Janet Malcolm famously despised biography. While she found journalism, with its mandate “to notice small things”, deliciously congenial, she thought biographical research led only to an “insufferable familiarity”, the fat volumes resulting from it being little more than processing plants in which “experience is converted into information the way fresh produce is converted into canned vegetables”. As for autobiography, that great literary craze of the late 20th century, it is misnamed. As she notes in Still Pictures, the slim book that is her last, it is a novelistic enterprise, and not to be trusted. Memory is patchy and partial. What...