Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm (born 1934 as Jana Wienerova) is an American writer, journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist. She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984) and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990).

Craig Seligman wrote of her: "Like Sylvia Plath, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness ... Malcolm's blade gleams with a razor edge. Her critics tend to go after her with broken bottles." The influential critic Harold Bloom has praised her "wonderful exuberance," writing that Malcolm's books, "transcend what they appear to be: superb reportage."

Malcolm was born in Prague in 1934, one of two daughters—the other is author Marie Winn—of a psychiatrist father (Josef Wiener a.k.a. Joseph A. Winn). She has resided in the United States since her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939. Malcolm was educated at the University of Michigan and lives in New York City. Her first husband, Donald Malcolm, reviewed books for The New Yorker in the 1950s and 1960s. Her second husband, whom she wed in 1975, was long-time New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford; Botsford died at age 87 in September, 2004.

Early Malcolm book jackets report her "living in New York with her husband and daughter." Her daughter is also mentioned in the text of The Crime of Sheila McGough.

Articles published in The New Yorker, and in Malcolm's subsequent book In The Freud Archives, triggered a $10 million legal challenge by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, former project director for the Freud Archives. In his 1984 lawsuit, Masson claimed that Malcolm had libelled him by fabricating quotations attributed to him; these quotes, Masson contended, had brought him into disrepute.

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