Private Matters: in Defense of the Personal Life by Janna Malamud Smith

Janna Malamud Smith (JMS) is the daughter of writer Bernard Malamud. I don’t know who that is, but after reading this book, I feel like I should. But I didn’t stop to find out because this book is really good. I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read about privacy. It doesn’t really tell us, in the end, why privacy is important, which is why I read it, but it collects a series of unorthodox and sensitive quotations and observations about privacy that distinguish it from others.

You see, other books I’ve read always mention the same people: Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, Alan Westin, and commentary about facebook and so on. But there is so much more, and JMS has really dived in. She offers quotidian scenarios that she encountered, laced with sensitive commentary, and she mines the literary world for rich examples — focusing on Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. She notes that many people burn their letters, which is surely motivated by some inchoate,  perhaps excessive, recognition of privacy. She talks about celebrity and fame by looking at Henry Ward Beecher and his affair with Elizabeth Tilton. She also tackles Richard Rhodes extremely revealing and detailed book: “Making love: an Erotic Odyssey” where he graphically describes his sexual practices, exhaustively.

The latter is such a great example of the way in which privacy may be a two way street. We expect others not to look at our life in various ways, but we also expect that persons will not reveal everything to us. That can be invasive too, as JMS tries to argue with regard to Rhodes’ book.

Throughout her discussion, she gives a fresh portrait of the value of privacy, by picture it as something to do with the way we conceive ourselves as one person among many, connected to them and yet distinct. These connections are based in emotion, identity, thinking, and fiction, and ranges over contemporary issues like politics, sexism, surveillance, intimacy, and more.