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Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Nonfiction (2023)From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, a passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of #MeToo, and of the link between genius and monstrosity.
In this unflinching, deeply personal book that expands on her instantly viral Paris Review essay, What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? She explores the audience's relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.
In this unflinching, deeply personal book that expands on her instantly viral Paris Review essay, What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? She explores the audience's relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.
257 pages, Hardcover
First published April 25, 2023
About the author
Claire Dederer
6 books429 followersClaire’s first book, Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in January, 2011. It will be published simultaneously in the UK by Bloomsbury.
Claire is a longtime contributor to The New York Times. Her articles have appeared in Vogue, Real Simple, The Nation, New York, Yoga Journal, on Slate and Salon, and in newspapers across the country. Her writing has encompassed criticism, reporting, and the personal essay.
Dederer’s essays have appeared in the anthologies Money Changes Everything (edited by Elissa Schappell and Jenny Offill) and Heavy Rotation (edited by Peter Terzian).
Before becoming a freelance journalist, Claire was the chief film critic at Seattle Weekly.
With her husband Bruce Barcott, Claire has co-taught writing at the University of Washington. She currently works with private students.
A proud fourth-generation Seattle native, Claire lives on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound with her family.
Claire is a longtime contributor to The New York Times. Her articles have appeared in Vogue, Real Simple, The Nation, New York, Yoga Journal, on Slate and Salon, and in newspapers across the country. Her writing has encompassed criticism, reporting, and the personal essay.
Dederer’s essays have appeared in the anthologies Money Changes Everything (edited by Elissa Schappell and Jenny Offill) and Heavy Rotation (edited by Peter Terzian).
Before becoming a freelance journalist, Claire was the chief film critic at Seattle Weekly.
With her husband Bruce Barcott, Claire has co-taught writing at the University of Washington. She currently works with private students.
A proud fourth-generation Seattle native, Claire lives on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound with her family.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,099 reviews
October 9, 2023
This book is half excellent and half terrible. First, it’s a great subject, horrible people who make great art is something that bothers all of us here I think. Claire Dederer asks all the right questions and rounds up all the usual suspects, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Hemingway, Picasso, JK Rowling…. Huh? What’s that you say? The author of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Incorrect Opinions?
This is not an exhaustive trawl through the long list of awful men, so no R Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, Chuck Berry, Bill Cosby, etc etc. And for the most part the details of the alleged bad behavior are not described, it’s assumed you already know. CD says clearly that this is a book about the audience not the artist, about what we are supposed to do now that we found out about ---------- (fill in your favourite painter/singer/director/actor/author).
I cannot refrain from pointing out the wretched irony of JK Rowling being considered monstrous these days. Most of the male monsters were raping and abusing girls and women, of course, and she (misguidedly or not) is all about trying to protect the rights of girls and women. We live in strange times.
LITTLE LO
The chapter on Nabokov is called “The Anti-Monster” because Vlad himself was in no way shape or form a monster but he wrote an appallingly accurate book about Humbert Humbert, the pedophile, leading CD to worry
Only a monster could know a monster so well. Surely Lolita must be some kind of mirror of its author?... Just how did Nabokov come to understand Humbert so perfectly?
Yeah, Vlad. Answers please. According to your biographer, you didn’t do anything nasty with little girls. We accept that. But you sure seem to have thought a lot about it.
There’s a strange side issue here : this book is about 50% memoir, and not so coincidentally, that’s the 50% I disliked. I wanted to get back to the nitty gritty, and CD was waffling about left liberal life in the Pacific North West. One autobiographical detail jumped right out and whacked me about the gizzard, however :
I was thirteen. I knew Lolita was officially an important book, but it was about a girl my age… I thought I might give Lolita a whirl…
13? This was some kind of madly advanced reader… I was still reading William books and starting on Ray Bradbury at that age. I would have made zero sense of Vlad’s fantabulous serpentine bejewelled sentences. I wouldn’t have made it to page two, but CD finished the whole thing. I am in awe.
This is a most interesting chapter, a nice addition to lolitological Studies, but every time you are thinking this book has now found its groove CD comes out with some highly dubious apercu that calls forth a groan or a puzzled frown :
Lolita is the scorched-earth offensive of pedophile novels (and sometimes, it seems, of novels in general)
FEMALE MONSTERS
CD meditates on whether women writers need to become more monstrous. The ruthless selfishness of the men is easy to see and involves tireless sexual appetites and endless expectations of a flock of female servants scurrying around. The selfishness of women is different – the only examples CD gives us is of women who abandon their children. Muriel Spark, Joni Mitchell, Doris Lessing, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath (who only abandoned her children when she abandoned herself) – oh, and there’s Valerie Solanas, who gets a chapter. (“Once you start quoting Solanas, it’s hard to stop, largely because she is often so right”). I was very happy to see her included. Yes, she was a monster! As were my other two favourite radical feminists, Andrea Dworkin and Aileen Wuornos (Aileen the more practical of the three).
Of these beleaguered women artists, CD writes the best sentence in the book:
What is feminism if not a daily struggle against forces that are so large, so consuming, that those forces are invisible to – forgotten, taken for granted by – the very people wielding them?
Yes indeed.
THE WRAP UP
An interesting, frustrating, often aggravating first attempt to answer the question can we still watch Manhattan or Chinatown, can we still listen to Kind of Blue or River Deep Mountain High, can we still enjoy Les Demoiselles D'Avignon or Where do we Come From? What are We?
The answer in the end is :
You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction.
Well, now you know.
This is not an exhaustive trawl through the long list of awful men, so no R Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, Chuck Berry, Bill Cosby, etc etc. And for the most part the details of the alleged bad behavior are not described, it’s assumed you already know. CD says clearly that this is a book about the audience not the artist, about what we are supposed to do now that we found out about ---------- (fill in your favourite painter/singer/director/actor/author).
I cannot refrain from pointing out the wretched irony of JK Rowling being considered monstrous these days. Most of the male monsters were raping and abusing girls and women, of course, and she (misguidedly or not) is all about trying to protect the rights of girls and women. We live in strange times.
LITTLE LO
The chapter on Nabokov is called “The Anti-Monster” because Vlad himself was in no way shape or form a monster but he wrote an appallingly accurate book about Humbert Humbert, the pedophile, leading CD to worry
Only a monster could know a monster so well. Surely Lolita must be some kind of mirror of its author?... Just how did Nabokov come to understand Humbert so perfectly?
Yeah, Vlad. Answers please. According to your biographer, you didn’t do anything nasty with little girls. We accept that. But you sure seem to have thought a lot about it.
There’s a strange side issue here : this book is about 50% memoir, and not so coincidentally, that’s the 50% I disliked. I wanted to get back to the nitty gritty, and CD was waffling about left liberal life in the Pacific North West. One autobiographical detail jumped right out and whacked me about the gizzard, however :
I was thirteen. I knew Lolita was officially an important book, but it was about a girl my age… I thought I might give Lolita a whirl…
13? This was some kind of madly advanced reader… I was still reading William books and starting on Ray Bradbury at that age. I would have made zero sense of Vlad’s fantabulous serpentine bejewelled sentences. I wouldn’t have made it to page two, but CD finished the whole thing. I am in awe.
This is a most interesting chapter, a nice addition to lolitological Studies, but every time you are thinking this book has now found its groove CD comes out with some highly dubious apercu that calls forth a groan or a puzzled frown :
Lolita is the scorched-earth offensive of pedophile novels (and sometimes, it seems, of novels in general)
FEMALE MONSTERS
CD meditates on whether women writers need to become more monstrous. The ruthless selfishness of the men is easy to see and involves tireless sexual appetites and endless expectations of a flock of female servants scurrying around. The selfishness of women is different – the only examples CD gives us is of women who abandon their children. Muriel Spark, Joni Mitchell, Doris Lessing, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath (who only abandoned her children when she abandoned herself) – oh, and there’s Valerie Solanas, who gets a chapter. (“Once you start quoting Solanas, it’s hard to stop, largely because she is often so right”). I was very happy to see her included. Yes, she was a monster! As were my other two favourite radical feminists, Andrea Dworkin and Aileen Wuornos (Aileen the more practical of the three).
Of these beleaguered women artists, CD writes the best sentence in the book:
What is feminism if not a daily struggle against forces that are so large, so consuming, that those forces are invisible to – forgotten, taken for granted by – the very people wielding them?
Yes indeed.
THE WRAP UP
An interesting, frustrating, often aggravating first attempt to answer the question can we still watch Manhattan or Chinatown, can we still listen to Kind of Blue or River Deep Mountain High, can we still enjoy Les Demoiselles D'Avignon or Where do we Come From? What are We?
The answer in the end is :
You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction.
Well, now you know.
May 16, 2023
thank god i can go back to watching Annie Hall in peace.
May 2, 2023
I think the problem is that I wanted this—and expected it—to be an entirely different book than what it was. There’s a lot that I felt disappointed by (it lacked areas of thought I think belong in the discussion, it felt self-serving to assuage the authors own guilt etc) but I think it just really suffers from being too broad. Is it memoir? Is it critical essays? Is it wise to cover a whole range of different artists and shove all their behaviour under one really big category? It’s way too vague and spends so much time describing biographies, setting up questions and then…saying there is no answer. It’s also really really repetitive. I feel like nothing really new is ever really said. I think there were some good moments and I think that it’s great that there’s writing on this topic but I just don’t think it works at the level I was expecting it to work at. Much, much more personal essays than an analysis of media and it doesn’t seamlessly do both the way other authors in this genre often can.
April 19, 2023
What do we do with terrible people in our lives? Nothing. We keep loving them.
Monsters is an honest, elaborate meditation on the separation of the art and the artist’s biography and whether or not it is possible at all.
In doing so Claire Dederer never claims to have the answer to the dilemma; she merely unfolds the problem, drawing from examples of her personal experiences, her personal admiration for the works of Woody Allen, Polanski and Picasso, and furthering by J.K. Rowling, Wagner, Michael Jackson and many the likes. The book is roughly divided into two parts where men and their monstrosity are mainly displayed by cases of sexual assaults while the female monstrosity is characterized (by society) by the treatment or abandonment of one’s own children, see Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath. These women may, in my own opinion, have been represented a little one-sidedly – Dederer speaks of a need for women to make a decision between children or their art, and that choice is put in very binary terms. Maybe some women just don’t want to have children and not because they had to choose anything. That chapter also takes a very personal turn, thematizing a personal addiction of the author, which was kind of autobiographical and uncomfortable for me to read. I don’t really feel like I signed up for that.
Other than that, I thought this was extremely interesting thought-provoking, very much worth your time.
Monsters is an honest, elaborate meditation on the separation of the art and the artist’s biography and whether or not it is possible at all.
