A Fan’s Dilemma” – Chicago Review of Books

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What does it mean to love the art but recoil at the artist? Claire Dederer, author of the acclaimed memoirs Poser and Love and Trouble, breathes new life into this question in her stirring and revelatory book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Building on her viral Paris Review essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” Dederer blends criticism, philosophy, history, and personal narrative as she valiantly attempts to resolve this tension. Through the lens of both fan and critic, she considers the work of such tainted creators as Pablo Picasso, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, and Richard Wagner—as well as female luminaries such as Doris Lessing and Sylvia Plath—and ponders the connection between genius and monstrosity. Above all, she illuminates what it means to live with ambivalence—a state that, for better or worse, is deeply human.

Monsters takes on serious subject matter, but Dederer’s companionable and often humorous voice made me feel, while reading it, as if I were sitting in a coffee shop chatting about art and bad behavior with a good friend. I was glad for the chance to make this imagined conversation real when I spoke with Dederer, by phone, about “cancel culture,” writing while mothering, and the art of knowing what it is one really feels.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nicole Graev Lipson

Monsters opens during a time, in 2014, when you found yourself struggling to reconcile your passion for the films of Roman Polanski with your abhorrence of his actions as a convicted child rapist. Why did you decide to begin the book with Polanski?

Claire Dederer

It was actually really hard to get to this point. I’d already written about Polanski in my previous book Love and Trouble, and it felt strange to return to him right at the opening of this one. I resisted it for a long time: I buried him in the middle, and I moved him all around. But as I revised, I found that even though Monsters is disguised as a book of essays, what interested me was moving chronologically forward in time through a set of problems. I wanted to tag my reflection on my own life experiences to the development of my thoughts, and then to the political and historical events that happened after I’d started writing. I began with Polanski because he’s the one who set off this firestorm in my brain.

Nicole Graev Lipson

Early in Monsters, you recall having a glimmer of what you wanted this not-yet-written book to be. You imagined it not as a biography of morally depraved artists, but as an “autobiography of the audience”. This is such a fascinating concept. Could you talk about what it means to you and how it guided your book’s creation?

Claire Dederer

It was very clear to me from the start that I wanted to talk about the audience experience. There’s no point in cataloging a list of morally depraved people, as you put it so well, and as I wrote the book, the world started to do that itself with #MeToo, when our media became its own catalog of morally depraved people. I was really only interested in the disruption of the experience of a work by the knowledge of the artist’s biography. And what I learned was that my identity as an audience member is really central to who I am. “The audience,” “an audience member”—these sound like not-hot words. They don’t sound like they’re packed with feeling or life experience. But for me, I realized, they are.

Nicole Graev Lipson

It’s true that on the one hand, Monsters is a book about thinking: it shows us a consciousness—your consciousness—grappling with a complicated idea on the page. But it’s also very much a book about feeling and the human capacity to fall in love with art. Thinking and feeling are often treated as binary: people say things like, “Stop overthinking things and just enjoy the moment! ” But I wonder: Can thinking deeply about something be entwined with, or even enhance, the emotional experience of it?

Claire Dederer

I’ve been waiting for somebody to bring up the problem of the body and feeling. My first two books were really about the body. The first one was about yoga, and the second one was about sex. And I think these grew out of the fact that, in many ways, I am the person who’s been told all my life to stop overthinking things and making everything so complicated.

For me, there’s so much safety in thinking—I want to be this kind of Übermensch of thinking. I’ve always had a really contested relationship with both my body and with feeling itself, which I think are somewhat conflated for me, and for everyone, I suppose. This conflict between body and mind, or feeling and mind, has informed all three books I’ve written. At first, I thought I was going to solve the problem of Monsters with thinking, and feeling was the enemy. And so once again, I myself kind of barbelled thinking and feeling and ended up stuck in feeling, stuck in the body, stuck in emotion, even though that’s not where I set out to be.

