for small for years.

David Remnick:
Well, what was it?

David Salle:
I have to say, it wasn't better than tiny.

David Remnick:
Teenie weenie. Let me just follow up on that. Whether Janet liked it or not, the most famous sentence she wrote was the one that begins The Journalist and the Murderer. When the process was over and she said... to summarize because I don't have it on the top of my head, but betrayal is part of the process, and if journalists are self-aware, they know that an act of betrayal is going to, taadada. And you know the book. When it was all over, how did you feel about the process and your chronicler? Relieved? Betrayed? Happy? Or all of the above and more?

David Salle:
Well, I think maybe I'm just a very simple person. I just liked Janet and I think she liked me. I just thought it was fun and a lark. I never imagined I would be the subject of a profile in The New Yorker, and all the whole thing was so unlikely and not something that one lays awake at night thinking about. I think now I would have much more feelings about being exposed. But it was a time in my life I was either just so stupid or so naive and so preoccupied, it was like, oh, that was interesting and that was fun. And I'm not trying to make myself up into some Buddha-like person, but I didn't feel the need to contradict any conclusions that Janet reached or any... People said, oh, she treated this person badly or that person. I don't think so. Nothing bothered me really.

David Remnick:
So Janet had a reputation, at least among some, for coldness in her prose or a coolness in her prose and in her persona, not completely different from Didion too. And in the book she writes about how she had to learn to change her personality for courtroom reasons, a process that she seemed to pretend, at least in this book, to enjoy immensely even though it was the most horrible experience imaginable. I don't think Janet enjoyed the legal process one bit. What do you make of this notion of her persona being cool or the prose being cool?

Zoë Heller:
Well, the testimony of anybody who ever met her or knew her is the opposite, is that she wasn't. As we were saying earlier about the capacity for the silence, she knew how to intimidate. And if we're talking about the writing, it seems to me that was always... It may have something to do with an expectation about how women should write, particularly about other people, that they should be kind and maternal and forgiving. It's not to say that Janet wasn't all of those things in their place, but she understood writing to be an arena in which you expressed all kinds of things and you made judgments. Her pieces were always thoughtful and they were always searching. And I can't think of a single piece she ever wrote where you felt, oh, there's some thoroughgoing malice happening in that piece. Cruel but fair, as Monty Python would say. There were occasions where you say, oh, that poor person. But it was more a case of them having been handed the rope and having very beautifully hung themselves than-

David Remnick:
And there's no malice in that?

Zoë Heller:
I do not detect. What's interesting about her is she will talk about... and actually this really gets down to what I love about her writing, is she'll be right in the middle of sweeping you along on some account of somebody and you're like, yeah, yeah, they sound awful. And then say, but wait, I shouldn't... I mean, what do I know? It's not my place to be deciding who is the goodie or the baddy. I'm not a novelist. And there's lots of things about, let's say, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes's relationship that I will never know. And she'll undercut her own thing. And the amazing thing is that you'll say, yes, yes, you're right. I will no longer be a bovine reader simply accepting your thing. And then the next paragraph, you're back with her, accepting her very brilliant assessment.

David Remnick:
There's a piece by Kenneth Tynan, another great profile writer with a very different spirit, who's doing a profile of Tom Stoppard. And they're at the breakfast table and there's Tom Stoppard, Kenneth Tynan, and Tom Stoppard's very young son at the time. And quite logically, the nine-year-old son turns to his father and says, Daddy, what is that man doing at the breakfast table? And Tom Stoppard says, collecting the damning domestic evidence, I should assume.

It's a weird process, this thing reporting. [To Katie] Janet, you got a unique insight into her in this extraordinary interview that you did with her. Similar question. What did you derive about her methods and intention overall?

Katie Roiphe:
Oh, that's such a huge question. I just want to say a word about the coldness and the pitilessness because I was very afraid of her in my interview. I went in there because I did feel that, what are the three sentences she's going to make of me in one moment? And I had to send her... because The Paris Review has this weird process where you show everything to the person, and I had to send her my introduction that I'd written about her. Actually, she made me read it out loud to her on the phone, which was scary. Like maybe the scariest thing in my life.

David Remnick:
She made you read it to her?

Katie Roiphe:
Yeah, she made me read it out loud to her on the phone.

David Remnick:
And you did it?

Zoë Heller:
Come on. That's not a little pitiless?

