Janet Malcolm’s Interview With The Paris Review

Well, you should read it. You should always read the interviews in The Paris Review, they’re fantastic. But especially this one, conducted by Katie Roiphe.

Later, she will write to me, “Before I try to answer your question, I want to talk about that moment in our meeting at my apartment last week, when I left the room to find a book and suggested that while I was away you might want to take notes about the living room for the descriptive opening of this interview. Earlier you had made the distinction between writers for whom the physical world is significant and writers for whom it scarcely exists, who live in the world of ideas. You are clearly one of the latter. You obediently took out a notebook, and gave me a rather stricken look, as if I had asked you to do something faintly embarrassing.”

This is what Janet Malcolm’s emails sound like. Glorious!

AHHH, and this! On not being a native English speaker!

Another memory is of the kindergarten teacher saying, “Good-bye, children,” at the end of the day, and my envy of the girl whose name I assumed to be Children. It was my secret hope that someday the teacher would say, “Good-bye, Janet.” I have never connected these ­pathetic struggles with a language I didn’t know to later struggles with the language I tried and try not to disgrace myself in as a professional writer, but there may be a connection after all. Your question gives me much to think about.

I can’t even.