Nicole Graev Lipson

Your 2017 Paris Review essay focused on male artists. In Monsters, you widen the lens to include women artists whose ethics have been controversial, such as Joni Mitchell and Valerie Solanas. Did expanding the scope in this way shift your thoughts about the idea of monstrousness?

Claire Dederer

I believe that a good memoirist is constantly onto herself. Writing about these women allowed me to point a finger, and then point it back at myself, both in my thinking and my writing. It also moved me closer to, if not exactly empathy for the monster, then a more expansive set of feelings toward the monster, an acknowledgement of their humanity. This was easier for me to see with women than with some of the men because I am a woman and have lived similar experiences.

Nicole Graev Lipson

This makes me think of one of my favorite chapters, “Am I A Monster?”, where you reflect on your own life as a creator, particularly in the context of being a mother. You note the small acts of selfishness artist-parents must commit to get their work done. Do you think the bar for monstrousness is lower for mother artists than other artists?

Claire Dederer

Yes. One of the main ideas the book gets at about women artists is that question of how quickly we can be seen as abandoning our duties of care when we go to work. And by care, I don’t just mean caring for children or older people with our bodies, but also with our attention to detail. These things aren’t the province of women: they’re just qualities we’ve assigned to women.

And what is an abandoning mother? It’s a spectrum. Let’s say I’m away at a writing retreat: Is it abandonment if I leave for a week? A month? A year? Whereas a man can go to work, and it’s that simple. The ambiguity of what it is to not provide care means not only that women can be held to a different standard, but also—and I think this is more important— that they can impose that standard and guilt upon themselves.

See Also

Nicole Graev Lipson

Your book is situated in the cultural context of the past ten years, which gave us Trump and #MeToo and the fall of Harvey Weinstein and new controversy around J.K. Rowling, but also, more recently, sensitivity revisions of classic books and a rise in the banning of books altogether. Where do you think the line is between a conscientious consumption of art and the silencing of viewpoints one doesn’t agree with? Is one person’s moral choice just another person’s censorship?

Claire Dederer

I think that so-called “cancel culture”—and I don’t even really believe in that term—is a terrible, complicated, and sometimes destructive tool, but it’s the tool we have. We get these knock-on effects of people saying that something bad happened to them, but it’s of greatest importance that people are able to say that something bad happened to them.

What happens after that is a second question. I can’t get away from the subjectivity of any response to a creative work. Each person’s response is different: that’s the problem with book banning, right? If I’m conscientiously consuming art—or not even conscientiously, but consuming art in a way that’s open and alive to my own emotional experience—and I’m like, “Hell no, I can’t watch Manhattan,” that affects no one except me. When we try to take our own subjective response as the ultimate authority, this immediately becomes a problem, and it’s absurd if you actually look at it with any degree of critical thinking.

Nicole Graev Lipson

I need to talk about one of my favorite moments in the book, which made me cry. You recall a campfire conversation with your friend Sam, who confides in you about his stepfather, who did terrible, abusive, criminal things when Sam was young. But he also confides that after everything, he still has tender feelings for his stepfather. He still loves him. There was something about this simple, loving refusal to see the world in terms of “either/ or” that deeply moved me. Is pushing beyond the “either/or” a goal of this book? Is this something you believe imaginative writing should do?

Claire Dederer

I quote Hemingway in the book, from Death in the Afternoon, where he talks about how the problem is to write what you really felt, not what you were supposed to feel. And I think about Lawrence Weschler, who wrote a book about the minimalist artist Robert Irwin called Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. This was absolutely the project of Monsters from beginning to end—to keep pushing past the things I thought I was experiencing and ask what was really going on.

I think this is why I was so moved by that moment by the fire. My friend so urgently wanted to tell me that he thought one way about his stepfather, but that he felt love for him no matter what he was thinking. And the urgency of his need to tell me about his feelings just moved me so much.

That was many years ago, and it was a sudden aha moment about what the book was always meant to open up toward: the problem of human love.