Malcolm spent a career taking other people apart in print and refused to write about herself, then in her eighties wrote this — twenty-odd short pieces, each triggered by a photograph from her own boxes. A Czech Jewish family that got out of Prague in 1939 when almost nobody did. A childhood in Yorkville. Her father the psychiatrist. Schoolfriends, a teacher, a first marriage. She keeps saying memoir is untrustworthy and keeps writing it anyway, and the tension is the book. It came out just after she died and it’s the least guarded thing she ever published.
Still Pictures