When I first became a "Janet Malcolm person", I was a producer, and her multi-part New Yorker saga about The Journalist and The Murderer became the point de depart for a film project about a journalist who betrays her subject. I even lured Costa Gavras to direct. We sat for months parsing her story and its implications.

The movie didn't get made (too long a story for this post) but Malcolm and all her take-no-prisoners investigations always managed to find a certain application to my life (by then as a journalist).
Her two-year long series of interviews with painter David Salle in which she examined him refracted in what she called Forty-one False Starts, became a totem. The subject is a famous artist conscious of the slope and presentation of his career and a journalist, ever more cognizant of the shifting sands of the 'truth".

A couple of Malcolm gems from that New Yorker piece:

"He [Salle] is the most authoritative exemplar of the movement [post modernism], which has made a kind of mockery of art history, treating the canon of world art as if it were a gigantic, dog-eared catalogue crammed with tempting buys and equipped with a helpful twenty-four-hour-a-day 800 number."

"To the writer, the painter is a fortunate alter ego, an embodiment of the sensuality and exteriority that he has abjured to pursue his invisible, odorless calling. The writer comes to the places where traces of making can actually be seen and smelled and touched expecting to be inspired and enabled, possibly even cured."

In the perfect coda, Salle has gone on to become a very good writer about art himself. Malcolm rubbed off. Her unique take on the world will be very missed.

Tiny in the Air” (1989), one of David Salle’s tapestry paintings illustrated that piece.