The Absent Woman

Reviews / Votes

A delicious examination of 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 Life' In her elegant and incisive study of Malcolm, Sneider makes impeccable sense of a woman often described as absent in her own life, a journalist who approached her subjects with the keenness of an analyst while always questioning her methods. The result is a stirring narrative that illuminates not only a fascinating woman and writer, but a culture, an era. -- Tracy Daugherty, New York Times bestselling author of 'The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion' Eve Sneider beautifully, gently bends the genre of biography around Janet Malcolm, a writer who was both allured and disconcerted by her power as a writer of other's lives. She tells Malcolm's story the only way it can be told: with heightened awareness to the unsaid, the unknowable, and the unmistakably resonant. Riveting and necessary. -- Amy Reading, author of 'The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker' 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'