November 2, 1934

On November 2, 1994, the jury deciding whether Janet Malcolm defamed Jeffrey Masson, returned a verdict in Malcolm's favor . It was a long case and the outcome a bit ambiguous. In his book The Assault on Truth (1984) Masson had argued a subtle and controversial point that in Freud's texts you could specify where Freud was duplicitous. The jury decided that whether or not Malcolm was inaccurate in quoting Masson, there was not enough evidence she intended to hurt him.

Janet Malcolm is one of the most famous journalists in the world. She was a staff writer at the New Yorker most of her career. A New York Times article discusses a Paris Review interview with the interviewer, (conducted by Katie Roiphe):

".....Malcolm was born in Prague, in 1934, and immigrated to this country when she was five. Her family lived with relatives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, for a year while her father, a psychiatrist and neurologist, studied for his medical boards, and then moved to Yorkville, in Manhattan. Malcolm ­attended the High School of Music and Art, and then went to the University of Michigan, where she began writing for the school paper, The Michigan Daily, and the humor magazine, The Gargoyle, which she later edited. In the years after college she moved to Washington with her husband, Donald Malcolm, and wrote occasional book reviews for The New Republic.
"She and her husband moved to New York and, in 1963, had a daughter, Anne. That same year Malcolm’s work first appeared in The New Yorker, where her husband, who died in 1975, was the off-Broadway critic. She began writing in what was then considered the woman’s sphere: annual features on Christmas shopping and children’s books, and a monthly column on design, called “About the House.”

"Later, Malcolm married her editor at The New Yorker, Gardner Botsford. She began to do the dense, idiosyncratic writing she is now known for when she quit smoking in 1978: she couldn’t write without cigarettes, so she ­began reporting a long New Yorker fact piece, on family therapy, called “The One-Way Mirror.” She set off for Philadelphia with a tape recorder—the old-­fashioned kind, with tapes, which she uses to this day—and lined Mead composition notebooks with marbleized covers. By the time she finished the long period of reporting, she found she could finally write without smoking, and she had also found her form."

That form is exhibited in a number of books, drawn from New Yorker articles, among which are:

Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981)
The Journalist and the Murderer (1990)
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (1994)
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial (2011)

Roiphe's article includes Malcolm's own words describing her New York townhouse:

"Strategically gracious, ...[Roiphe] encourages her subject to do the job herself. Ms. Malcolm responds with subtle irony: “My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large ficus and large fern, a fireplace with a group of photographs and drawings over it, a glass-top coffee table with a bowl of dried pomegranates on it, and sofas and chairs covered in off-white linen. If I were a journalist walking into the room, I would immediately start composing a satiric portrait of the New York writer’s apartment with its standard tasteful objects (cat included) and general air of unrelenting Culture.” This is not an interview; it’s literature. In one paragraph, Ms. Malcolm has evoked a character (“the New York writer”); established a sardonic, self-aware voice (“air of unrelenting Culture”); and created a social milieu (the urban professional class, surrounded by “standard tasteful objects”)."

So we have a small sample of Malcolm's famous style. This is a good thing because Janet Malcolm is notably reluctant to discuss herself, and, a minor point to all but me, the cat. And we learned--cats are "standard tasteful objects."