Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

By Janet Malcolm

Two Lives is Janet Malcolm's stunning portrait of a legendary couple: Gertrude Stein, the modernist master, and Alice B Toklas, the 'worker bee’ who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate 'marriage’. As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. 'The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,' she writes.

The portrait of their relationship that emerges is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat.

Janet Malcolm is at her finest in this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9780522866902

Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm (1934–2021) was the author of many books, including In the Freud Archives; The Journalist and the Murderer; Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude, which won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; and Forty-One False Starts, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. In 2017, Malcolm received the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews for Two Lives

[chenlow · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Should have been better.

[karen0s · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

My Great Books Reading Group will read Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas -- and I vaguely remembered a review of this longish essay on Stein & Toklas... So I picked it up. SO far -- not particularly gripping.