Janet Malcolm’s talent was her cynicism. This she marshaled readily in herself and took pleasure at uncovering in others. In her profiles and critical essays — written over the course of half a century for the New Yorker and New York Review of Books — she was guided by a suspicion that one could not speak about oneself with candor and sincerity, especially when in the presence of a journalist. For Malcolm, who died in 2021, the whole enterprise of journalism was a performance. A nasty business, full of high pretensions and base desires.

This, at least, is the image Malcolm presents of herself in Still Pictures, a book which is something between a memoir and a mea culpa, structured around a series of family photos. In it, Malcolm, a writer who trained her critic’s eye in profiles, turns her attention inward. Self-recrimination — motivated by a retrospective unease about the value of the writerly persona she worked so hard to cultivate — is her memoir’s dominant mood.