Not Oprah’s Book Club: The Journalist and the Murderer

I had been meaning to read this journalistic classic by Janet Malcolm for years, after having read an excerpt of it in grad school, but, you know, life happens. I finally picked it up and devoured it on a plane a few days ago on my way home to visit my parents.
Essentially, Janet Malcolm revisits the case against Joe McGinniss, a journalist who was sued after publishing a book about convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald. MacDonald felt that McGinniss had deliberately lured him into thinking that they were friends, that he believed in his innocence, and then written a scathing indictment. McGinniss denied intentional subterfuge and, also, argued that it is the writer’s practice to coax the subject into comfort, however false. It explores the complexity of the writer-subject relationship, truth and justice, and the thorny psychology involved in making the personal public.
This book is a journalistic classic for a reason; it pushes writers to come to terms with the insanity of trying to write about real people’s lives with integrity. What you learn in journalism school these days is fairly limited to networking and logistics–new media techniques, the craft and art of writing, journalistic protocol, but rarely are the psychological incongruities of the profession brought to light and discussed openly.
I have struggled with the drive to write the emotional truth of a person’s story so as to illustrate my analysis in the most cogent, inspiring way and my deep commitment to honoring that person’s humanity and privacy. The two are often at odds in a way that I suspect non-writers wouldn’t predict. It’s painful and murky and fraught with human frailty.
Through a feminist lens, this is very related to the personal being the political. On the one hand, for example, women’s struggles with perfection and their own bodies is entirely personal–right up there with sex and money and religion in terms of unspeakables. On the other hand, I had a conviction that there was a collective story to our individual pain, and I wanted to bring that to light in my book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters. So I asked these women–many of them my friends, all of them people I care about–to share their stories with the world. I encouraged/pushed/coaxed (depending on your perspective) them to bare their souls (personal) for the betterment of the public (political). Many experienced unanticipated consequences (angry mothers, a sense of being horribly exposed). Some also experienced a deep sense of freedom, courage, a letting go. I stood, morally, in between these two experiences, feeling a bit helpless and also totally responsible.
I leave you with Malcolm’s own words (pronouns admittedly annoying):

Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.