My post at Neuron Culture:

In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm’s meta-biography of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm structures the book around visits, mostly in and about London, with other writers who have written about Plath and encountered the hazards, both obvious and submerged, that await anyone writing about people live or recently alive. For the end of the book she saves a visit to one of the oddest Plath memoirists: Trevor Thomas, a man of many hats who happened to live in the flat below Plath’s in the last couple of months before she killed herself, and who in 1986 had been coaxed by the Independent to retail his memories of her. He was 79 then and a few years older when Malcolm visited him.

Thomas and a friend, Robbie, pick her up at the tube stop in London, pick up a pizza and some olives for dinner, and drive back to Thomas’s flat. The entire visit is searing, as Malcolm, a writer of incomparable intelligence, fierceness, and compassion, tries to give order to Thomas’s dense, cluttered existence in a house that is much the same way. Toward the end of this passage, which is just short of the end of the book — this is both a biography of biography as well as of Plath, so she’s trying to tie up one just before the other — Malcolm offers this extraordinary passage about the challenge facing any writer. It’s vintage Malcolm and an extraordinary view of the writer’s challenge: