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<\/a>Janet Malcolm wrote many New Yorker<\/em> articles as well as\u00a0many books about interesting subjects\u2014Gertrude Stein, Chekov, psychoanalysis, photography, murders. If the subject was uninteresting, she prided herself on finding something interesting about it. There was one subject, however, that she found terminally uninteresting \u2014herself. In an article titled \u201cThoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography,\u201d she wrote: \u201cI have been aware, as I write this autobiography, of a feeling of boredom with the project \u2026. If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue memory\u2019s autism, its passion for the tedious.\u201d\u00a0She continues to rail against the subject in the book under consideration here, calling memories with a plot the \u201c\u2026original sin of autobiography,\u201d stating that \u201cAutobiography is a misnamed genre; memory speaks only some of its lines.\u201d<\/p>\nIn other words, this, her last book, is not an autobiography. It is, rather, a collection of 26 digressions based on more than 50 pictures, snapshots \u201c\u2026of no artistic merit,\u201d \u201c\u2026drab little photographs,\u201d\u00a0which \u201c\u2026if stared at long enough, begin to speak to us.\u201d<\/p>\n
They certainly speak to her, and carry her to unexpected places. A picture of her between her parents\u2019 heads, \u201cThe Girl in the Train,\u201d but she has no memory of being on the train escaping the Nazis. She is there by \u201c\u2026dumb luck, as a few random insects escape a poison spray.\u201d\u00a0 She does remember, however, her life as an immigrant, with \u201c\u2026a painful and shameful reality of my inner life as a child\u201d \u2014 internalized anti-Semitism. She ends the story with a recounting of her family\u2019s Jewish history, and the man who took the picture, all very far from the girl in the picture.<\/p>\n
As the title tells us, the book is not about just memories, but memory itself. In \u201cCamp Happyacres,\u201d from a picture of people standing around a car, she vaguely remembers the camp, because \u201cThe events of our lives are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.\u201d\u00a0In a story headed with a picture of her friend \u201cFrancine,\u201d she recalls the girl looking up from a malted milk and saying \u201cIt tastes so good.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThat these unremarkable words should have stayed in my mind while more significant utterances have disappeared is another instance of memory\u2019s perversity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many of the stories jolt us with epiphanies that emerge as she follows the memory. From a picture of \u201cSlecna,\u201d her after-school Czech teacher, she takes us to a crush on a boy she secretly loved, like other girls, who \u201c..unbeknownst to ourselves were grateful for the safety of not being loved in return. The pleasure and terror of that would come later.\u201d In \u201cSkromnost,\u201d a summer institute where she fell in love with a girl before such a thing could happen, she takes us through the charms of the object of her (unacknowledged) affection Then she\u00a0travels to the street outside the Plaza Hotel, where she sees the girl again, and realizes she is of another class, a \u201c\u2026daughter of wealth and privilege.\u201d\u00a0The shock was of recognition: \u201cWe know so much that we don\u2019t know we know about each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a book of what she calls \u201cplotless memories,\u201d where she eschews a narrative, a narrative nevertheless emerges. As her daughter points out in an afterword, little Jana, teenaged Jan, grown Janet is \u201c\u2026the observing sensibility whose impressions of the people in the faded photographs form the narrative of this book.\u201d That narrative provides us the picture of a very interesting person \u2014 Janet Malcolm.<\/p>\n
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Bob Moyer reviews a book that, both author and reviewer make clear, is not an autobiography. And yet… Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer STILL PICTURES: On Photography and Memory. By Janet Malcom. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 155 pages. $26. Janet Malcolm wrote many New Yorker articles as well as\u00a0many books about interesting subjects\u2014Gertrude Stein, Chekov, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[252,10,813,253],"tags":[1353],"class_list":["post-3110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiography","category-contemporary-nonfiction","category-essays-contemporary-nonfiction","category-memoir-biography","tag-janet-malcolm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3110"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3112,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3110\/revisions\/3112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}