Janet Malcolm: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

A provocative collection of interviews with the sublimely talented author of The Journalist and the Murderer

The legendary journalist, Janet Malcolm, opened her most famous work The Journalist and the Murderer with the line: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

Ever since its publication in 1980, she only increased her reputation as a devastatingly sharp writer, whose eye for observation is matched only by her formal inventiveness and philosophical interrogations of the relationship between journalist and subject.

Predictably, as an interview subject herself, she was an intimidating mark. In this collection, interviewers tangle with their own projections and identifications, while she often, gamely, plays along. Full of insights about her writing process, the craft of journalism, and her own analysis of her most famous works, this collection proves that Janet Malcolm is just as elusive and enlightening in conversation as she was on paper.

Janet Malcolm was an American writer, journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist.  She was the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, In the Freud Archives, and The Journalist and the Murderer, among other books. She wrote frequently about psychoanalysis as well as the relationship of the journalist to subject and was known for her prose style as well as polarizing criticism of her own profession, though her most contentious work, The Journalist and the Murderer, became a mainstay of journalism-school curricula.
Katie Roiphe is an American author and journalist, best known for her non-fiction examination The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism (1994).