Biographers rue the destruction or loss of letters; they might also curse the husband and wife who never leave each other’s side, and thus perform a kind of epistolary abortion.

This to her was a professional sin. She has resided in the United States since her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939. As reported in The New York Times the author "declared in an affidavit under penalty of perjury that the notes were genuine.

She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981) In the Freud Archives (1984) and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990). Janet Malcolm (born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine. " The influential critic Harold Bloom has praised her "wonderful exuberance" writing that Malcolm's books "transcend what they appear to be: superb reportage.