What if you trusted a writer with your story?

Thursday, 10 September 2026

What if you trusted a writer with your story?

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer and the betrayal at the heart of nonfiction

Imagine spending months talking to a writer. You tell them things you wouldn't normally tell people. They meet your family. They read your letters. They listen sympathetically while you explain the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, you begin to think this person understands you.

Then the book comes out, and you discover that the writer you thought understood you has turned you into a character you barely recognise.

That is the nightmare sitting at the centre of Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer. And after everything we've been reading about writers, truth and the people who become material, I suspect Malcolm is the writer we've been heading towards all along.

We have been sitting on the wrong side of the desk

This journey started with Joan Didion's wonderfully unsettling warning that "writers are always selling somebody out". Rachel Cusk made me wonder what happens when someone recognises themselves after their life has been transformed into fiction. Truman Capote took us somewhere darker, turning real murder into literature in In Cold Blood. Norman Mailer tried to step aside in The Executioner's Song, only to demonstrate that the invisible writer is still making choices. Then Hunter S. Thompson grabbed the camera, made himself part of the spectacle and forced us to ask whether something could be factually unreliable and still tell us something true.

But throughout most of that journey, we've been sitting beside the writer.

We've worried about what the writer can know, what the writer can change and whether the writer can ever get out of the way. Even when we have worried about the people being written about, we have largely approached the problem from the page.

Janet Malcolm asks us to change seats. Forget whether you trust the writer. Should the person being written about trust them?

One of the most dangerous openings in nonfiction

The Journalist and the Murderer begins with a sentence designed to make journalists choke on their coffee.

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."

It's an outrageous statement. Deliberately so. Malcolm goes on to compare the journalist to a confidence man who gains someone's trust and then betrays it. When the book first appeared as a two-part article in The New Yorker in 1989, that argument caused considerable outrage among journalists, not least because Malcolm was one of them.

But read after Didion, the opening sounds strangely familiar. "Writers are always selling somebody out." Didion gives us the warning. Malcolm describes the transaction, and to do it, she tells us the story of another book.

The murderer and the writer who believed him

On 17 February 1970, the pregnant Colette MacDonald and her daughters Kimberly, five, and Kristen, two, were murdered in their home at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Colette's husband, Jeffrey MacDonald, an Army doctor, survived. He claimed that a group of intruders had attacked the family.

Years later, MacDonald was tried for the murders. We get a new character on the scene. Enter Joe McGinniss. He was already a successful nonfiction writer, best known for The Selling of the President 1968. He became interested in the MacDonald case shortly before the 1979 trial and managed to secure something every nonfiction writer dreams about.

He secured access. That's the holy grail when it comes to non-fiction. McGinniss got real access, not merely interviews from the outside. McGinniss embedded himself with MacDonald's defence team. He spent time with MacDonald and the people around him. MacDonald gave him extraordinary access to his life and eventually supplied recordings and documents. The arrangement was mutually beneficial: McGinniss got the inside story, while MacDonald expected a book about his case and shared financially in the publishing deal.

There was just one complication. Jeffrey MacDonald thought Joe McGinniss believed him.

What happens when the writer changes his mind?

MacDonald was convicted in 1979 of murdering his wife and daughters. During the process, McGinniss also became convinced that MacDonald was guilty.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. A writer investigating someone has to be allowed to change their mind. Access cannot mean surrendering judgement. A subject cannot reasonably agree to a book on the condition that the writer reaches the conclusion they prefer.

The problem was what happened next. McGinniss continued corresponding with MacDonald in language that maintained the intimacy between them. Malcolm reproduces letters in which the writer appears reassuring and supportive while privately moving towards a radically different interpretation of the man he was writing about.

Then, in 1983, Fatal Vision appeared. MacDonald wasn't presented as the wrongfully accused man he believed McGinniss had understood him to be. The book accepted his guilt and offered readers a devastating portrait of its subject.

Imagine opening a book written by someone you regarded as an ally and gradually realising that they had been studying you all along.

MacDonald sued, and that lawsuit is where Malcolm found her real story.

This isn't actually a book about whether MacDonald was innocent

There is an obvious problem here. Why should we feel sorry for Jeffrey MacDonald? He was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters. He maintained his innocence, but the ethical question Malcolm asks does not depend upon accepting his version of events.