Katie Roiphe:
I did it. But then she wrote me an email about it and she actually wrote, am I as forbidding as all that... question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark. And that was very her, because she wasn't. By that point, I'd gotten to know her and she was very warm. And as Zoe said, she wasn't forbidding at all in person. Not at all. A little bit.

But anyway, the thing is that she... even her obituaries talk about her as brutal, pitiless. They use this language that... I agree with Zoe, I think it's... and you wrote about this too in your piece. I believe that it was very gendered because nobody's saying that Christopher Hitchens is brutal or pitiless or James Baldwin is brutal or pitiless. And they did the same thing, which is they were very, very good-

David Remnick:
They don't?

Katie Roiphe:
No, they don't use those words. The coldness, the pitiless, the brutal. Not that they didn't get criticized, but they didn't get criticized for this. Because what she was doing was seeing through people's delusions, seeing through... As you said, she could look at how you chopped tomatoes and see everything about you, seeing through our own mythologies about ourselves, our pretensions, our secret things we tell ourselves, and our hopes. And she could dice them up in one second. But she was just really good at it. She was better at it than other people. And I think there was a lot of jealousy in the journalistic community surrounding that.

David Remnick:
Because of The Journalist and the Murderer stuff.

Katie Roiphe:
A little bit because of that. She attributed it much to that. Everybody admired her. She was this paradox. She was a grand dame and an enfant terrible simultaneously. She was both an incredible journalist that everyone respected, but also somebody that everybody thought did something wrong or got away with something. But I do believe with the pitiless stuff, that it's really just that she did this job that we're all doing on such a high level and that what people were attacking just fundamentally boiled down to how good she was at it.

David Salle:
I had a conversation with Janet about this once. There was one piece, I think it was about women in some eastern European country... Poland? I can't remember which piece it was, in which collection, but it was a profile not of an individual, but of a group of women who had become survivors in the managing sense, managing with deprivation and shortages and whatnot, and just being strong and competent. And the piece struck me as somehow having a very sharp edge. And maybe this is what people talk about, what people mean when they talk about the coldness.

And she said, what do you think? And I told her, it seems you come on pretty strong. And she was shocked. She said, really? Show me where. And we went through the text and, of course, it wasn't there. It was absolutely not there. It was just someone describing reality without too much apology. And I probably did play into some gendered expectation that the ability to simply say this and not that, very clearly and simply is in our culture so rare that it comes off cold. But it wasn't. When she challenged me to point out where in the writing this alleged coldness or brutality lay, I couldn't find it.

Zoë Heller:
The other really important thing to add is that... and this is very apparent in the piece about you and so many of her profiles... there was an abundance of affection and identification with and love for her subjects. And I would say that was true of the famous Jeffrey Masson piece that got her into such trouble. It's hard to spend two years or more with somebody without actually... I mean, at the very least, you're acknowledging them as a very interesting person who's worth spending all that time with. But I think there was enormous affection that seeps through in the piece about David. And in some way, she kind of fell in love with Ted Hughes it seemed to me. She certainly fell in love with the MSNBC woman, Rachel Maddow.

David Remnick:
She did. She loved Rachel Maddow, but she also very carefully tore back some of the over-torquing in Rachel's storytelling. The methodology of the way Rachel Maddow would begin and develop her narratives about Trump or whoever it was, that was really discerning. And I think Rachel Maddow was both thrilled and found out a little bit as much the...And we were talking before, there's that wonderful piece that the great Anne Goldstein edited and edited many other pieces. What's the name of the pianist?

Zoë Heller:
Yuja Wang.

David Remnick:
If you remember this piece, Janet commented at least 475 times on the shortness of the skirts, almost to the tone of you're not leaving the house wearing that. And I gently mentioned this, and maybe six mentions of this is okay and maybe not a seventh. And I was listened to very carefully, at least at a distance, and they stayed all as is, which is my usual luck on editing or suggesting anything. But there was a certain... She had a sense of standard too in her behavior.

Zoë Heller:
Yeah, and I think one of the interesting things about this book, too, and one of the things I liked about her writing is she's both an extremely modern, forward-looking and enfant terrible person, as you say. But there's also a very strong sense of her not being of this Instagram generation. And one of the difficulties with writing autobiography is how much value she put on privacy and the idea that actually there are some things that possibly it's not wise or salutary to share with the world.

David Remnick:
A sensitive question maybe, but a fair one, I think. What is your favorite of her books and is there a book where you thought, I don't know if I'm totally along for the ride on this one? I have, as we say, problems with this one.

