This was an excellent book that is part journalistic inquiry, part court-room drama, and part social discourse.
Janet Malcolm is an experienced journalist who receives a mysterious letter from a lawyer suggesting that a libel court case may ruin the entire professional sphere of journalism. Malcolm takes the bait and begins investigating the already exhaustively investigated murder trial of a Dr. Jeff MacDonald and his follow up libel case with his court-biographer, Joseph McGrinnis.
Throughout her book, Malcolm chronicles how Dr. MacDonald came to be imprisoned for a triple homicide and still managed to win the libel suit against McGrinnis regardless of a hung jury and McGrinnis’ authorial success with his book “Fatal Vision.” Malcom’s masterful use of interviews, verbatim transcripts, and her own self-awareness and sharp wit paint an accurate picture of what can go horribly wrong in the tenuous interviewee-journalist relationship.
While this book was published in 1990, and all of its material takes place between 1970 and 1987, the material is still incredibly relevant and Malcolm’s language withstands the test of time. Her work brings to light the danger for both the writer and the writer’s subject when creative expectations don’t meet up. But Malcom’s multi-faceted approach to the narrative never has you rooting for one party or the other. She frequently has you flip-flopping in sympathy for both parties as well keeping you continuously questioning MacDonald’s guilt or innocence over the murders in the first place.
She interviews everyone from MacDonald and McGrinnis themselves (although McGrinnis refuses to meet with her after the first interview), to the jurors, the lawyers, and even other published biographers and journalism professors to get to the bottom of whether or not the libel case has any merit.
As with most BIG questions, Malcolm never reaches a definitive conclusion on the ethical issue of the journalists’ abuse of the interviewees’ most intimate details verses the interviewees’ willingness to provide the journalists with intimate information. She simply relates what is, which was one of the books’ major selling points for me. Malcolm never attempts to solve the problem, nor does she even suggest that it is a problem collectively, but simply that for MacDonald and McGrinnis, the book MacDonald had hoped McGrinnis would write, and the book McGrinnis ultimately wrote, ruined both men’s lives in ways that may be far worse than the initial trial and conviction.
Even as person who finds law and courtroom drama to be incredibly boring, this was a fantastic read that had me interested from the first page. I highly recommend this, especially for those of us who enjoy writing non-fiction.