In doing so Claire Dederer never claims to have the answer to the dilemma; she merely unfolds the problem, drawing from examples of her personal experiences, her personal admiration for the works of Woody Allen, Polanski and Picasso, and furthering by J.K. Rowling, Wagner, Michael Jackson and many the likes. The book is roughly divided into two parts where men and their monstrosity are mainly displayed by cases of sexual assaults while the female monstrosity is characterized (by society) by the treatment or abandonment of one’s own children, see Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath. These women may, in my own opinion, have been represented a little one-sidedly – Dederer speaks of a need for women to make a decision between children or their art, and that choice is put in very binary terms. Maybe some women just don’t want to have children and not because they had to choose anything. That chapter also takes a very personal turn, thematizing a personal addiction of the author, which was kind of autobiographical and uncomfortable for me to read. I don’t really feel like I signed up for that.
Other than that, I thought this was extremely interesting thought-provoking, very much worth your time.
January 28, 2024
Frankly, the whole discussion about the cancellation of problematic artists is rather silly, because it's based on a false dichotomy: That we have to categorize artistic output as either morally good or morally bad in order to validate our consumption of it. In our post-postmodern world, we should by now have developed some tolerance for ambiguity, in this case an awareness of the complex interplay between our knowledge of the character of an artist, the power of their work, how the work might reflect said dubious character and what all that theoretical awareness does to our emotions towards creator and art. After Roland Barthes' declaration of the death of the author, he*she has long come back, but is not the same as before. Why isn't this evidently the status quo of the discussion for every art form?
Dederer has written a highly entertaining book focusing on the perspective of a specific kind of consumer, namely the fan, so a person who feels deeply for the art, but struggles with the implications of the artist being a terrible human being. For Dederer herself, the prime example is Roman Polanski, but the book also references the likes of Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, J.K. Rowling, Pablo Picasso, etc.pp. The chapters are mostly structured around the kinds of transgressions fans have to face when contemplating their idols, from rape over racism, antisemitism, to violence, alcoholism, and - oh boy - being a bad mother. And we also get some positive examples, like Vladimir Nabokov who wrote about the everyday nature of sexual child abuse and the justifications of predators without being a predator himself, and Raymond Carver, who turned his life around.
The text elegantly oscillates between biography, interpretation and emotional response, thus showing how the "all at once" approach of tackling and even enjoying the art while being critically aware of the actions of the artist tuns out to be fruitful for our understanding of cultural production - and of ourselves. But then, towards the end, a classic twist happens: The cultural critique turns into a critique of capitalism, and the disrespect for the state of the economy is paired with a nonchalant ignorance about its function: No, Claire Dederer, it is not true that the behavior of the consumer does not shift markets. On the contrary, it's pretty outrageous to claim that consumers try in vain to fight climate change by changing their patterns of consumption. (Why does the book suddenly talk about climate change, you ask? I have no idea.) WTF, Dederer? Denying personality responsibility is not a reasonable response to capitalism, it is a motor to destructive hyper-capitalism as opposed to the social market economy. Why do so many people who love art think that being ignorant about the economy is cute? I don't get it.
But still, overall, this is a very enjoyable book, smart and entertaining.
Dederer has written a highly entertaining book focusing on the perspective of a specific kind of consumer, namely the fan, so a person who feels deeply for the art, but struggles with the implications of the artist being a terrible human being. For Dederer herself, the prime example is Roman Polanski, but the book also references the likes of Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, J.K. Rowling, Pablo Picasso, etc.pp. The chapters are mostly structured around the kinds of transgressions fans have to face when contemplating their idols, from rape over racism, antisemitism, to violence, alcoholism, and - oh boy - being a bad mother. And we also get some positive examples, like Vladimir Nabokov who wrote about the everyday nature of sexual child abuse and the justifications of predators without being a predator himself, and Raymond Carver, who turned his life around.
The text elegantly oscillates between biography, interpretation and emotional response, thus showing how the "all at once" approach of tackling and even enjoying the art while being critically aware of the actions of the artist tuns out to be fruitful for our understanding of cultural production - and of ourselves. But then, towards the end, a classic twist happens: The cultural critique turns into a critique of capitalism, and the disrespect for the state of the economy is paired with a nonchalant ignorance about its function: No, Claire Dederer, it is not true that the behavior of the consumer does not shift markets. On the contrary, it's pretty outrageous to claim that consumers try in vain to fight climate change by changing their patterns of consumption. (Why does the book suddenly talk about climate change, you ask? I have no idea.) WTF, Dederer? Denying personality responsibility is not a reasonable response to capitalism, it is a motor to destructive hyper-capitalism as opposed to the social market economy. Why do so many people who love art think that being ignorant about the economy is cute? I don't get it.
But still, overall, this is a very enjoyable book, smart and entertaining.
July 16, 2023
I didn't get what I wanted from this one.There were far too many tangents and too many potted biographies of the artists being discussed.
An interesting premise but one the author struggled to add depth to, resulting in the book feeling really padded out.
An interesting premise but one the author struggled to add depth to, resulting in the book feeling really padded out.
July 1, 2023
**Rant alert**
Haven’t read a work that bugged me as much as this one in forever. Men are monsters, right? We can all agree on that. And there’s soooo much material to craft a compelling argument on the topic of “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men.” I mean, we all just lived through Kanye West’s 2022. And yet all Claire Dederer seems compelled to do here is assert her own preferred “public” identity. There’s no meaningful research. There are easily a dozen logical contradictions here, just depending on what suits her argument at any particular moment, and just as many factual inaccuracies. Broad characterizations that Dederer subscribes to are presented as objective truths, and the book is littered with idiotic #humblebrags. Did you know her children are “leftists”? Don’t worry, she’ll casually drop that tidbit numerous times. (And any cinephiles out there are bound to squirm when we get Claire’s film analysis. It’s painfully simple-minded. Whoa, you noticed a composition?! You think Chinatown is good? Glad you made room in these pages for that hot fucking take.)
The degree to which this is awful is also hilarious. There’s a whole chapter on Nabakov that suggests the author was a closet pedophile because of Lolita, goes through a lot of information that determines if he was then he hid it entirely, and ends by saying, well maybe not, but also maybe! Of course, this also tacitly argues that writers can’t possibly write about anything not directly reflective of them, which is of course insane, but given the astounding level of narcissism on display here, it’s clear that Dederer certainly can’t. Another chapter starts out discussing alcohol abuse in certain writers, and then turns into Dederer talking about her sobriety at length. Because nothing pertains to the art of monstrous men more than her affinity for wine. Dederer also waxes ad nauseam about the importance of subjectivity when it comes to responses and interpretations of art so that she has a built-in defense against any and all criticism.
It’s so frustrating how regressive Monsters is. In a world where men’s rights activists are growing in number and the de facto response of men writ large is to employ defensiveness rather than empathy when it comes to the gender’s history-long marriage to monstrosity, Dederer comes in with this English 101 C+ riddled with flaws and bursting with sanctimony. These are the unfocused musings of an egoist, a diary masquerading as moral outrage. Men deserve a far more severe flaying than the low-hanging fruit peddled here by an author who can’t stop looking back into the mirror. Fuck this book. Claire Dederer needs to go touch grass.
Haven’t read a work that bugged me as much as this one in forever. Men are monsters, right? We can all agree on that. And there’s soooo much material to craft a compelling argument on the topic of “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men.” I mean, we all just lived through Kanye West’s 2022. And yet all Claire Dederer seems compelled to do here is assert her own preferred “public” identity. There’s no meaningful research. There are easily a dozen logical contradictions here, just depending on what suits her argument at any particular moment, and just as many factual inaccuracies. Broad characterizations that Dederer subscribes to are presented as objective truths, and the book is littered with idiotic #humblebrags. Did you know her children are “leftists”? Don’t worry, she’ll casually drop that tidbit numerous times. (And any cinephiles out there are bound to squirm when we get Claire’s film analysis. It’s painfully simple-minded. Whoa, you noticed a composition?! You think Chinatown is good? Glad you made room in these pages for that hot fucking take.)
The degree to which this is awful is also hilarious. There’s a whole chapter on Nabakov that suggests the author was a closet pedophile because of Lolita, goes through a lot of information that determines if he was then he hid it entirely, and ends by saying, well maybe not, but also maybe! Of course, this also tacitly argues that writers can’t possibly write about anything not directly reflective of them, which is of course insane, but given the astounding level of narcissism on display here, it’s clear that Dederer certainly can’t. Another chapter starts out discussing alcohol abuse in certain writers, and then turns into Dederer talking about her sobriety at length. Because nothing pertains to the art of monstrous men more than her affinity for wine. Dederer also waxes ad nauseam about the importance of subjectivity when it comes to responses and interpretations of art so that she has a built-in defense against any and all criticism.
It’s so frustrating how regressive Monsters is. In a world where men’s rights activists are growing in number and the de facto response of men writ large is to employ defensiveness rather than empathy when it comes to the gender’s history-long marriage to monstrosity, Dederer comes in with this English 101 C+ riddled with flaws and bursting with sanctimony. These are the unfocused musings of an egoist, a diary masquerading as moral outrage. Men deserve a far more severe flaying than the low-hanging fruit peddled here by an author who can’t stop looking back into the mirror. Fuck this book. Claire Dederer needs to go touch grass.
April 11, 2024
Can we separate art from the artist? That's the question this book aims to answer and, surprisingly, it's longer than one word: "Duh!"
But as it turns out, this question is bigger than it sounds. Film critic Claire Dederer poignantly turns to a number of case studies which peel back complex layers on why art and biography matter, and why they don't. The book is a mix of literary criticism, personal memoir and social commentary. Though the topics often stray from the main question, Dederer does an excellent job bringing it back home.
"Cancel culture" is not a new phenomenon and can be seen throughout history for at least as long as there's been capitalism, and probably longer. Sometimes a great artist does something universally abhorrent, such as Roman Polanski. These situations are perhaps the best case studies for examining how biography taints a work of art or, as Dederer sometimes provocatively suggests, makes the art more intriguing.
Edgar Allan Poe was actively being "cancelled" after his death due to distaste of his mental illness and alcoholism. But the more his enemies described him as psycho, the more interesting audiences began to find his tales of madness and macabre.
Of course being cancelled does not always elevate the art. Also an example from this book, Bill Cosby's numerous crimes do not make "The Cosby Show" more interesting. In fact, they make it almost impossible to watch. It seems that the type of art, the type of artist, the type of fan, and the type of monstrosity are all factors swirling around this issue.
When I was a kid, Evangelicals were desperate to cancel Harry Potter because they claimed the books persuaded children to take an interest in "black magic." Also, they said, because the author actually believed in witchcraft. We kids laughed at them and read the books anyway. If we had crazy parents (like me) we found other ways to devour the series without their knowledge. Now, of course, many from my generation cancel J.K. Rowling for different reasons. I once had a friend demand that I unfollow Rowling on Twitter because of her TERF beliefs. I didn't even know I was following her, and I certainly wasn't promoting her harmful political rants. I thought my friend's reaction was a bit extreme.
And yet, in the summer of 2012, when Mike Huckabee asked Christians to flock to Chick-Fil-A in support of their donations to organizations which promoted conversion therapy for gay people, I felt a similar reaction to what my trans friends probably feel when they saw my name connected with Rowling. I remember logging on to Facebook that day and seeing pictures of my family holding bags of fast food chicken with big grins on their face. Whether or not they meant the picture to be a direct attack on me, it felt like it. I still can't eat there without re-experiencing the trauma.
My point is, this book could go on and on. There is an endless supply of controversy from artists and companies. We could ponder forever why a product absorbs social context and frequently becomes something different because of it.
In the end, the thing we consume or choose not to consume is a personal decision. You shouldn't feel guilt for enjoying the work of a monster, and you shouldn't feel guilt for not enjoying it either. I hope no one goes into this book expecting an answer that is any different. But you don't have to be looking for answers to enjoy reading this. The magic is in the discussion, the thought-provocation.
Highly recommended.
But as it turns out, this question is bigger than it sounds. Film critic Claire Dederer poignantly turns to a number of case studies which peel back complex layers on why art and biography matter, and why they don't. The book is a mix of literary criticism, personal memoir and social commentary. Though the topics often stray from the main question, Dederer does an excellent job bringing it back home.
"Cancel culture" is not a new phenomenon and can be seen throughout history for at least as long as there's been capitalism, and probably longer. Sometimes a great artist does something universally abhorrent, such as Roman Polanski. These situations are perhaps the best case studies for examining how biography taints a work of art or, as Dederer sometimes provocatively suggests, makes the art more intriguing.
Edgar Allan Poe was actively being "cancelled" after his death due to distaste of his mental illness and alcoholism. But the more his enemies described him as psycho, the more interesting audiences began to find his tales of madness and macabre.
Of course being cancelled does not always elevate the art. Also an example from this book, Bill Cosby's numerous crimes do not make "The Cosby Show" more interesting. In fact, they make it almost impossible to watch. It seems that the type of art, the type of artist, the type of fan, and the type of monstrosity are all factors swirling around this issue.
When I was a kid, Evangelicals were desperate to cancel Harry Potter because they claimed the books persuaded children to take an interest in "black magic." Also, they said, because the author actually believed in witchcraft. We kids laughed at them and read the books anyway. If we had crazy parents (like me) we found other ways to devour the series without their knowledge. Now, of course, many from my generation cancel J.K. Rowling for different reasons. I once had a friend demand that I unfollow Rowling on Twitter because of her TERF beliefs. I didn't even know I was following her, and I certainly wasn't promoting her harmful political rants. I thought my friend's reaction was a bit extreme.
And yet, in the summer of 2012, when Mike Huckabee asked Christians to flock to Chick-Fil-A in support of their donations to organizations which promoted conversion therapy for gay people, I felt a similar reaction to what my trans friends probably feel when they saw my name connected with Rowling. I remember logging on to Facebook that day and seeing pictures of my family holding bags of fast food chicken with big grins on their face. Whether or not they meant the picture to be a direct attack on me, it felt like it. I still can't eat there without re-experiencing the trauma.
My point is, this book could go on and on. There is an endless supply of controversy from artists and companies. We could ponder forever why a product absorbs social context and frequently becomes something different because of it.
In the end, the thing we consume or choose not to consume is a personal decision. You shouldn't feel guilt for enjoying the work of a monster, and you shouldn't feel guilt for not enjoying it either. I hope no one goes into this book expecting an answer that is any different. But you don't have to be looking for answers to enjoy reading this. The magic is in the discussion, the thought-provocation.
Highly recommended.
January 8, 2024
such an interesting essay collection examining the fan dilemma of separating the art from the artist, what constitutes a ‘monster’, and our complicity and morality when it comes to consuming the work of, and in some cases ‘loving’, artists who have done awful things. you won’t agree with every single point in here, but it’s a compelling, smart, and passionate insight into an age-old debate which no one will ever truly have the answers to. and as dederer states in the book, maybe it’s not really our job to have the answers.
(dederer does, however, kind of come to her own conclusions on how she will move forward with these dilemmas. but it’s something each person must take the time to decide for themselves.)
(dederer does, however, kind of come to her own conclusions on how she will move forward with these dilemmas. but it’s something each person must take the time to decide for themselves.)
September 9, 2023
First 3 outta 4 parts of this book are stellar. Just really great stuff. That third quarter is wonky at best. I liked the writing, book, and idea but some of the authors own biography isn’t addressed in a way that feels like a huge missed opportunity. Some of the better cultural criticism I’ve read in a while. Ripe for discussion.
I felt the same on my reread of this books. Claire is an imperfect guide through this world but also this book really changed and broadened my thinking about thinking about art and the people who made it.
I felt the same on my reread of this books. Claire is an imperfect guide through this world but also this book really changed and broadened my thinking about thinking about art and the people who made it.
October 22, 2023
I read Monsters as part of an ill-fated attempt to replace the unsatisfying internet culture writing that I sometimes let clog my mornings with book-length works of criticism. This book in particular because I was worried my own perspective on the question—what to do with great art by horrible men, basically—was in danger of ossifying. I wanted to challenge myself. Alas, Dederer and I basically agree:
“There is not some correct answer. You are not responsible for finding it. Your feeling of responsibility is a shibboleth, a reinforcement of your tragically limited role as a consumer. There is no authority and there should be no authority. … You will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end” (242).
At the same time: “The stain—spreading, creeping, wine-dark, inevitable—is biography’s aftermath. The person does the crime and it’s the work that gets stained” (50). “When someone says we ought to separate the art from the artist, they’re saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that’s not how stains work. We watch the glass fall to the floor; we don’t get to decide whether the wine will spread across the carpet” (45).
There were times when I wanted a deeper engagement with the content of the works under consideration. There is a passage, for example, where Dederer wishes she could watch the early Polanski classic Knife in the Water without the stain of Polanski’s crime. To separate out Polanski, “predator, rapist” from Polanski, “preternaturally talented Polish art student, wunderkind, Holocaust survivor.” Dederer’s point is that this is not possible. But reading the passage, all I could think was that Knife in the Water is one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen, a movie of barely contained violence, horror seething beneath the surface of every shot. What could it possibly mean for such a movie to be “unstained”? This is in no way a defence of Polanski, or even a point against Dederer. But there is an absence, here—a set of assumptions around authorship, and what art means and is for, that go unexplored. To be fair, the book isn’t about art—that’s right in the subtitle. The book is about fans, about audiences.
The same absence shows itself in Dederer’s thoughtful discussion of Annie Hall. She doesn’t really stop to consider who made Annie Hall. She just assumes it is a Woody Allen movie. And why wouldn’t she? But that absence speaks, in my view, to the continuing way that the genius of (usually) women actresses, models, and singers is undervalued in our culture. What are we saying to Diane Keaton when we say that a work of art she obviously put her whole heart and soul into in 1977, a work of art she made great, is ruined because of something Woody Allen did in 1992?
These are not complaints, though, only reactions, only thoughts. Precisely the kinds of thoughts, I suspect, that Claire Dederer hoped to inspire.
“There is not some correct answer. You are not responsible for finding it. Your feeling of responsibility is a shibboleth, a reinforcement of your tragically limited role as a consumer. There is no authority and there should be no authority. … You will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end” (242).
At the same time: “The stain—spreading, creeping, wine-dark, inevitable—is biography’s aftermath. The person does the crime and it’s the work that gets stained” (50). “When someone says we ought to separate the art from the artist, they’re saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that’s not how stains work. We watch the glass fall to the floor; we don’t get to decide whether the wine will spread across the carpet” (45).
There were times when I wanted a deeper engagement with the content of the works under consideration. There is a passage, for example, where Dederer wishes she could watch the early Polanski classic Knife in the Water without the stain of Polanski’s crime. To separate out Polanski, “predator, rapist” from Polanski, “preternaturally talented Polish art student, wunderkind, Holocaust survivor.” Dederer’s point is that this is not possible. But reading the passage, all I could think was that Knife in the Water is one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen, a movie of barely contained violence, horror seething beneath the surface of every shot. What could it possibly mean for such a movie to be “unstained”? This is in no way a defence of Polanski, or even a point against Dederer. But there is an absence, here—a set of assumptions around authorship, and what art means and is for, that go unexplored. To be fair, the book isn’t about art—that’s right in the subtitle. The book is about fans, about audiences.
The same absence shows itself in Dederer’s thoughtful discussion of Annie Hall. She doesn’t really stop to consider who made Annie Hall. She just assumes it is a Woody Allen movie. And why wouldn’t she? But that absence speaks, in my view, to the continuing way that the genius of (usually) women actresses, models, and singers is undervalued in our culture. What are we saying to Diane Keaton when we say that a work of art she obviously put her whole heart and soul into in 1977, a work of art she made great, is ruined because of something Woody Allen did in 1992?
These are not complaints, though, only reactions, only thoughts. Precisely the kinds of thoughts, I suspect, that Claire Dederer hoped to inspire.
September 13, 2023
Ooof I think Claire Dederer mentions praxis only once in this book and it shows. Maybe some people find this book helpful and I don't want to poo-poo them. I don't think this book is entirely without merit, but I also don't think that this book is the "ambitious" book that the author says is her goal nor is it a deep dive into the question of meaningful art created by monstrous people that the book advertises itself as. I will separate this review into the reasons I did not like this book:
1. It feels fundamentally dishonest
I think what I find frustrating is that this book feels to me like a dishonest attempt to address the subject this book claims to be about. The question the author is actually interested in asking is "Am I a Monster?" and "What do we do with the people we love who are monsters?" which I do not think is about art or celebrities. She gives some lip service to evaluating parasocial natures of relationships but does not seem interested in actually examining that in-depth or even really acknowledging the author's own conception of art or genius that is in and of itself inherently parasocial. Which is weird because she is constantly reminding the reader of her own subjectivity, which like I get it I've read Derrida too, but I feel like if she were truly leaning into her own subjectivity she would admit that part of her motive for even evaluating this question is to reaffirm her own humanity for the unnamed bad things she did while an alcoholic and reckon with the ability to still love people who have harmed us.
Instead the book neither really evaluates the question of good art by bad people nor how we conceive of or enact justice or forgiveness. I don't know Claire Dederer and this might be a mean thing to say, but from my outsider perspective it feels like Dederer is not actually interested in answering or investigating these questions at all and in fact the ending is just like "I guess we love people who hurt us oh well" which almost seems like what someone who does not want to reckon with their own monstrousness would say.
