Janet Malcolm, provocative author-journalist, dies at 86

At the University of Michigan, she met her first husband, Donald Malcolm, later a writer for The New Republic and The New Yorker. After marrying in 1959, Janet Malcolm moved east and published occasional film criticism in The New Republic and a poem in The New Yorker, but otherwise dedicated several years to raising her daughter, Anne Olivia.

Donald Malcolm died in 1975. Her second husband, Botsford, died in 2004.

Her breakthrough came in 1966 when she wrote a piece on children’s books for The New Yorker that so impressed editor William Shawn he eventually gave her a column — about furniture. She soon expanded her subject matter and evolved in how she approached it.

“When I first started doing long fact pieces, as they were called at The New Yorker, I modeled my ‘I’ on the stock, civilized, and humane figure that was The New Yorker ‘I,’ but as I went along, I began to tinker with her and make changes in her personality,” she told the Paris Review in 2011.

“Yes, I gave her flaws and vanities and, perhaps most significantly, strong opinions. I had her take sides. I was influenced by this thing that was in the air called deconstruction,” she added. “The idea I took from it was precisely the idea that there is no such thing as a dispassionate observer, that every narrative is inflected by the narrator’s bias.”