People like Janet Malcolm

Janet Clara Malcolm (born Jana Klara Wienerová; July 8, 1934 – June 16, 2021) was an American writer, journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist. She was the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984), and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), 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.

Malcolm was born in Prague in 1934, one of two daughters—the other is the author Marie Winn—of Hanna (née Taussig) and Josef Wiener aka Joseph A. Winn, a psychiatrist. She resided in New York City after her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939, fleeing Nazi persecution of Jews. Malcolm was educated at the High School of Music and Art, then University of Michigan. At Michigan she wrote for the campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily, as well as the humor magazine, The Gargoyle, later editing The Gargoyle.