2. It feels out of touch both in the culture and in the discourse around this subject
Listening to this book, mostly the end but also at certain points throughout, was a less uncomfortable version of watching that scene in Tár where Cate Blanchett continuously bullies a non-binary Julliard student of color for deciding to opt out of performing and promoting the music of people who would've had no respect for them as brown person and for their non-patriarchal gender identity. They want their respect for the artist to be met with an artist's respect for their inherent humanity. Tár is threatened by this both because she gained and maintains her power in the industry through her complicity in upholding these oppressive power structures despite her oppression under these same structures and therefore does not meet this requirement and because she has deep emotional "art love" (Dederer's phrase) for these "important" "genius" composers. Like Tár, it does not feel like Dederer is interested in exploring what happens if we decide to open our heart to "art love" for people who are (to our knowledge) not exploiting the power they have been given in society. If we, like the Julliard student, want to opt out of this system how do we find the people to replace the monsters? How do we help them exist in a fundamentally exploitative system? Can funding art and creators through platforms like Patreon disrupt these exploitative systems or does it reproduce them differently? Are so many celebrities monstrous because monstrous people are drawn to power and acclaim or because the system that they are in encourages or even creates monstrous behavior? Dederer might not be interested in these questions but many people are interested in these questions and are evaluating them. This is where the discourse is going, not "is it ok to like David Bowie?"
Furthermore her examples of monstrous people just seem stale and bordering on irrelevance. My children might never see a Woody Allen movie, not because I will refuse to show it to them and not because he doesn't have great films that can't still hold meaning outside of his philandry and pedophilia, but because his works are becoming culturally irrelevant. Who we are as a society is changing and I would not be surprised if some of my favorite Allen films like Crimes and Misdemeanors, Radio Days, and Scoop do not resonant with my future Gen Alpha children because what we consider important as a society and the questions we think are interesting are changing. I never liked Annie Hall not because it isn't a "good" film, but because who Annie Hall is and what she represents changed between its release and when I saw the film in my twenties. In our post manic-pixie dream girl world I'm not charmed by Annie Hall and in a world where we are unlearning and unpacking our fetishization of relationships with age gaps I am in no way invested in her relationship with Allen (fyi I saw this film before I knew anything of Allen's personal life). The magic of Annie Hall (except that Christopher Walken scene, which still slaps) rings as false and unbelievable as the Orientalist magician from Oedipus Wrecks. As a society we are fundamentally questioning the importance of upholding and including the (mostly white male) figures that we uphold as "important" and "genius". We are rewriting the canon and in schools we are starting to evaluate books as "relevant" and "relatable" instead, replacing 1984 with The Hunger Games , The Scarlet Letter with All Boys Aren't Blue , and Cry, the Beloved Country with The Hate U Give . And this is good actually especially since classic or more difficult texts are not eradicated entirely but instead exist alongside contemporary work. Dederer mentions people in passing who are culturally relevant and are still shaping society like Elon Musk and Kanye West but decides to focus on Doris Lessing and Roman Polanski instead? This book almost ages out of its own relevance before it is even published.
She tries to critique the construct of the genius but simultaneously upholds it by attributing the value of the film to the person that we attribute the creative vision to, ignoring other people who contribute to the art. Do I love Psycho because of undeniable asshole Alfred Hitchcock's directing and does it belong to him? Or do I love Alma Reville's keen eye for editing and Anthony Perkins' bewiling performance as Norman Bates and George Milo's evocative set design and Bernard Hermann's chilling, discordant score? Whether Hogwarts Legacy or Space Jam, people are asking how involved a monstrous person needs to be in a project in order to withdraw support and is it inadvertently punishing the other artists involved in the project who were not party to the abuse? By making each chapter about a different monstrous person and attributing the inherent quality of worthiness to their art she simultaneous upholds the construct of genius by saying that it is their something special that makes the art good while erasing the other people who collaborate on and create the art and ignoring questions that are more relevant to the current direction of the discourse.
3. It's argument is cynical and not backed up by facts and lacks praxis
When Dederer finally does make an argument almost 7 hours in for how we should evaluate meaningful art by monstrous people her answer boils down to more or less the structure of capitalism cannot be brought down through capitalist action of withholding capitol and then for the remainder of the 8 hour text returns to her personal anxiety and experiences. She does not list any examples of this not working (and there are many) nor does she collect or present statistics about say the financial effects or lack thereof of cancellation or boycott on celebrities. While there are undoubtedly many examples to support her point, what do we do with the examples that do not fit her point? Kevin Spacey and Roseanne Barr were fired and replaced from their own TV shows and have been mostly out of work and culturally irrelevant since. Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson lost their biggest platform and reach only a fraction of their former audience on Twitter. R. Kelly won his 2008 court case for sexual abuse of a minor WITH VIDEO EVIDENCE but lost his recent cases in no small part because boycotts of his work changed his ability to fund his legal fees. While I agree that "voting with your dollar" cannot be the end all be all of change and that we need to think of other strategies to affect change, we currently live in a capitalist system and I think we should also do this if it can sometimes affect change as shown above. I'm open to Dederer's argument but I won't be convinced by a short chapter where the only citations are from economic and social theorists and there is no hard data to back up her point and credible arguments against her theory are not evaluated and addressed.
Speaking of erasure, she has an entire chapter reflecting on the erasure of Dolores Hayes in the text of Lolita and how society often silences victims of abuse, but does not include the thoughts and opinions of the victims on the questions she purports to be interested in asking. Many victims of abusive celebrities are still alive and probably have feelings and opinions on the existence of the art. She seems to only bring up these opinions when they benefit her argument, such as with the woman who was raped by Roman Polanksi as a teen. Rowan Farrow, a victim of Woody Allen's parental abuse, did in fact call for a boycott of Allen's work when he exposed his father's misdeeds. Dederer could frame this in the context of victim centered justice, where the feelings and desires of the victims are considered above what our traditional pathways of justice are, but then that would require that Dederer be interested in the current evolving discourse around the topic that she is writing about. The things highlighted most in Dederer's text continue to be from those who are not involved in the despicable acts that she is trying to judge.
However, as mentioned above, Claire Dederer seems ultimately disinterred in actually evaluating a lot of the deeper questions around these phenomena and I think this is for two reasons. Part of this is her personal desire to humanize the category that she identifies with - monster - and the other is because she seems to believe that people are fundamentally interested in this question for some sort of desire to be "good" and promote their morality and separate themselves from those they call monsters. Dederer seems to be interested in evaluating this as a philosophical question and therefore her answer is a philosophical answer about theory and ideas. But real people were and are being hurt by these people. She quotes a woman who experienced sexual abuse's changing relationship with Miles Davis, but not those who experienced sexual abuse by prominent artists. Everything is one level removed. Were none of Danny Masterson's victim's available for comment? Could you not find anyone actually working on enacting alternate means of justice willing to be interviewed?
This is where the sense of cynicism comes from. The system is corrupt and this thing that we think can do something actually won't do anything and instead of spending time evaluating alternative systems or looking at work people are doing to dismantle it or listening to the people who are actively being harmed, she says we should just stop worrying about it and just watch/read/listen to the things by bad people. Which makes sense if you think, like she states, that people are fundamentally interested in this for some sort of virtue signaling. What she fundamentally fails to grasp is that these strategies and conflicts exist because people want to do better, people want to fix injustice. It's not just about convincing yourself and others that you are not a monster but understanding the practical effects of what is happening to people and trying to create a better world. "Voting with your dollar" is the only avenue that some people have been exposed to to make a difference and if you truly feel like we should throw that strategy in the trash, the most practical thing you can do is expose readers to things they can do instead.
Two stars for the very good chapter on Lolita and the banality of evil and for giving Wrock the respect it deserves.
1. It feels fundamentally dishonest
I think what I find frustrating is that this book feels to me like a dishonest attempt to address the subject this book claims to be about. The question the author is actually interested in asking is "Am I a Monster?" and "What do we do with the people we love who are monsters?" which I do not think is about art or celebrities. She gives some lip service to evaluating parasocial natures of relationships but does not seem interested in actually examining that in-depth or even really acknowledging the author's own conception of art or genius that is in and of itself inherently parasocial. Which is weird because she is constantly reminding the reader of her own subjectivity, which like I get it I've read Derrida too, but I feel like if she were truly leaning into her own subjectivity she would admit that part of her motive for even evaluating this question is to reaffirm her own humanity for the unnamed bad things she did while an alcoholic and reckon with the ability to still love people who have harmed us.
Instead the book neither really evaluates the question of good art by bad people nor how we conceive of or enact justice or forgiveness. I don't know Claire Dederer and this might be a mean thing to say, but from my outsider perspective it feels like Dederer is not actually interested in answering or investigating these questions at all and in fact the ending is just like "I guess we love people who hurt us oh well" which almost seems like what someone who does not want to reckon with their own monstrousness would say.
2. It feels out of touch both in the culture and in the discourse around this subject
Listening to this book, mostly the end but also at certain points throughout, was a less uncomfortable version of watching that scene in Tár where Cate Blanchett continuously bullies a non-binary Julliard student of color for deciding to opt out of performing and promoting the music of people who would've had no respect for them as brown person and for their non-patriarchal gender identity. They want their respect for the artist to be met with an artist's respect for their inherent humanity. Tár is threatened by this both because she gained and maintains her power in the industry through her complicity in upholding these oppressive power structures despite her oppression under these same structures and therefore does not meet this requirement and because she has deep emotional "art love" (Dederer's phrase) for these "important" "genius" composers. Like Tár, it does not feel like Dederer is interested in exploring what happens if we decide to open our heart to "art love" for people who are (to our knowledge) not exploiting the power they have been given in society. If we, like the Julliard student, want to opt out of this system how do we find the people to replace the monsters? How do we help them exist in a fundamentally exploitative system? Can funding art and creators through platforms like Patreon disrupt these exploitative systems or does it reproduce them differently? Are so many celebrities monstrous because monstrous people are drawn to power and acclaim or because the system that they are in encourages or even creates monstrous behavior? Dederer might not be interested in these questions but many people are interested in these questions and are evaluating them. This is where the discourse is going, not "is it ok to like David Bowie?"
Furthermore her examples of monstrous people just seem stale and bordering on irrelevance. My children might never see a Woody Allen movie, not because I will refuse to show it to them and not because he doesn't have great films that can't still hold meaning outside of his philandry and pedophilia, but because his works are becoming culturally irrelevant. Who we are as a society is changing and I would not be surprised if some of my favorite Allen films like Crimes and Misdemeanors, Radio Days, and Scoop do not resonant with my future Gen Alpha children because what we consider important as a society and the questions we think are interesting are changing. I never liked Annie Hall not because it isn't a "good" film, but because who Annie Hall is and what she represents changed between its release and when I saw the film in my twenties. In our post manic-pixie dream girl world I'm not charmed by Annie Hall and in a world where we are unlearning and unpacking our fetishization of relationships with age gaps I am in no way invested in her relationship with Allen (fyi I saw this film before I knew anything of Allen's personal life). The magic of Annie Hall (except that Christopher Walken scene, which still slaps) rings as false and unbelievable as the Orientalist magician from Oedipus Wrecks. As a society we are fundamentally questioning the importance of upholding and including the (mostly white male) figures that we uphold as "important" and "genius". We are rewriting the canon and in schools we are starting to evaluate books as "relevant" and "relatable" instead, replacing 1984 with The Hunger Games , The Scarlet Letter with All Boys Aren't Blue , and Cry, the Beloved Country with The Hate U Give . And this is good actually especially since classic or more difficult texts are not eradicated entirely but instead exist alongside contemporary work. Dederer mentions people in passing who are culturally relevant and are still shaping society like Elon Musk and Kanye West but decides to focus on Doris Lessing and Roman Polanski instead? This book almost ages out of its own relevance before it is even published.
