The writer Janet Malcolm once joked to her editor Ileene Smith, “People are disappointed when they meet me because I don’t look like a dominatrix.” An image of Malcolm as brutal had been looming over her for decades. A news reporter labeled her “a master of pitiless prose.” A review called her “the Queen of Not-Nice.” An admiring critic said she “was given to mutilating her subjects.” In an interview, she was once asked, “To what extent do you see yourself as an eviscerating machine?” And when Malcolm died, in 2021, words like “deadliest,” “pitiless,” “cold,” “merciless” and “chilling” echoed through the obituaries and reminiscences.

The idea of her as terrifying emerged from her writing, which irritated, flustered, enraptured and dazzled the literary world for half a century. She turned outrageously arcane subjects, like a feud about the Sigmund Freud Archives, or infighting among Sylvia Plath biographers, into books as gripping as mystery novels. On subjects ranging from photography to murder trials, there is a thrilling psychological penetration in her descriptions, a brisk rigor to her thinking, a superb confidence in her own opinions.

Malcolm sliced through delusions and vanities, and cut to the heart of people and situations. One of my New York University students said of her, “She’s like a psychiatrist freed from the need to heal people.” She was a master at reading the accidental gesture or casual comment for what it exposed. This quality combined with the drop-dead elegance of her sentences was distilled as “cold” or “mean.”

What is odd is that this idea of Malcolm as ruthless seemed to be constructed as much by people who love her work as by those who were troubled by it. There seemed to be something in her supreme confidence and intellectual brio that provokes people even as they revere her.

Malcolm and I became friendly in the last decade of her life, after I interviewed her for The Paris Review, and we often met for lunches at a Japanese restaurant near her house in Gramercy. In person, Malcolm was slight, sparrowlike, with large glasses. Her ambience was watchful, controlled, reserved. One felt she was keeping herself a bit apart. But she was also nice, if that is not too vacuous a word. She was quietly generous, sympathetic, funny, good company. Throughout her life, she sent encouraging notes to younger writers, especially women. She once tried to buy her housekeeper a house. Long after finishing a piece about a woman who was convicted of murder, Malcolm worried about her being in prison on very hot days without air-conditioning. This Janet Malcolm clashed so conspicuously with the ruthless, forbidding Janet Malcolm in the public imagination that I began to wonder about the gap.