Janet Malcolm stands atop a notorious pedestal in the world of journalists. Past reactions to her work include mudslinging from critics and libel suits from her subjects. She's been accused of lying, solipsism, and slandering the entire journalistic profession. Her crime? Making her case most deliberately in The Journalist and the Murderer , Malcolm suggests that nonfiction writers are likely to use manipulation, chicanery, or equivocation to write premeditated stories. What she has lost in bad publicity and peer support, however, her readers have gained in meticulous, multifaceted works.

Such hyperawareness of the nonfiction-writing process results in books that tell multiple stories. In the case of Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Malcolm writes both a new take on the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and a treatise on the nature of biography — specifically, a biographer's responsibilities when placing private, complicated lives in the public record. Who better to spur a study of the biography as literature than Stein, whose The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas flipped the premise of (auto)biography on its head?

Two Lives stands out in the vast collection of Stein biographies because Malcolm does not set out to unlock the hermetic language of the author's genius, but to answer the chilling question, "How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians escaped the Nazis?" Collective memory, it seems, had neutered the couple's sexuality and absolved them of their religion — perhaps because, as Malcolm notes, the words "lesbian" and "Jewish" rarely, if ever, appear in the literary, nonfiction, or epistolary works of either woman.

While chasing an elusive answer, Malcolm emerges as the main character in her book, with the creative process as its framework. Herein lies the book's attraction; Two Lives is truly a writer's work for writers, a mellifluous recording of the ad-hoc process of writing a biography on Stein's peculiar legacy, veiled as it was by her shrewd protectorate, Toklas.

-McKay McFadden