That distinction matters. The Journalist and the Murderer isn't fundamentally an investigation into whether MacDonald committed the murders. Malcolm is interested in something stranger: the relationship between MacDonald and the man who wrote about him.

MacDonald's lawsuit against McGinniss alleged fraud and breach of contract. The 1987 trial ended with a hung jury, with five of the six jurors reportedly favouring MacDonald. The case was subsequently settled.

Think about the oddness of that situation. A convicted murderer had managed to persuade most of a civil jury to sympathise with him over a writer. Malcolm wanted to know why.

The subject thinks this is a relationship

This is where The Journalist and the Murderer stops being merely a book about one particularly troubling true crime book.

Imagine someone interviews you once. You know what is happening, and you are being interviewed. Now imagine they interview you for months. They telephone. They write. They remember things you've told them. They ask about your childhood. They meet people you know. They listen while you explain your failures, resentments, relationships and fears.

Something changes. Eventually, the word "interview" begins to feel inadequate, as you have a relationship, or at least you think you do.

The writer may genuinely like you. They may sympathise with you. They may enjoy your company. They may even consider you a friend. But something else is happening at the same time. You are becoming material.

The strange thing is that neither person necessarily has to be completely dishonest for this to become dangerous. They may simply misunderstand the nature of the relationship.

The subject thinks: I'm telling you my story.

The writer thinks: You're helping me discover the story.

Those are not the same thing.

The moment you become a character

This is where Malcolm belongs in our bookish journey because what happens between writer and subject isn't confined to journalism. Eventually the writer has to go away and write, and the person they knew becomes a character.

Details are selected. Conversations are shortened. Contradictions are placed beside one another. One anecdote survives while another disappears. The writer decides which version of an event seems credible and which seems evasive. Perhaps the subject talks for fifty hours and appears in the finished book for fifty pages.

Nothing necessarily needs to be invented. Selection is enough. We encountered this problem with Norman Mailer. The absence of invention does not mean the absence of manipulation. Reality supplies an enormous amount of material. The writer gives it shape.

But Malcolm adds another stage. Before selection came access, and before access came trust. Perhaps that is where the transformation really begins.

Didion's warning looks different now

"Writers are always selling somebody out." I've kept returning to that sentence because every book we've encountered seems to make it mean something slightly different.

With Cusk, it was about recognition. With Capote, it became the ethics of turning somebody else's catastrophe into beautiful literature. With Mailer, it became the unavoidable power of selection. With Thompson, it became the transformation of real people into literary characters.

Malcolm takes us backwards, to the moment before any of those things happen. Perhaps the selling out begins in the conversation. The sympathetic nod, the telephone call, and the letter. The moment the writer says, "Tell me more about that, "because the person answering may believe that being understood means being agreed with. The writer knows those things are entirely different.

But surely the writer cannot promise loyalty?

This is where Malcolm's argument becomes uncomfortable rather than merely clever. What exactly do we expect a writer to do? Suppose you're writing about somebody and gradually become convinced that they are lying.

Do you stop? Do you announce immediately that you've changed your mind and risk losing access? Do you continue listening? If you continue listening, what do you owe the person who is still talking?

A writer cannot promise a subject that they will like the finished book. They cannot promise to reproduce the subject's preferred version of themselves. They cannot surrender the right to interpret evidence simply because somebody has trusted them.

Otherwise we wouldn't have journalism. We'd have authorised biography. But Malcolm forces us to acknowledge the uncomfortable mechanism by which much good nonfiction gets made.

Writers need people to talk. People talk because they believe something about the writer, and the writer may have very good professional reasons not to correct every misunderstanding.

That doesn't make every journalist a confidence trickster, but it does make the relationship far less innocent than the word "interview" suggests.

And then Malcolm walks into her own trap

There is another reason The Journalist and the Murderer is such a satisfying book for this series. Malcolm cannot escape Malcolm's argument.

She is writing about Joe McGinniss. She interviews him, and she selects his words. She decides which scenes matter, analyses his motives, and arranges the evidence so we begin forming a picture of him.

In other words, Malcolm is doing to McGinniss what McGinniss did to MacDonald. McGinniss turns MacDonald into a character. Malcolm turns McGinniss into a character who turned MacDonald into a character. It's all getting very meta at this point, as now I'm writing about Malcolm writing about McGinniss writing about MacDonald.