Katie Roiphe:
I think The Silent Woman is my favorite. The Sylvia Plath book and I guess the one that I still admire more than most people's books. One of my friends, who's actually a New Yorker writer, said of Iphigenia in Forest Hills, that's all Janet Malcolm doing her scary music. And I felt like that was maybe just a tiny bit true, but I still loved it. But that would be one of my less favorite ones. But the Silent Woman, I think is my most favorite.

Zoë Heller:
I would say The Silent Woman was my favorite too. I know she had great affection for the Sheila McGough book, but also recognized it was... And I have real affection for that book. That's probably my least favorite. But why I love it is because it's Janet dealing with this welter of information and not quite getting... Her great skill was to take vast, complicated things and turn them into something beautiful and elegant and coherent. And with that one, that's slightly octopus.

David Salle:
I found the Sheila McGough one challenging because the character is so challenging. There's just not a lot anyone could do with that character. And I'm sure there's an analogy in Shakespeare somewhere. There's some character that just takes up a lot of stage time and you wonder what they're doing there. I mean, I know the point of her. So that one was one that probably I didn't go back and reread.

I think the Iphigenia in Forest Hills is an absolute masterpiece. In fact, I wept when I read it and it's so moving. Her feeling for family, what families do, what they fail to do, how they form, construct and destruct people's personalities is so deep and moving. That one gets to me.

David Remnick:
This kind of writing is a rare thing. And I think it is possible to say just as the 19th century novel was possible because a certain kind of magazine in Russia and in Britain serialized at fantastic length, and this was an entertainment of the day, also there was a generation when a fat with advertising magazine carried a three, four-part series of a certain kind of writing. What are we in danger of losing because of the way things are changing in terms of the medium? Do you think Janet Malcolm's career would be possible now and going forward?

Katie Roiphe:
Well, I mean, I think for one thing, her use of long quotes, which is... We are sitting beneath one of her collages, and I just want to bring up her collage. But the element of her writing that really was a lot like collage, where she would just use these long speeches that were allowing people to be articulate, I think obviously the fact-checking department at The New Yorker is going to be a little bit more challenging for that now, to be a little tactful. But that some of her-

David Remnick:
Do you think it should be or shouldn't be?

Katie Roiphe:
No, I think it shouldn't be, honestly. Because I think that... and even though I teach in a journalism school, I'm way more on the edge of Virginia Woolf's idea of there's more fact in fiction. But I think that she curated them, but she was making people sound... I know that she took speech very seriously. And one of the reasons why she didn't like interviews was that she took speech so seriously.

She wanted to write her answers because she wanted to control it because she took words very seriously. And she wanted herself, as she wanted other people, not to just be judged by their casual utterances. She wanted to really make them into their best selves, which is not to say I think she fabricated or tinkered with these quotations, but rather she curated them to make the person more themselves and to represent their speech and their mind better. And I think the loss of that is sad. So I think some of her innovations and her creativity and her novelist contributions to journalism aren't possible now partly... and maybe in reaction to some of the things that happened to her. The industry changed. But I do think it would be hard for someone to do that kind of writing now.

David Remnick:
Zoe?

Zoë Heller:
For my part, I'm very strongly against collages of quotes. And it's funny, the first time I ever read Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer, it was given to me by my then editor, the late great Ian Jack. And he said, well, it's an interesting thing that she says about putting all the courts together. I think it's a bit dodgy.

And I completely agree. I take your point that she never did it in a gotcha, taking things out of context to make people look foolish. On the contrary, she tended to make them more themselves and more articulate than they were. However, precisely because she valued language, and I value language, and the idea of if one imagines oneself saying something on one day and having it stuck against another sentence that was said on another day, it makes my hair stand on end. I wouldn't want it done to me. I don't think she would want it done to her either. So there's that.

And I think, yes, it's very hard to imagine future Janet Malcolms being able to get along in journalism in the way she did, not least because you can't wander around for two years interviewing David Salle and having your editor say, how's it going? Marvelous. Send in your expenses. So that's a great sadness.

David Salle:
It's an interesting question because in this book, Janet's writing about things that took place in the '40s and '50s and '60s. It's a long time ago now. And I didn't ask it of myself in a formal way, but I was wondering in the back of my mind how this would be read by younger people. Of course, I have no real idea.

