Malcolm’s writing career, we are told, really began on the heels of her first husband’s. After following Donald Malcolm from a humor magazine at the University of Michigan to The New Republic, where she wrote book and film reviews while he was a staff writer, she began contributing to The New Yorker after Donald was hired as an editor there. It was the heyday of magazine journalism, yet “the jobs being offered to women were these very menial, secretarial jobs,” she later recalled. In her case, this didn’t mean administrative work: She was a writer. But it did mean that at The New Yorker, she was being assigned to write on subjects that were considered appropriately feminine by her mostly male editors—Christmas-shopping recommendations, interior design, Curious George—until, in 1975, she became The New Yorker’s photography critic. Even then, Malcolm wasn’t getting the most prestigious assignments, but she had broken out of the gendered topics that she had previously been relegated to. It would be another decade or two before she’d write her most heralded and experimental profiles of artists and public intellectuals, from “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” about Ingrid Sischy, then the editor of Artforum, to “Forty-One False Starts,” about the painter David Salle. Photography wasn’t only the subject of Malcolm’s longest-running column; it also became a key to unlocking her development as a journalist. When the Malcolms moved from Washington, DC, where The New Republic was then based, to New York, Janet was an expectant mom and still figuring out her career. In her spare time, she played around with a camera and a darkroom, and as she began work as The New Yorker’s photography critic, she brought many of the skills she’d developed in those years into her writing. Journalism, like photography, was a way to frame a moment and to offer a portrait of a person. Not only does the photographer get to choose exactly what is included in a particular shot, but, as Sneider puts it, “the people on the other side don’t really see how their likenesses look until it’s too late to do anything about.”

This similarity between photography and journalism helped define Malcolm’s first reported piece for The New Yorker. At the time, her father, who was working as a psychiatrist for the state of New York, told her about a peer, the psychiatrist Salvador Minuchin, and his practice of watching patients and their therapists interact through a one-way mirror. Malcolm decided to do an essay about it, which she published as “The One-Way Mirror.” It was nominally an account of a newly emerging practice called Family Therapy, in which the therapist tries to “change patterns of behavior rather than to correct skewed perceptions”—but it would also become her first foray into both reporting and the world of psychoanalysis.

In the essay, Malcolm explored how guilt about one’s parenting style may impact a child’s behavior. She also explored, for the first time as a writer, what it meant to have a conversation with people who knew much less about her than she knew about them, and how such an arrangement could benefit her. When she finally sat down with the story’s central family, whom she calls the Brauns, she had already spent eight weeks watching them interact through a mirror. The Brauns, feeling that their child had been helped by Family Therapy, treated their interview with Malcolm as a kind of extension of their weekly sessions. The cocktails that Mr. Braun served at the beginning of the interview ensured there were no inhibitions. Malcolm, in other words, got the shot.

Malcolm followed up “The One-Way Mirror,” which was well received by the public and the intelligentsia alike, with a series of essays and then three books, two of which were on the subject directly, the third perhaps indirectly: Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1983), and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990).

If you’ve read Psychoanalysis, you know that Malcolm’s central figure—an analyst she pseudonymously refers to in the book and the two-part New Yorker essay that spawned it as Aaron Green—does not come off particularly well. Green complains about how his colleagues bore him while also bloviating that he is a much better practitioner, and he admits to falling in love with at least one of his female patients, among other confessions that no person of good conscience would ever want to hear themselves make. Malcolm might have been absorbed by the subject of psychoanalysis, but she was not enamored with it—and especially those who practiced it for a living.

Malcolm’s ambivalence toward psychoanalysis became even more pronounced with her next foray into the subject, back-to-back New Yorker articles that were later expanded into a book (as most of her essays were), In the Freud Archives. Having examined the methodology and inner worlds of psychoanalysis and its practitioners, Malcolm now turned her attention to Sigmund Freud himself, telling the story of a dispute that emerged over his legacy between many of his followers and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, the director of the Sigmund Freud Archives. Masson had his own theory of Freud: that the great psychoanalyst had been bullied into abandoning his “seduction theory”—the highly contested idea that adult neuroses result from repressing the memories of having been sexually abused as a child—and that doing so was a mistake. After alienating Freud’s daughter Anna and infuriating the analytic community, Masson was fired as the archives’ director, and he had a lot to say about it. By this point, Malcolm was so well-known for her reporting on analysis that when she called him up after reading about him in The New York Times, Masson answered by telling her that he’d been waiting for her call. He was the perfect subject for Malcolm’s journalism: angry, voluble, and, as Sneider put it, “a narcissist of epic proportions.”

