Toklas and Gertrude Stein seated on patio at Berchtesgaden. Toklas, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1932 Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein “solves the koan of autobiography,” or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of “magisterial disorder,” Malcolm is stunningly perceptive. “The key of ‘I’ will not unlock the door to their meaning-you need a crowbar for that-but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion.” Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. “Even the most hermetic of writings are works of submerged autobiography,” Malcolm writes. Ancient Lives Black Lives Catwalk Jewish Lives The Margellos World Republic of Letters Why I Write. Toklass legendary 40-year partnership with the brilliant modernist Gertrude Stein in Two Lives, clearing up a few mysteries along the wayincluding how two Jewish women were able to survive World War II in their provincial French château with the help of a Vichy collaborator. Stein never even typed her own work, since Toklas acted as amanuensis, as well as lover and. Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. In Two Lives (2007), she examined the power dynamic between Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas. “The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,” she writes. As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple’s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. Two Lives is a work of literary biography and investigative journalism exploring the lives of modernist writer Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. This event is free and open to the public. She writes for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and lives in New York City. Both a pioneer and provocateur in her field, the long-form journalist Janet Malcolm was preoccupied by the slipperiness of memory whether on the analyst’s couch, the witness stand or in a. Janet Malcolm is the author of The Journalist and the Murderer, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and Reading Chekhov, among other books.

Malcolm researched this work in the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Please join us at 4pm on Thursday, January 17th for a reading and discussion by scholar Janet Malcolm, about her new book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice published this fall by Yale University Press.

Two Lives by Janet Malcolm