Nobody's Looking at You

By Janet Malcolm

Farrar, Straus and Giroux     2019

289 pages     Essays

I was drawn to Janet Malcolm’s book of essays by its cover. I happened to see the cover and I did a double-take. I know that woman! The picture shows a young woman in ultra-high heels, a dress that hardly covers her body, and a cigarette hanging from her mouth as she sits at a grand piano. She is Yuja Wang, a world-renowned pianist. As a teenager, she was named the Gilmore Young Artist and came to Kalamazoo to perform at the 2006 Gilmore International Keyboard Festival. My volunteer job for that festival was to drive her around, offer her a practice space at my house, and listen to her talk. I have a lot of stories I could tell!

Malcolm’s essay about Wang of course discusses her clothes as well as her career. In this essay, Malcolm helps us to understand this brilliant musician—writing in an impressive style that helps the reader to realize that she is not just any writer; Malcolm tries to really know her subject. Not many musicians would tell their interviewer: “Mozart is like a party animal. I find I play him better when I am hung over or drunk.” I loved what Malcolm did with her interview of Yuja Wang—it was almost like I was with that crazy young woman again.

Each of the interviews in the book has that kind of intimacy. Malcolm really knows her subjects. The title of the book comes from her article about the clothier Eileen Fisher, who told her that her mother emphasized to her that “nobody’s looking at you,” and that she had spent her life trying to hide in plain sight.

Another essay is about a New York antiquarian book store called Argosy and the three sisters, now all in their seventies, who have run the book store since the early nineties. These charming women took over the business from their father, and Malcolm does a deep dive into the antique book business by spending a considerable amount of time with the sisters. While I was reading this essay, I happened upon an article about a movie about the antique book business, and the Argosy bookstore is going to be in the movie. Called The Booksellers, the promo says that the movie will "takes viewers inside their small but fascinating world, populated by an assortment of obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers."

Then there is the long and important essay about Rachel Maddow, which I really loved because I watch Maddow several times a week. I think she is brilliant, and Malcolm is equally brilliant about how she gets inside Maddow’s mind and heart.

Nobody’s Looking at You  was the first book by Janet Malcolm that I had read, although I had read several of her essays in the New Yorker. All of the fourteen essays in the book have appeared in other publications. I was so impressed by how she interjected herself into all the stories, making her a very revealing author. She has really lived these interviews—they were not a chore, but they were the “substance of a lived life,” in the words of the New York Times book reviewer.