At some point we are going to need a bigger camera, but the joke contains something serious. There is always another frame.

Malcolm knew she wasn't innocent either

Malcolm is especially interesting because she doesn't pretend to occupy some morally pure position outside journalism.

In The Journalist and the Murderer, she even scrutinises the letters she herself sent MacDonald while trying to establish a relationship with him. She recognises in her own correspondence the same problem she is examining elsewhere: the journalist needs rapport, and rapport can involve presenting a version of yourself designed to keep somebody talking.

This matters because Malcolm's argument is sometimes reduced to "journalists are terrible people". That is too easy. Her argument is more disturbing than that. The problem may survive perfectly decent intentions.

A thoughtful journalist can still create expectations they cannot fulfil. A conscientious writer can still produce a portrait the subject experiences as betrayal. A writer can sincerely want to understand somebody and still eventually use that understanding against the version of themselves the subject wanted preserved.

Good intentions don't make the structure disappear.

Then Malcolm became the accused writer

And Malcolm's relationship with her own subjects makes everything even messier.

Before The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm had written about the psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson for The New Yorker. Masson later sued Malcolm and the magazine, alleging that quotations attributed to him had been fabricated or altered.

The dispute eventually reached the US Supreme Court over the legal standard surrounding quotation alteration and actual malice. Malcolm ultimately prevailed when the case went to trial.

The legal details are complicated, but for our purposes the irony is irresistible.

The writer who became famous for examining what happens when a subject believes a journalist has betrayed him was herself accused by a subject of misrepresenting him. Malcolm wasn't standing outside the problem. Nobody was.

We've been here before

At this point, I find myself thinking about Rachel Cusk again. Earlier in this journey, Cusk made us ask what happens when somebody recognises their life after a writer has transformed it into literature.

At the time, the problem seemed to begin with publication. Malcolm makes me think it begins much earlier. Before somebody can recognise themselves in a book, they have to become available to the writer in the first place.

Sometimes that happens because they are a relative. Sometimes a lover. Sometimes a friend, and sometimes they sit down opposite a journalist and agree to talk. Different relationships, same strange transformation.

A wheel is in motion, and it is constantly turning. A person becomes a source. A source becomes material. Material becomes narrative. Narrative becomes a book, and then the person who started the process picks up that book and meets the character who has replaced them. No wonder writers make people nervous.

So what does a writer owe the person who trusts them?

I don't think the answer can be loyalty. Not at all, as the writer isn't there to produce the subject's preferred version of events. If that were the bargain, some of the most important nonfiction ever written couldn't exist.

Nor do I think the answer is friendship. A writer may become friendly with a subject, but the existence of a publishing contract means the relationship can never be quite as simple as either person might wish.

Perhaps what the writer owes the subject is something less comforting: clarity.

They say I will listen to you, and I will try to understand you. They say they will take seriously what you tell them, and that they will try to represent you fairly. Then there is the other thing: they cannot promise they will believe you. They cannot promise that you will like what they write, and they cannot promise that the person you recognise on the page will be the person you hoped I would see.

That sounds cold. Really cold. It may also be kinder than pretending otherwise.

Should anyone trust a writer?

Didion told us that writers are always selling somebody out. Cusk showed us the shock of recognising yourself after a writer has used life as material. Capote showed us what happens when real people are transformed into literature.

Mailer demonstrated that even the writer who tries to disappear remains responsible for the shape of the story. Thompson stopped pretending the camera was reliable and made his own subjectivity part of the performance.

Malcolm turns the camera around again. For the first time, we're looking directly at the relationship that made the story possible.

Perhaps that's why The Journalist and the Murderer remains such an unsettling little book. It isn't really asking whether Joe McGinniss behaved badly. That would be easier.

It's asking whether something resembling betrayal lurks inside the basic transaction of nonfiction itself.

A writer asks you to trust them. You talk to them, and they listen, and eventually they leave the room and write a book you can no longer control. But perhaps there is one more possibility.

What if the writer doesn't hide that relationship from the reader? What if the uncertainty, the correspondence, the fascination and the uncomfortable relationship between writer and subject become part of the book itself?

What if, instead of pretending to be invisible, the writer admits exactly where they are standing?

That takes us to Emmanuel Carrère, and The Adversary.

Tangled Prose — We're always talking about books

Thursday, 10 September 2026