She tries to critique the construct of the genius but simultaneously upholds it by attributing the value of the film to the person that we attribute the creative vision to, ignoring other people who contribute to the art. Do I love Psycho because of undeniable asshole Alfred Hitchcock's directing and does it belong to him? Or do I love Alma Reville's keen eye for editing and Anthony Perkins' bewiling performance as Norman Bates and George Milo's evocative set design and Bernard Hermann's chilling, discordant score? Whether Hogwarts Legacy or Space Jam, people are asking how involved a monstrous person needs to be in a project in order to withdraw support and is it inadvertently punishing the other artists involved in the project who were not party to the abuse? By making each chapter about a different monstrous person and attributing the inherent quality of worthiness to their art she simultaneous upholds the construct of genius by saying that it is their something special that makes the art good while erasing the other people who collaborate on and create the art and ignoring questions that are more relevant to the current direction of the discourse.
3. It's argument is cynical and not backed up by facts and lacks praxis
When Dederer finally does make an argument almost 7 hours in for how we should evaluate meaningful art by monstrous people her answer boils down to more or less the structure of capitalism cannot be brought down through capitalist action of withholding capitol and then for the remainder of the 8 hour text returns to her personal anxiety and experiences. She does not list any examples of this not working (and there are many) nor does she collect or present statistics about say the financial effects or lack thereof of cancellation or boycott on celebrities. While there are undoubtedly many examples to support her point, what do we do with the examples that do not fit her point? Kevin Spacey and Roseanne Barr were fired and replaced from their own TV shows and have been mostly out of work and culturally irrelevant since. Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson lost their biggest platform and reach only a fraction of their former audience on Twitter. R. Kelly won his 2008 court case for sexual abuse of a minor WITH VIDEO EVIDENCE but lost his recent cases in no small part because boycotts of his work changed his ability to fund his legal fees. While I agree that "voting with your dollar" cannot be the end all be all of change and that we need to think of other strategies to affect change, we currently live in a capitalist system and I think we should also do this if it can sometimes affect change as shown above. I'm open to Dederer's argument but I won't be convinced by a short chapter where the only citations are from economic and social theorists and there is no hard data to back up her point and credible arguments against her theory are not evaluated and addressed.
Speaking of erasure, she has an entire chapter reflecting on the erasure of Dolores Hayes in the text of Lolita and how society often silences victims of abuse, but does not include the thoughts and opinions of the victims on the questions she purports to be interested in asking. Many victims of abusive celebrities are still alive and probably have feelings and opinions on the existence of the art. She seems to only bring up these opinions when they benefit her argument, such as with the woman who was raped by Roman Polanksi as a teen. Rowan Farrow, a victim of Woody Allen's parental abuse, did in fact call for a boycott of Allen's work when he exposed his father's misdeeds. Dederer could frame this in the context of victim centered justice, where the feelings and desires of the victims are considered above what our traditional pathways of justice are, but then that would require that Dederer be interested in the current evolving discourse around the topic that she is writing about. The things highlighted most in Dederer's text continue to be from those who are not involved in the despicable acts that she is trying to judge.
However, as mentioned above, Claire Dederer seems ultimately disinterred in actually evaluating a lot of the deeper questions around these phenomena and I think this is for two reasons. Part of this is her personal desire to humanize the category that she identifies with - monster - and the other is because she seems to believe that people are fundamentally interested in this question for some sort of desire to be "good" and promote their morality and separate themselves from those they call monsters. Dederer seems to be interested in evaluating this as a philosophical question and therefore her answer is a philosophical answer about theory and ideas. But real people were and are being hurt by these people. She quotes a woman who experienced sexual abuse's changing relationship with Miles Davis, but not those who experienced sexual abuse by prominent artists. Everything is one level removed. Were none of Danny Masterson's victim's available for comment? Could you not find anyone actually working on enacting alternate means of justice willing to be interviewed?
This is where the sense of cynicism comes from. The system is corrupt and this thing that we think can do something actually won't do anything and instead of spending time evaluating alternative systems or looking at work people are doing to dismantle it or listening to the people who are actively being harmed, she says we should just stop worrying about it and just watch/read/listen to the things by bad people. Which makes sense if you think, like she states, that people are fundamentally interested in this for some sort of virtue signaling. What she fundamentally fails to grasp is that these strategies and conflicts exist because people want to do better, people want to fix injustice. It's not just about convincing yourself and others that you are not a monster but understanding the practical effects of what is happening to people and trying to create a better world. "Voting with your dollar" is the only avenue that some people have been exposed to to make a difference and if you truly feel like we should throw that strategy in the trash, the most practical thing you can do is expose readers to things they can do instead.
Two stars for the very good chapter on Lolita and the banality of evil and for giving Wrock the respect it deserves.
May 25, 2023
Claire Dederer discusses in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma if we can separate art from artist/their biography?
What do we do with the art of monstrous men?
For me the answer is always firmly once I find out somebody has abused their position of power to harm others, their work is forever tainted in my mind. The name Woody Allen, for example, makes my skin crawl. I watched a documentary where Dylan and Mia Farrow spoke out about him and it actually broke my heart, whilst also admiring their courage and strength to speak out so candidly and publicly. No matter how “genius” some of his movies are considered to be, I personally won’t be jumping to put them on anytime soon.
This is a heated debate, especially when we find out less than favourable things about somebody whose work we grew up admiring or who shaped us as people. Because art has the power to do this.
Roman Polanski, Michael Jackson, Picasso and Hemingway are some of the people named here. Roman Polanski was director of the iconic horror movie Rosemary’s Baby which had long been a favourite of mine and other iconic movies, he lost his pregnant wife Sharon Tate in the Manson murders. He was also complicit of assaulting a girl in Jack Nicholson’s house when she was only 13 years old 🤬🤮
Many of us grew up hearing Michael Jackson songs often, they could be considered as part of the soundtrack to our lives, and the debate of if he is innocent or not has carried on long after his death.
Picasso’s artwork is legendary status, there is a whole other book written surrounding him and this subject. The way he treated women and relationships was despicable.
Hemingway I would consider to be one of the the greats of classic literature with his earlier works, not so much the later stuff. But no matter how much you love a piece of their work, of course it doesn’t excuse their behaviour. A lot to be discussed here. There are two names I could bring up right now who work in television currently where it’s an open secret amongst the public what they have done, with concrete proof by victims, and yet they have kept their careers firmly afloat. As I finish this book and review - the net is slowly closing in on one of them actually. Weirdly enough, he just lost his main job as of 20/05/2023! So hopefully this is the beginning of the end. Time’s up. Your actions have consequences, especially if it ruins people’s lives.
Where is the line here when excluding pieces of art/media/work for people? That’s up to the individual to decide if they can separate it mentally from the creator’s views or actions.
This book makes the reader question their own ethics and moralities as the writer questions her own responses and behaviours to a delicate subject matter.
What also makes female artists monstrous?
The writing is sharp, thoughtful, compassionate, and morally-wise here.
This books provides an insight into the human psyche, the human condition - regardless of gender identity.
”What do we do with the art of monstrous men? This question is there merest gnat, buzzing around the monolith that is the biggest question; what do we do about the monstrous people we love?”
TW:// some details of SA/CSA cases
What do we do with the art of monstrous men?
For me the answer is always firmly once I find out somebody has abused their position of power to harm others, their work is forever tainted in my mind. The name Woody Allen, for example, makes my skin crawl. I watched a documentary where Dylan and Mia Farrow spoke out about him and it actually broke my heart, whilst also admiring their courage and strength to speak out so candidly and publicly. No matter how “genius” some of his movies are considered to be, I personally won’t be jumping to put them on anytime soon.
This is a heated debate, especially when we find out less than favourable things about somebody whose work we grew up admiring or who shaped us as people. Because art has the power to do this.
Roman Polanski, Michael Jackson, Picasso and Hemingway are some of the people named here. Roman Polanski was director of the iconic horror movie Rosemary’s Baby which had long been a favourite of mine and other iconic movies, he lost his pregnant wife Sharon Tate in the Manson murders. He was also complicit of assaulting a girl in Jack Nicholson’s house when she was only 13 years old 🤬🤮
Many of us grew up hearing Michael Jackson songs often, they could be considered as part of the soundtrack to our lives, and the debate of if he is innocent or not has carried on long after his death.
Picasso’s artwork is legendary status, there is a whole other book written surrounding him and this subject. The way he treated women and relationships was despicable.
Hemingway I would consider to be one of the the greats of classic literature with his earlier works, not so much the later stuff. But no matter how much you love a piece of their work, of course it doesn’t excuse their behaviour. A lot to be discussed here. There are two names I could bring up right now who work in television currently where it’s an open secret amongst the public what they have done, with concrete proof by victims, and yet they have kept their careers firmly afloat. As I finish this book and review - the net is slowly closing in on one of them actually. Weirdly enough, he just lost his main job as of 20/05/2023! So hopefully this is the beginning of the end. Time’s up. Your actions have consequences, especially if it ruins people’s lives.
Where is the line here when excluding pieces of art/media/work for people? That’s up to the individual to decide if they can separate it mentally from the creator’s views or actions.
This book makes the reader question their own ethics and moralities as the writer questions her own responses and behaviours to a delicate subject matter.
What also makes female artists monstrous?
The writing is sharp, thoughtful, compassionate, and morally-wise here.
This books provides an insight into the human psyche, the human condition - regardless of gender identity.
”What do we do with the art of monstrous men? This question is there merest gnat, buzzing around the monolith that is the biggest question; what do we do about the monstrous people we love?”
TW:// some details of SA/CSA cases
May 7, 2023
I should have known I wouldn't get what I wanted from a memoirist, but I was eager to read anything on this topic! I'd much prefer a book from a psychologist or sociologist who can share further insight into human nature and culture, or a writer who researched and summarized great perspectives already out there in the era of #metoo. This book talks in circles without going in-depth or covering the many facets and intersections of art, fame, ambition, narcissism, and abuse.