After In the Freud Archives was published, Masson was naturally even more incensed, and he would go on to sue her, The New Yorker, and the book’s publisher, Knopf, for libel. At the center of the dispute was, among other things, Masson’s insistence that he had never called himself “an intellectual gigolo” and his assertion that if he had still been employed by the archives, he would have made the Freud house-cum-museum “a place of sex, women, [and] fun.” Malcolm, diligent reporter that she was, had most of Masson’s words on tape, but there were a few quotes she had written down in a notebook that she said she’d misplaced, rendering them a case of he said/she said. In 1994, after Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc. had made its way through the byzantine US court system, including a pit stop at the Supreme Court, the jury sided with Malcolm, finding that she was not liable for defaming Masson—a verdict that was later upheld after Masson’s appeal. The final verdict, though, was just as significant as the precedent this case set for journalism, including the Supreme Court’s statement that “quotation marks indicate a verbatim reproduction, and quotations add authority to a statement and credibility to an author’s work.” (Years later, as Malcolm recounts in Still Pictures, her granddaughter would find the missing notebook in the bookcase of a country house.)

If Malcolm is nothing but revered today, during the years of Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., she was “a kind of fallen woman of journalism,” as she put it, or journalism’s “class snitch” and “school slut,” as others did. Her many stylistic and creative choices would earn her this reputation, but also her perceived hypocrisy.

While the Masson case was making its way through the appellate courts, Malcolm, began to turn the judicial system into a new source for her material. Using court transcripts as well as various published texts and documents, she set out to tell the story of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer who sued the writer Joe McGinniss, a man he’d previously thought was his friend, after McGinniss’s book about the MacDonald case, Fatal Vision, ultimately did not exonerate him. Published in The New Yorker and then in expanded form as The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm’s examination of the vexed relationship between the two men proved to be a fruitful exploration of what—if anything—journalists owe to their subjects. McGinniss had gained MacDonald’s cooperation (and even promised him a portion of the royalties) by convincing the convicted murderer that he would finally be able to offer his side of the story in full and prove his innocence. But McGinniss, at least according to Fatal Vision, was just as uncertain about MacDonald’s innocence as the jury had been. Was this a professional blunder?

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” Malcolm stated at the beginning of both the essay and the book. “He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” Yet given that she never noted the obvious similarities between MacDonald v. McGinniss and the case involving her and Masson, many critics concluded—with considerable and understandable frustration—that the statement was hypocritical and noted how unflattering it was to the profession. Some claimed that Malcolm was using The Journalist and the Murderer as a way to process her own feelings. Reading it now, it is hard not to suspect that Malcolm was also thinking about herself here but simply chose not to address it directly.

Either way, it’s clear that Malcolm eventually began to rethink her approach to literary reportage. In The Silent Woman (1994), for example, she discloses early on that she is more on the side of Ted Hughes than of Sylvia Plath, making sure that her readers know where her sympathies lie. In Two Lives (2007), a similarly styled wild-goose chase into how Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, who were both Jews and lesbians, survived the Holocaust, Malcolm uses her missteps as part of the story. In one of the book’s more curious junctures, she tells us about her plans to meet a Stein scholar named Leon Katz at an airport in Los Angeles to interview him. But he shows up at the airport the day before she is set to arrive, and the mishap leads him to abandon the plans completely. It’s the end of their scholarly relationship, and Malcolm finishes the book without him. But she also wonders whose “unconscious had misbehaved” in this situation, appearing to admit that there had been some kind of Freudian slip involved in their passing ships.

Read in this context, Still Pictures appears far more of a confession than it initially seems to be. While Malcolm still withholds a lot, she was venturing to reflect to some degree on both her interpersonal and professional mistakes. When it comes to the way she handled the fallout from the Masson affair, she says, she regrets not having spoken up more. “While Masson gave more than two hundred accusatory interviews,” she writes, “I—in dogged accord with themagazine’s stance of unrelenting hauteur—said nothing in my defense. Nothing at all. Nothing of course produces nothing, except further confirmation of guilt.” And when it comes to the arrogant afterword she wrote for The Journalist and the Murderer, in which she discussed the Masson case again at length, she admits that upon rereading it, she was “appalled by the stupidity of the approach.”

As consequential as Malcolm’s journalism was to the profession, The Absent Woman serves not only as a chronicle of her life but also as a history of the rise and fall of long-form journalism—a period in which such writing was often well-paid, but also one in which some writers took leaps that would not be tolerated today. For Malcolm, journalism was an art as well as a profession; in her works of reporting, she often pieced together quotes from multiple conversations and combined them into one colossal monologue. Read any book by Janet Malcolm, and you’ll feel more like you’re reading a novel or a Shakespeare play than a work of nonfiction.

Perhaps this is why, when Sneider observes that the “days of blurring the lines between fact and fiction” are now “over,” there’s a certain wistfulness to the statement. I don’t mean to say that Sneider, or any of us, supports the questionable journalistic tactics that Malcolm sometimes used, but rather that there was once a period in which literary reportage was taken as seriously as fiction by its audience and its practitioners. To write a great profile about an obscure person or subject was commensurate with writing a great work of art. While there are still some examples of this today in magazines, but more often in books, the new standards for and constraints on published nonfiction make them far fewer and farther between.

As a reviewer of The Journalist and the Murderer wrote for this magazine in 1994, “what Janet Malcolm has done is to lift her work to a whole new art form.” Today, we no longer regard examples of this art form as models for our own writing—which is probably for the best—and instead view them the way we view classics. Malcolm’s work represents a style that we cannot repeat. But its beauty lies in the fact that it’s part of journalism’s vital and fertile history.