Malcolm, who died in 2021 at 86, was as attuned as anyone to the dangers—malice, betrayal, misunderstanding—of a tape recorder clicking on. The monster in her masterpiece, The Journalist and the Murderer, isn’t the man convicted of killing his family but the bestselling author he took to court for publishing a tell-all; what haunts The Silent Woman, her book about Sylvia Plath, isn’t the poet’s suicide or Ted Hughes but the couple’s biographers. To read Malcolm’s decades of work for the New Yorker is to be moved by the clarity of her journalism—and warned, again and again, that the form is no good.