April 30, 2024
There’s moments of reading this where I’m screaming “yes, yes yes. finally someone is saying this,” and then about 3 pages later I am deciding if the book is even worth finishing. It was that back and forth for the entire read, astoundingly abrasive but yet compelling. People will love it. People will hate it. And all people will be correct.
May 11, 2023
An awful lot of navel gazing for a book that's classified as criticism and not a memoir. Like other readers I went into this expecting something else entirely. More criticism, more research, more fact-checking (FFS, are there not fact checkers anymore? There were so many patently false bits of biographical information about the 'monsters' covered in the book!) and fewer irrelevant tangents about the writer's personal life. The book deal stemmed from a 2017 essay in the Paris Review and felt padded and poorly assembled. It should have remained in article form and if you're interested, you'd be better off just reading that instead (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...). Monsters doesn't offer much that wasn't already outlined in that article from six years ago.
Two direct quotes from the book that perfectly sum up how I felt after finishing it:
"The thing was, I couldn't find a truly operational theory in the book's pages."
"I all but held the book upside down and shook out its pages, but no helpful strategies fell out of it."
Me too, Claire.
Two direct quotes from the book that perfectly sum up how I felt after finishing it:
"The thing was, I couldn't find a truly operational theory in the book's pages."
"I all but held the book upside down and shook out its pages, but no helpful strategies fell out of it."
Me too, Claire.
June 20, 2023
Sometimes an essay should stay an essay
June 23, 2023
READING VLOG
Major thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts:
Perhaps the most important book to come out of our cancel-culture society.
Much like Dederer, Woody Allen's work had created quite an impression on my early life. This was before I could get a strong internet connection. This was still during a time I would visit the library for resources, to rent VHS tapes of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘪𝘳𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘨𝘦 to explore my sexuality at the age of eight, or even Bergman's 𝘚𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘴 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘢 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘨𝘦 (yes, I was absolutely this awfully precocious child--believe me, I was not fun at the birthday parties at Chuck-E-Cheese).
When the news of Soon-Yi and Mia Farrow finally came to my attention (by way of Moses Farrow's blogspot letter), I was shocked. Disgusted. In denial. A few years later, Ronan bagged Weinstein and the world shifted. Left and right, people cancelled. One awful thing and you were done. And then it became hard to talk about the monsters you've loved.
Dederer explores this. Comes to the idea of a stain. Does a single stain ruin a silk dress? So much so that the stain becomes the dress? Perhaps for some, but for others, it's just a stain. It'll wash out. It can be taken to the cleaners. It can be fixed. But the stain should not totally ruin the dress.
Somewhere in the middle of the book, Dederer goes on to target monstrous women, shaming those that abandon their children. This comes off as round-about and personal as we finally understand why Dederer took this path.
I mean, I was surprised with the Wagner mention that she didn't mention Leni Riefenstahl. Especially when she glossed over the Allen-apologists for how 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘢𝘯 must be looked at for its aesthetics. Riefenstahl was the very queen of aesthetics, a female champion of her time, while also being a nazi.
But the book becomes personal for her when it comes to her children where it somewhat slips into memoir. This was a choice that took too long to get to, and a choice I don't think particularly fit into the book completely well (and I find this particularly amusing given how Dederer critiques memoirs and explicitly tells us what a memoir is and should be), but, without it, I wouldn't have known about Joni Mitchell or how to review the sixties and feminist violence through Plath and Solanas. Thankfully, the last few chapters tie the pretty bow on how we should go about monstrous artists with Cleage's 𝘔𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘵 𝘔𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘴.
Love.
Isn't that the be-all end-all answer to all the pains and glories of the world?
But it's true. It's love, emotional confidence, that urges us to find joy, pleasure, and a stance in the way we say, "𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨.."
Face it. The heart wants what it wants. So, when Dederer includes personal history in the text, I realize why. Because it's personal. The people we love, the artists who speak to us from some higher point beyond moral authority and knowledge, move us, whether or not we can explain it, all out of love.
Here, Dederer writes the anti-cancel culture book. Allows us not to feel guilty about our pleasures and allows room for the gray space.
The last time I watched 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘢𝘯 was when I was 19. I came back to it after so many years, having watched 𝘈𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯 𝘝. 𝘍𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸 on HBO, having avoided 𝘈𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘕𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 by Allen himself (because good GOD the quotes of misogyny I previewed, I could not muster the time or courage to go through with it). But I watched it again just after finishing Dederer's book. My stomach churned at the beginning lines. Her again. 17. Hemingway. Woody, 42. The nonchalance of it all.
But as soon as the film slipped into the beauty of New York in black and white, even the way Hemingway lounged in Woody's apartment under a bell of light with a backdrop of books behind her, I could not help but let the aesthetics speak. And they show up again and again. The planetarium. The carriage ride. The opening. God, the opening.
Love is complicated. And so are people. Dederer isn't saying that we should write off a work of art simply because the person is bad, but that we can be smart about it. Talk about it. Create a conversation that knows the difference between ethical thoughts and moral feelings.
Major thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts:
Perhaps the most important book to come out of our cancel-culture society.
Much like Dederer, Woody Allen's work had created quite an impression on my early life. This was before I could get a strong internet connection. This was still during a time I would visit the library for resources, to rent VHS tapes of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘪𝘳𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘨𝘦 to explore my sexuality at the age of eight, or even Bergman's 𝘚𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘴 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘢 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘨𝘦 (yes, I was absolutely this awfully precocious child--believe me, I was not fun at the birthday parties at Chuck-E-Cheese).
When the news of Soon-Yi and Mia Farrow finally came to my attention (by way of Moses Farrow's blogspot letter), I was shocked. Disgusted. In denial. A few years later, Ronan bagged Weinstein and the world shifted. Left and right, people cancelled. One awful thing and you were done. And then it became hard to talk about the monsters you've loved.
Dederer explores this. Comes to the idea of a stain. Does a single stain ruin a silk dress? So much so that the stain becomes the dress? Perhaps for some, but for others, it's just a stain. It'll wash out. It can be taken to the cleaners. It can be fixed. But the stain should not totally ruin the dress.
Somewhere in the middle of the book, Dederer goes on to target monstrous women, shaming those that abandon their children. This comes off as round-about and personal as we finally understand why Dederer took this path.
I mean, I was surprised with the Wagner mention that she didn't mention Leni Riefenstahl. Especially when she glossed over the Allen-apologists for how 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘢𝘯 must be looked at for its aesthetics. Riefenstahl was the very queen of aesthetics, a female champion of her time, while also being a nazi.
But the book becomes personal for her when it comes to her children where it somewhat slips into memoir. This was a choice that took too long to get to, and a choice I don't think particularly fit into the book completely well (and I find this particularly amusing given how Dederer critiques memoirs and explicitly tells us what a memoir is and should be), but, without it, I wouldn't have known about Joni Mitchell or how to review the sixties and feminist violence through Plath and Solanas. Thankfully, the last few chapters tie the pretty bow on how we should go about monstrous artists with Cleage's 𝘔𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘵 𝘔𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘴.
Love.
Isn't that the be-all end-all answer to all the pains and glories of the world?
But it's true. It's love, emotional confidence, that urges us to find joy, pleasure, and a stance in the way we say, "𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨.."
Face it. The heart wants what it wants. So, when Dederer includes personal history in the text, I realize why. Because it's personal. The people we love, the artists who speak to us from some higher point beyond moral authority and knowledge, move us, whether or not we can explain it, all out of love.
Here, Dederer writes the anti-cancel culture book. Allows us not to feel guilty about our pleasures and allows room for the gray space.
The last time I watched 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘢𝘯 was when I was 19. I came back to it after so many years, having watched 𝘈𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯 𝘝. 𝘍𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸 on HBO, having avoided 𝘈𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘕𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 by Allen himself (because good GOD the quotes of misogyny I previewed, I could not muster the time or courage to go through with it). But I watched it again just after finishing Dederer's book. My stomach churned at the beginning lines. Her again. 17. Hemingway. Woody, 42. The nonchalance of it all.
But as soon as the film slipped into the beauty of New York in black and white, even the way Hemingway lounged in Woody's apartment under a bell of light with a backdrop of books behind her, I could not help but let the aesthetics speak. And they show up again and again. The planetarium. The carriage ride. The opening. God, the opening.
Love is complicated. And so are people. Dederer isn't saying that we should write off a work of art simply because the person is bad, but that we can be smart about it. Talk about it. Create a conversation that knows the difference between ethical thoughts and moral feelings.
September 30, 2023
A masterpiece. One of the most insightful explorations of "feelings" and how the soul responds to work that, alas, has been created by monsters. Claire Dederer is not merely super smart, she can be very, very funny. Once you read this extraordinary book, you will be fascinated by your deeply personal responses to the work of Woody Allen, Miles Davis, Doris Lessing, and so many others.
Read
February 27, 2023Dederer provides a fascinating new way of looking at how the work and lives of problematic artists are bound together. She poses so many topical questions, plays with so many pertinent ideas, that I'm still thinking about this book long after I finished.
April 29, 2024
This deeply personal book explores the ethics of consuming art by problematic creators, from Picasso to Roman Polanski. The prose of this book is lovely in itself, and it’s definitely a highly literary work of criticism. I particularly enjoyed the exploration of gender dynamics, and how famous men have historically gotten to be troubled, irresponsible geniuses while women are still expected to be responsible and nurturing. I also liked her nuanced take on Woody Allen as someone who is both a film-lover and a feminist.
I like that the author’s final conclusion is open-ended enough to allow readers to make their own decisions about their media consumption. I would have liked for her to explore certain figures a little more deeply (like, WTF do we do about J.K. Rowling), but overall I enjoyed this a lot. It was cerebral without feeling too academic or alienating.
I like that the author’s final conclusion is open-ended enough to allow readers to make their own decisions about their media consumption. I would have liked for her to explore certain figures a little more deeply (like, WTF do we do about J.K. Rowling), but overall I enjoyed this a lot. It was cerebral without feeling too academic or alienating.
July 17, 2024
I've been struggling to put into words my feelings about the art of monstrous men. Luckily, Claire Dederer is here to offer one possible path out of my moral quagmire. Sometimes I love a piece of work so much that I struggle to represent the experience in any way that is reflective of the book's content. It feels that way with Monsters, but I do have some quick hit feelings:
-The audiobook is terrific and I couldn't imagine experiencing the book for the first time in any other format.
-The book is erudite without being pretentious or preachy.
-Some of the passages about parenthood, typical motherhood in particular, pierced me through to my core in recognition.
Monsters is, quite possibly, my favourite book of the year so far. I can’t recommend it highly enough!
-The audiobook is terrific and I couldn't imagine experiencing the book for the first time in any other format.
-The book is erudite without being pretentious or preachy.
-Some of the passages about parenthood, typical motherhood in particular, pierced me through to my core in recognition.
Monsters is, quite possibly, my favourite book of the year so far. I can’t recommend it highly enough!
