Janet Malcolm is the most divisive (within me) writer I have encountered. I loved The Journalist and the Murderer. A journalistic masterpiece (except for the opening sentence about all journalists being con artists). I wrote her a fan letter about it. I hated In the Freud Archives, her hit piece about Jeffrey Masson. This review of a book about how to write email is not very good, alas. Too obvious. How far the gifted have fallen.
Jeffrey Masson used to live in Berkeley. I visited him while writing an article for Spy about his lawsuit against Malcolm (it never ran). While I was there, he got a phone call from Joe McGinness, the “journalist” of The Journalist and the Murderer.