In these revealing late-life chats, the two doyennes of US journalism display all the acuity and intellectual toughness that made them household names
, written after the sudden death of her husband, she rawly exposed the sentimental self-deceptions of bereavement. With the same innate toughness, she defies interviewers who want to probe her professional secrets. “I don’t know,” she shrugs when asked about existential leaps in her novels, after which she more candidly adds: “It’s nothing I want to examine too closely.
Malcolm, a scarier character, engages in tugs of war with interviewers and her own interviewees. “She did not like the impromptu or spontaneous,” says an outmanoeuvred journalist after being refused permission to record their conversation. Malcolm only agreed to be questioned by theif allowed to respond by email whenever she felt ready. Her excuse for this premeditation was that speech is sloppy and imprecise, “full of”.
To disarm the subjects she interrogated, Malcolm adopted what she called a “Japanese technique”, deferentially giggling like a geisha flattering a businessman in a bar. Didion, genuinely shy but also shrewd, relied on a similar subterfuge. On magazine assignments, she asked desultory questions as an excuse for being allowed to hang around and watch events unfold, but she took no notice of what was said to her.
As their ultimate triumph, these crafty women decline to utter famous last words when giving their last interviews. “I had not totally absorbed the idea of her as ordinarily mortal,” Malcolm’s admirertestified after her heroine’s death. Malcolm, suffering from lung cancer, had no such illusions. Asked at the end of the volume about the items on her bedside table, she tallies a Kleenex and a cough drop rather than a pile of consoling classics.
The dumb, bumbling questions deserve such dismissive treatment: writers are not oracles who relay messages from the gods. Our last inquisitions are conducted posthumously, and no transcripts of those fateful, soul-baring sessions with the recording angel have ever been published.is published by Melville House . To support the
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