July 15, 2023
What’s a person to do if you love the art, music, or book but don’t approve of the behavior of the artist, musician, or author? And don’t get me started on asking the same question about politicians, preachers, and theologians. These are questions I’ve pondered myself, so when I came across this book that explores the morality of cancel culture I decided to see what the author had to say.
It’s not cancel culture according to the author but rather an era when information is widely available, and it's now more difficult to ignore certain unpleasant facts. Also, the combination of #MeToo snd Hollywood access tapes placed this issue on steroids.
The author uses the memoir format to trace her own experience feeling betrayed by artists. At one time she enjoyed Woody Allen’s movies, but was relieved to learn of a little free library filled with Woody Allen stuff so she had access to research materials for writing this book without needing to pay for them.
The book explores the suggestion that being a monster is part of being a creative genius. In other words, if they were forced to behave properly they would no longer be creative. Pablo Picasso is discussed as a supposed example of such an artist. The author sarcastically notes (spoiler alert) this type of genius does not include women per prevailing social standards.
Next the author explores the suggestion that the monster was simply a man of his time—a time of differing ethical expectations. The example of Richard Wagner is explored in this context. The author sites a Jewish fan of Wagnerian opera who believed if he had the opportunity to travel back in time to talk to Richard Wagner he could dissuade him from writing his infamous essay supporting antisemitic views. The author shows no mercy for Wagner by sighting evidence that numerous individuals had tried to convince him to be silent about such views, and he rejected such entreaties.
After discussing numerous monstrous examples this book comes to a chapter titled "Am I a Monster?" in which the author admits that her writing career on certain occasions hindered her role as a mother of two sons. In this chapter I didn't take such a confession too seriously because it sounded much the same as what any working mother might say. But then I as reader moved into later chapters where the author confesses to being an alcoholic for many years while her sons were growing up and that this hindered the quality of mothering.
Thus near the end of the book the author stopped being a fellow judge with me as a reader viewing others, and instead changed into an author confessing her own monster-hood. Suddenly the question of whether monsters deserve forgiveness became intimate and personal. (It's interesting to note that the public is more forgiving of alcoholic fathers than they are of alcoholic mothers.)
The following excerpt from the end of the book addresses the question of "what do we do about the terrible people we love? That question comes with another question nestled inside it: how awful can we be, before people stop loving us?"
https://www.chicagotribune.com/people...
It’s not cancel culture according to the author but rather an era when information is widely available, and it's now more difficult to ignore certain unpleasant facts. Also, the combination of #MeToo snd Hollywood access tapes placed this issue on steroids.
The author uses the memoir format to trace her own experience feeling betrayed by artists. At one time she enjoyed Woody Allen’s movies, but was relieved to learn of a little free library filled with Woody Allen stuff so she had access to research materials for writing this book without needing to pay for them.
The book explores the suggestion that being a monster is part of being a creative genius. In other words, if they were forced to behave properly they would no longer be creative. Pablo Picasso is discussed as a supposed example of such an artist. The author sarcastically notes (spoiler alert) this type of genius does not include women per prevailing social standards.
Next the author explores the suggestion that the monster was simply a man of his time—a time of differing ethical expectations. The example of Richard Wagner is explored in this context. The author sites a Jewish fan of Wagnerian opera who believed if he had the opportunity to travel back in time to talk to Richard Wagner he could dissuade him from writing his infamous essay supporting antisemitic views. The author shows no mercy for Wagner by sighting evidence that numerous individuals had tried to convince him to be silent about such views, and he rejected such entreaties.
After discussing numerous monstrous examples this book comes to a chapter titled "Am I a Monster?" in which the author admits that her writing career on certain occasions hindered her role as a mother of two sons. In this chapter I didn't take such a confession too seriously because it sounded much the same as what any working mother might say. But then I as reader moved into later chapters where the author confesses to being an alcoholic for many years while her sons were growing up and that this hindered the quality of mothering.
Thus near the end of the book the author stopped being a fellow judge with me as a reader viewing others, and instead changed into an author confessing her own monster-hood. Suddenly the question of whether monsters deserve forgiveness became intimate and personal. (It's interesting to note that the public is more forgiving of alcoholic fathers than they are of alcoholic mothers.)
The following excerpt from the end of the book addresses the question of "what do we do about the terrible people we love? That question comes with another question nestled inside it: how awful can we be, before people stop loving us?"
... Love is not reliant on judgement, but on a decision to set judgment aside. Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don't love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason.The following is a link to a Chicago Tribune article about Claire Dederer on book tour with this book:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/people...
March 30, 2023
I originally thought I was going to devour this in one sitting, but boy oh boy was I wrong. After the first couple of chapters I realised that I wanted to take my time with this one. I wanted to sit and think about the chapter I had just read, dissect it and let it sit in my thoughts.
This book covers the monstrous behaviours of Polanski, Hemingway, Michael Jackson, JK Rowling, Elvis, Motley Crue, honestly the list of people that featured in this book made my heart heavy, because it was in no way a comprehensive list, despite the amount of people getting a mention, and a lot of the musicians were people I admired, and now having looked into some of the claims in this book I don’t know whether or not I will be able to listen to them.
I’ve long often struggled, especially with musicians, over whether I can separate the artist from their art. I wanted to desperately sing along to some of my favourite Lost Prophet songs over the last 10 years but every time I tried I felt icky, icky because of what the frontman went to prison for.
This book highlights the struggle of loving an artist’s work, but not liking the artist, and should we therefore continue to support those artists even though we know what they have done. And if we do choose to continue to support them, how might that affect other people around us and the victims of that particular trauma.
If you only pick up one non fiction book this year, please let it be this one.
Thank you to Sceptre for sending me a proof of this magnificent book.
This book covers the monstrous behaviours of Polanski, Hemingway, Michael Jackson, JK Rowling, Elvis, Motley Crue, honestly the list of people that featured in this book made my heart heavy, because it was in no way a comprehensive list, despite the amount of people getting a mention, and a lot of the musicians were people I admired, and now having looked into some of the claims in this book I don’t know whether or not I will be able to listen to them.
I’ve long often struggled, especially with musicians, over whether I can separate the artist from their art. I wanted to desperately sing along to some of my favourite Lost Prophet songs over the last 10 years but every time I tried I felt icky, icky because of what the frontman went to prison for.
This book highlights the struggle of loving an artist’s work, but not liking the artist, and should we therefore continue to support those artists even though we know what they have done. And if we do choose to continue to support them, how might that affect other people around us and the victims of that particular trauma.
If you only pick up one non fiction book this year, please let it be this one.
Thank you to Sceptre for sending me a proof of this magnificent book.
June 2, 2023
Monsters is a lot of things--smart, incisive, insightful, absorbing--but more than anything, it is such an impressively thoughtful book in so many ways.
To begin, Monsters is a thoughtful book because it understands that monstrousness is contingent. What makes a monster? To what extent does an artist's monstrousness bleed into--or, in Dederer's words, "stain"--their work? What do we do when the artist whose work we love turns out to be, in fact, a monster? These are questions of dissonance and ambivalence: the dissonance of the great art of the monstrous artist, the ambivalence of engaging with the art despite its artist's monstrousness. They are contingent questions because, as Dederer puts it, "Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art." This point of intersection is the site of negotiation; it is where this book takes place.
So, Monsters doesn't take for granted; it centers the contingent nature of these questions, not questioning for the sake of questioning (everything is relative! case closed!), but instead making room for that contingency of all contingencies, that always various thing: subjectivity. Anything can happen in that meeting place of the biography of the artist and the biography of the audience, and Dederer not only recognizes this, but makes it the foundation of her book. Her writing has an elasticity that is precisely suited to the topic at hand; it is what allows her to accommodate different contexts, viewpoints, ideas. Put another way, she approaches her topic with nuance and sensitivity. Monstrousness is not a monolith, and Dederer's book shows us how: there are different kinds of monsters, different kinds of responses to monstrousness, different standards for monstrousness. Personally, my favourite chapters were "The Genius," about how the genius of the male artist exerts a kind of force that excuses and countenances all kinds of monstrousness; "The Critic," about who responds to, and in what way, to art and to monsters; and "The Beloveds," which is the final chapter and which I won't say anything about because I don't want to spoil it (I've never thought of non-fiction as "spoilable," but Monsters is just that good).
Finally, Monsters is a thoughtful book because Dederer is a thoughtful writer; that is, it's a thoughtful book because its author so firmly roots herself in her own writing. Perhaps this goes without saying, but in a book like this it needs to be said, and Dederer says it aptly, clearly, insightfully, unwaveringly. It's a very intertextual book, in conversation with works by artists, novelists, poets, musicians, moviemakers; but it is also a book that's in conversation with itself, self-aware, its ideas not set down so much as they are continually negotiated. An example of this that especially struck me is the way that Dederer is always distinctly alive to the slipperiness of speaking to a reader versus speaking for them: "But hold up a minute: who is this 'we' that's always turning up in critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority." And more than just enriching her ideas, Dederer's personal voice is just so damn enjoyable to read. Her writing takes seriously the questions it poses, but it also isn't afraid to be funny or wry. Even more, I listened to Monsters on audio and Dederer's excellent narration of her own book just made me love it that much more.
Monsters is, to put it simply, a book that rang true to me: in its efforts to contend with contentious questions, in its frank recognition of the open-endedness of those questions, in its willingness to ask them anyway.
To begin, Monsters is a thoughtful book because it understands that monstrousness is contingent. What makes a monster? To what extent does an artist's monstrousness bleed into--or, in Dederer's words, "stain"--their work? What do we do when the artist whose work we love turns out to be, in fact, a monster? These are questions of dissonance and ambivalence: the dissonance of the great art of the monstrous artist, the ambivalence of engaging with the art despite its artist's monstrousness. They are contingent questions because, as Dederer puts it, "Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art." This point of intersection is the site of negotiation; it is where this book takes place.
"The tainting of the work is less a question of philosophical decision-making than it is a question of pragmatism, or plain reality. That's why the stain makes such a powerful metaphor: its suddenness, its permanence, and above all its inexorable realness. The stain is simply something that happens. The stain is not a choice. The stain is not a decision we make.
Indelibility is not voluntary.
When someone says we ought to separate the art from the artist, they're saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that's not how stains work.
We watch the glass fall to the floor; we don't get to decide whether the wine will spread across the carpet.
The stain begins with an act, a moment in time, but then it travels from that moment, like a tea bag steeping in water, coloring the entire life."
