Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory

Having abandoned an earlier attempt at an autobiography, out of her journalist's frustration with the slipperiness of memory, Malcolm, the longtime New Yorker writer who died in 2021, left behind this fragmentary memoir instead, built around the memories (and the gaps) evoked by a series of everyday family photos. Famously unsparing and elegant in her profiles (like the deliciously ruthless In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer), she is much the same when writing about her family, Czech emigrés who barely escaped the Holocaust, and their mostly emigré friends. She's wittily rigorous in her assessment of their faults and charms, and of the limits of what she can recall. She reveals herself too, but only up to a point, cheekily withholding at times in a way she never would have in describing one of her reporting subjects. It's wonderful, and leaves you wanting more.