But the writing is so user friendly. This strikes me about Janet again and again and again and what's so apparent in this book is that she brings the audience along with her. She brings the reader along. She brings us along with her in all kinds of ways, all kinds of little techniques that she has to do. And she does it repeatedly, which means that what she's really doing is she's thinking always about the reader. That's why the thing about quotes, should she or shouldn't she? I don't have an opinion about it. The point is the reader, that she's writing it for the reader.

Now, will that mean anything to you? To people who grow up on Instagram and Twitter? I have no idea. I hope so. My hunch is that it's so accessible. It's really, really accessible. It's shockingly accessible for something that is so complex and so well considered and so deep. But it's so non-academic and it's also grounded in a kind of malicious humor. I mean malicious in the small M sense of mischievous maybe, that who wouldn't enjoy it? Who would not find that enjoyable?

Q&A

David Remnick:
Are there questions in the balcony? Did you make a little motion in the back? If you make a motion, you get called on. It's like an auction. You just bought a piano. No questions? You're really that hungry? Yes, please.

Speaker 1:
I know that Janet's original editor was her husband, Gardner Botsford, and I always wondered how it affected her style, if it did, that she had to adjust to... It's like a late Henry James or something. She had to adjust to a different editor.

David Salle:
She's right there.

David Remnick:
Can I answer that?

Speaker 1:
Yes.

David Remnick:
I think Gardner Botsford was a great editor. So was his successor. Anne Goldstein is sitting right there in the front row, who you probably know also as the translator of so many Italian novels. There's not an Italian novel of worth that is not translated by Anne, but it's hard to say.

Anne Goldstein:
Janet was sad when there was no Gardner.

David Remnick:
Pardon me?

Anne Goldstein:
When Gardner died, Janet was very... Obviously she was sad. She was sad about losing her editor.

David Remnick:
And her husband, too, I assume.

Anne Goldstein:
Yes. And I said, well, it's up to us now.

David Remnick:
Yes. That's fair. Go ahead.

Speaker 2:
Katie, in your interview with her for the Paris Review, you brought up the subject of malice and she had very interesting things to say. Do you remember?

Katie Roiphe:
Yes. She said, I think you're asking me about my own malice. And she said, yes, I confess to my malice. That's what I remember. Do you remember it differently?

Speaker 2:
No, I think that's right. And earlier in the conversation, someone said there was no malice. I don't think that's right.

Katie Roiphe:
I mean, obviously she was very interested in this moral interrogation of journalism, and she felt that journalists were... I mean, she was very alive to the ways in which journalists would be ruthless about the story. And I think she was comfortable with aggression being a part of this business and admitting to it.

Zoë Heller:
Yeah, I'm the one who stands corrected. It's true. Because I was the person who said there wasn't really malice in her work. I guess how I would correct that is to say there was never... One reads an awful lot of stuff. In the New York Times, you can open up something tomorrow and there'll be somebody ostensibly doing a friendly... and actually you can feel the kind of oo-eeh-eeh going on during a friendly interview with somebody. She was always self-conscious in I think a very interesting way and was always alerting you to her own biases, predilections, prejudices and so on. And so it seems to me that when she took agin somebody, she let you know, and that makes all the difference.

David Salle:
It's part of the accessibility factor as well. To say about oneself, talking about her younger self, of course we were filled with malicious glee when so and so, this happened. But saying it about oneself in that way, it's no longer malicious. It's just human.

Speaker 3:
A month before Janet's birthday, a month before her 80th birthday, the New York magazine called and wanted to do a piece about Janet and Joan Didion, who was also turning 80. And Janet's response to that was “tell them to find another pair of crones.” But then the Times reviewed Still Pictures and in the first paragraph compared Janet to Didion. And so the question is, what is this compulsion to pair them?

Katie Roiphe:
I agree. I've seen a little bit of this, and I think obviously they're very, very different writers and they both happen to be women who became very prominent in a time where it was harder for women. But I agree. And I always wanted Janet to talk to me about Didion because I secretly suspected that she had some issues with her work, but she never really... I don't know if she said anything to any of you, but I never really got to that comment with her. But I think there are Janet people and Joan people, and I think of myself as a Janet person.

David Remnick:
What does that mean? You didn't think I was going to let that go by.

Zoë Heller:
It's a question of sensibility.

Katie Roiphe:
It's a question of sensibility. I mean, I very much admired Didion as a writer, and I even wrote a piece called Didion's Daughters about the way in which younger female journalists were imitating certain ticks of Joan Didion's work, which somebody asked her about and she said it made her feel like she was reading her own obituary. So I felt bad about that.

