The Absent Woman
The Genius of Janet Malcolm
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Pub Date Nov 10 2026 | Archive Date Oct 31 2026
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Description
An illuminating critical biography of one of our most influential nonfiction authors, New Yorker journalist Janet Malcolm.
Janet Malcom was a New Yorker journalist and titan of American letters. Unlike her peers Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, she avoided the personal fame that her renown might have brought despite making herself a character in her work. In The Absent Woman, journalist Eve Sneider, among the first researchers to access Malcolm’s archive, insightfully portrays Malcolm and delves into the people and themes that consumed her during a nearly sixty-year career.
From photography to psychoanalysis to how we tell stories, Sneider explores Malcolm’s obsessions through her manuscripts, lauded but controversial books, art, correspondence, and interviews with colleagues and friends. Examining Malcolm’s infamous trials with former Freudian psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, her provocative convictions about the nature of journalism, and her eventual turn to autobiographical writing, Sneider also grapples with the dilemma that attended much of Malcolm’s most famous work: the knotted ethics of depicting another person, even as she depicts Malcolm.
Divided into identities that Malcolm embodied—émigré, humorist, photographer, shrink watcher, defendant, writer, artist, and archivist—The Absent Woman illustrates the many ways in which Malcolm’s works were vehicles for understanding herself. The Absent Woman is a vivid, Malcolmian probe into the mind of one of the most elusive literary figures of our time.
About the Author: Eve Sneider is a writer based in Brooklyn. She has written for Wired, where she was an editor, New York Review of Books, and Lapham’s Quarterly. She is deputy editor at Poets & Writers.
Advance Praise
"Eve Sneider’s fast-paced and brilliant biography is equal to its subject, which is no easy feat. Sneider brings Janet Malcolm, the notoriously sharp writer and thinker, into clear focus in all her complex humanity. Sneider manages to be just as sharp—and also kinder." -Karin Roffman, author of The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life
"How does one write a biography of someone known for questioning the whole idea of biography, and of nonfiction narrative in general? It’s even harder if that person is herself a literary master, as Janet Malcolm was. Eve Sneider solves these challenges beautifully, to produce a reflective, involving account of one of our era’s most fascinating writers." -Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Café
"A delicious examination of Janet Malcolm’s formidable body of work, taking us deep into her writing process and showing, brilliantly, how she ticked." -Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting
"There will surely be many books written about the late Janet Malcolm, one of our greatest journalists and intellectuals, but none may surpass Eve Sneider’s The Absent Woman. Sneider was one of the first writers to dip into Malcolm’s archive, and she has written a penetrating, even thrilling study of a woman who didn’t want to be studied. She has profiled the great profiler, and it’s a treat to behold." -Mark Oppenheimer, author of Judy Blume
"A sensitive, thoughtful, and judicious portrayal of Janet Malcolm, one of the most fascinating minds in American literary criticism. Eve Sneider has carefully probed the archive of this notoriously private writer and come away with unexpected insights into Malcolm’s early life, her development as a journalist and thinker, and the makings of her deservedly classic works." -Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781324075127 |
| PRICE | $29.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 256 |