But I think that Janet was very interested in reporting and she cared very deeply about deep reporting, and that wasn't the way that Didion was processing the world. And I think she really respected people who went deep into reporting things. And whenever I've heard her say something critical about other writers, which she did not do a lot in my presence, but it would always be criticizing them for shallow reporting or for not really going deep in. So I think she was interested in psychology and she was interested in going deep into her stories in a different way.

Speaker 4:
Could she have written a piece like Forty-One False Starts about anyone that she spent two years with, or did the subjects that she chose inspire her in a specific way? And did they have something in common, the people she chose to train her attention on?

David Remnick:
It's very simple. If I go to the office tomorrow morning and there's a manuscript on my desk by Janet Malcolm, I'm the happiest boy in America. But could somebody report on something for two years at The New Yorker anymore? They do. They do. It's a very difficult thing to do economically. And to elaborate a little bit on what we were talking about before, I mean, quite frankly, if you looked at the address list for writers at The New Yorker way back when as I have, there were two kinds. There were Bohemians, Bohemian addresses and wealthy addresses. That doesn't exist anymore. That has changed. Nobody particularly wants to be a Bohemian if they can help it at this point. And I think that's good. I don't want to tell people that they're getting pennies for something they work on for two years.

It's always been a difficult thing to work for a long period of time. But as people in book publishing know, the old way where somebody in The New Yorker would publish something 60,000 words long and it would appear in three parts and then it would be published as a book six months later, no publisher would allow that anymore. That's over. If John McPhee came to me or Janet Malcolm came with psychoanalysis, I'd be the happiest person in America to publish the whole thing. And then Knopf could have it six months later.

Now, the psychology of book publishing is they will have "felt they read it already" and not buy the book. Economics and the way publishers and the world we live in at a given time influences the way things are written and how they're presented to the world. There's no getting around it.

Zoë Heller:
I think part of your question was about whether Forty-One false starts could have been written... whether that form would've been suggested. And I think it was very much inspired by David and by the way he worked, which is why it's funny to me that some of David's friends thought, oh, she's treated you badly. Because it seemed to me such a work of affection and interest and investment in somebody.

And the other question, which I don't really have an answer for, was about whether there was something in common with her subjects, whether her subjects shared something in common.

David Remnick:
I couldn't tell you. With all of them?

Zoë Heller:
Yeah. I didn't ask it.

David Remnick:
I wouldn't think so. I don't think so.

Katie Roiphe:
Just another way to answer that question. She wrote an incredible piece, Girl of the Zeitgeist, about a character, her subject, Ingrid Sischy, who, she talks about in the piece, was disappointing to her. And the piece was about how she had imagined this glamorous, forceful person, but there was actually this hardworking, virtuous, almost drably nice person. And she talks about her disappointment.

So in a way, what she did was she took that disappointment she felt and turned it into the piece. So she used the fact that this person wasn't who she fantasized about, and then she went into this great anecdote about a man who sits next to Ingrid Sischy at a party and ignores her because she's not beautiful, and then realizes she's important and starts being nice to her, and connects her own experience with Ingrid Sischy with that moment. And it's this really brilliantly constructed piece, but it's an example, to go to your question, of how she turned this subject, who wasn't the subject she fantasized about and was dying to write about, into this tour de force.

So my feeling is that Janet, while she might not have written that essay about anyone, could take any of us in this room and spend two years with us and write an unbelievable piece.

David Remnick:
Last question right there.

Speaker 5:
Well, this is extremely specific, but David, will you tell us about interviewing Masson long before you edited Malcolm. You were like 25 and you were at The Washington Post, and I think you interviewed Masson right as their fight was beginning. Will you tell us about that and your memories of that?

David Remnick:
My memories of that? I'm going to give you an honest Janet Malcolm answer. I don't remember at all. If I wasn't married to the person I am married to, I wouldn't remember nine-tenths of my life. I don't remember. You have to understand a newspaper reporter, at least when I was in Moscow, I would write two, three articles a day. So to remember what it was like to be on the phone with Jeffrey Mason when I was 25 and I'm 252 now, I honestly don't remember. I really don't remember that I wrote such a piece. I think I remember that Janet was out of the country and unavailable to be quoted. I think that's the case. And beyond that... And Janet once said to me when we got to know each other that she thought the piece was good, and she stopped there.

I want to thank you all for coming out tonight. Buy the book. Give it to your friends.

Laura Hoptman:
And thank you so much to our panel from The Drawing Center. Thank you all for coming.