So, Monsters doesn't take for granted; it centers the contingent nature of these questions, not questioning for the sake of questioning (everything is relative! case closed!), but instead making room for that contingency of all contingencies, that always various thing: subjectivity. Anything can happen in that meeting place of the biography of the artist and the biography of the audience, and Dederer not only recognizes this, but makes it the foundation of her book. Her writing has an elasticity that is precisely suited to the topic at hand; it is what allows her to accommodate different contexts, viewpoints, ideas. Put another way, she approaches her topic with nuance and sensitivity. Monstrousness is not a monolith, and Dederer's book shows us how: there are different kinds of monsters, different kinds of responses to monstrousness, different standards for monstrousness. Personally, my favourite chapters were "The Genius," about how the genius of the male artist exerts a kind of force that excuses and countenances all kinds of monstrousness; "The Critic," about who responds to, and in what way, to art and to monsters; and "The Beloveds," which is the final chapter and which I won't say anything about because I don't want to spoil it (I've never thought of non-fiction as "spoilable," but Monsters is just that good).
Finally, Monsters is a thoughtful book because Dederer is a thoughtful writer; that is, it's a thoughtful book because its author so firmly roots herself in her own writing. Perhaps this goes without saying, but in a book like this it needs to be said, and Dederer says it aptly, clearly, insightfully, unwaveringly. It's a very intertextual book, in conversation with works by artists, novelists, poets, musicians, moviemakers; but it is also a book that's in conversation with itself, self-aware, its ideas not set down so much as they are continually negotiated. An example of this that especially struck me is the way that Dederer is always distinctly alive to the slipperiness of speaking to a reader versus speaking for them: "But hold up a minute: who is this 'we' that's always turning up in critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority." And more than just enriching her ideas, Dederer's personal voice is just so damn enjoyable to read. Her writing takes seriously the questions it poses, but it also isn't afraid to be funny or wry. Even more, I listened to Monsters on audio and Dederer's excellent narration of her own book just made me love it that much more.
Monsters is, to put it simply, a book that rang true to me: in its efforts to contend with contentious questions, in its frank recognition of the open-endedness of those questions, in its willingness to ask them anyway.
May 17, 2023
I have seen Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma recommended a couple of times recently. I loved the concept of this book, and the author makes some good points, but I just couldn't finish it as I couldn't stand the author. I found her incredibly pretentious and self-absorbed (which she shares with many of the 'monsters' in the book) and although that seems to be part of her point, I just didn't appreciate it. I stopped an hour from the end as I really didn't care what else she had to say. I'm clearly not the target audience for this.
January 29, 2024
I liked her essays on Nabokov and “abandoning mothers,” but especially the overall tone which—surprisingly, given the subject matter—is not that of someone who claims the moral high ground! This might leave readers wanting more—more bite, more monstrous behaviours—but it’s meant to make you think about your own views on controversial figures and not have the final word…which in the Twitter era is rare.
December 16, 2023
An incredible work of analysis and cultural criticism with significant insight into the question of what to do with the art of monstrous people and related topics.
January 18, 2024
"Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art."
Review/personal reflections on the book’s subject matter. Feel free to disagree with me, this is an entirely personal perspective on a thorny issue.
This book had been on my radar for a while, because I find the topic it explores truly fascinating, but I wasn’t in any particular rush to read it. Then it happened: a musician whose work had meant so much to me for almost twenty years was accused of sexual misconduct, first by one woman, then by a dozen, his band broke up, their label folded and a huge stack of records I have cherished and found strength and comfort in now looks… weird and tainted because that man used a very progressive and inclusive message and persona to conceal some terrible actions. This is not a new phenomenon; I had simply felt lucky it had never hit so close to home before, and it was heartbreaking to see the veneer peeling off.
“Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma” is all about the increasingly frequent reckoning we encounter, of not really knowing what to do with a work of art when its creator’s deeds show them to be, well, monsters. Separating art from artist is an age-old debate, and the #metoo movement has certainly brought it back into our collective consciousness, as victims now find their voices backed by a community and support system they may not have had access to before.
Can we take art on its own terms, and truly ignore that it was created by a person whose behavior was inappropriate at best and criminal at worst? As mentioned before, I hadn’t experienced that question with works that were very close to my heart until this year. I was not sufficiently attached to any one specific work of art made by a monstrous person to feel that strongly about it. And right now, frankly, I’m still not sure how to feel about my pile of records.
Dederer is not trying to find a definitive answer, but more to get people to consider this issue as personal, complex, multifaceted and potentially unsolvable. I do like the main image she uses, of a stain on the work done by terrible people. If we have a shirt with a stain, will we keep it, still wear it in public, will it be relegated to the clothes we wear to clean up and paint, or will we consider it ruined and throw it out? I think it’s a good analogy.
My pile of records is now stained. Is the stain set all the way into the vinyl grooves to the point where they can’t be listened to? I honestly don’t know, because the inspiration and comfort they gave me was real, even if one of the men involved in making them was lying about who he was and what he believed in. Art is powerful like that, which is why these situations are so tricky to figure out and so divisive. Dederer uses “Annie Hall” as an example to discuss the fact that Woody Allen is not the only one who worked on this movie: do we throw Diane Keaton’s performance in the trash along with all of Allen’s movies? It’s not that simple – and I think of the other three musicians who worked tirelessly on my pile of stained records, the way their own trust was betrayed by a bandmate, the shock, guilt and horrible feelings they must be experiencing. Do I throw their labor, their creativity, their genuine love and commitment to their art and fans to the trash? Is it inextricably linked to the deeds committed by their bandmate? Do all the good things that came from their work (the people they inspired to get into music, into activism, into politics) go away? It’s a lot to chew on, and frankly, I have no clue.
Dederer’s floundering and refusal to take a stance clearly annoyed a lot of readers, and I get why, I really do: it is much more simple to just draw a hard line, but I also think that life might be too complicated for that. I think that because our relationship to art is so deep and so personal, untangling our feelings about it requires more introspection than a lot of people are comfortable doing; in the book “Your Favorite Band is Killing Me”, the point is made than when we support an artist, we often see it as taking a moral stand, so if an artist we supported turned out to be a terrible person, we see our continued support of their work as a moral failing on our part, or even an endorsement of their actions – hence the need to learn to pry artist and art apart.
Dederer is also careful to make a difference between an audience member and a fan, which she defines as someone who makes the art part of their identity; the fans tend to have much bigger reaction to transgressing artists than audience members, which makes quite a lot of sense, and absolutely resonates with my personal experience with these situations. Add to that the relatively modern phenomena of parasocial relationships and how fandom is linked to consumer culture, and you have a disaster waiting to happen every time an artist puts a toe out of line.
She also makes a very interesting connection between cancel culture and consumer culture, and ponders if the two are not inextricably linked, which also circles back to the concept of fandom, which is often expressed via consumption of goods. The way personal identity becomes fused with fandoms and with our consumer habits is something we do agonize over, because we feel that we ought to spend our money (which is power in the capitalist society we live in) ethically, on things that reflect our values.
A few people have expressed frustration that Dederer looks at a lot of monstruous men and few monstruous women in this book, but I got the feeling that she explains the double-standard well enough: some behavior will be excused in men and be considered unacceptable in women. I do wonder if more women would act the way those famous, monstruous men did if societal norms would have allowed them to get away with it, but there are different standards between genders, or at least, there have been for a very long time. I was especially struck by the idea that Joni Mitchell is a monster for putting her daughter up for adoption (bad mother!) but there are legions of famous absentee fathers that people still idolize, and that aspect of their personal life is rarely questioned or held against them.
Dederer is a beautiful writer, and while this book can feel at time more like something she wrote for herself, to help herself untangle feelings she doesn’t know “where to put”, I can truly appreciate the obvious talent she is working with. The second half of the book meanders a bit more, and while it is still interesting, it feels less tight and engaging than the first half. Her chapter on Nobokov actually makes me want to re-read "Lolita". I found her chapter on the historical rear-view mirror very interesting, because I often wonder if we do in fact, know better now than people did 30, 60 or 100 years ago; I am glad to see I'm not the only one who isn't so sure about that...
By the end of the book, I was left with a simple and yet infinitely frustrating (and somewhat depressing) conclusion: art is complex and powerful, and we need it to support us, make sense of the world, fill us with wonder, hope and inspiration. But art is made by humans, and humans are, statistically speaking, often total dicks. Which means we will inevitably consume art created by a total dick at some point or another. That's the sad reality, and it is up to the reader/listener/viewer to determine where their personal line in the sand is about this.
"Genius is the name we give our love when we don't want to argue about it, (...) when we don't want to hold our heroes accountable."
The musician I mentioned at the beginning of the review wrote some amazing songs that have shaped the way I think in many ways; he also offered to buy me a drink after a show about 15 years ago, and I now wonder if I would have been one of the women quoted in the Rolling Stone exposé about him if I hadn't been surrounded by male friends when that happened (there is also the equally horrifying possibility that at 25, I might have already been a bit too old for his taste). I may never know what the fuck to do with any of that. I may never have the capacity to enjoy that music again "in spite of everything", and that makes me sad. I am glad he is being sued for his alleged crimes, and I am heart-broken for the people he hurt. But I may never throw out those records.
Fuck.
Review/personal reflections on the book’s subject matter. Feel free to disagree with me, this is an entirely personal perspective on a thorny issue.
This book had been on my radar for a while, because I find the topic it explores truly fascinating, but I wasn’t in any particular rush to read it. Then it happened: a musician whose work had meant so much to me for almost twenty years was accused of sexual misconduct, first by one woman, then by a dozen, his band broke up, their label folded and a huge stack of records I have cherished and found strength and comfort in now looks… weird and tainted because that man used a very progressive and inclusive message and persona to conceal some terrible actions. This is not a new phenomenon; I had simply felt lucky it had never hit so close to home before, and it was heartbreaking to see the veneer peeling off.
“Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma” is all about the increasingly frequent reckoning we encounter, of not really knowing what to do with a work of art when its creator’s deeds show them to be, well, monsters. Separating art from artist is an age-old debate, and the #metoo movement has certainly brought it back into our collective consciousness, as victims now find their voices backed by a community and support system they may not have had access to before.
Can we take art on its own terms, and truly ignore that it was created by a person whose behavior was inappropriate at best and criminal at worst? As mentioned before, I hadn’t experienced that question with works that were very close to my heart until this year. I was not sufficiently attached to any one specific work of art made by a monstrous person to feel that strongly about it. And right now, frankly, I’m still not sure how to feel about my pile of records.
Dederer is not trying to find a definitive answer, but more to get people to consider this issue as personal, complex, multifaceted and potentially unsolvable. I do like the main image she uses, of a stain on the work done by terrible people. If we have a shirt with a stain, will we keep it, still wear it in public, will it be relegated to the clothes we wear to clean up and paint, or will we consider it ruined and throw it out? I think it’s a good analogy.
My pile of records is now stained. Is the stain set all the way into the vinyl grooves to the point where they can’t be listened to? I honestly don’t know, because the inspiration and comfort they gave me was real, even if one of the men involved in making them was lying about who he was and what he believed in. Art is powerful like that, which is why these situations are so tricky to figure out and so divisive. Dederer uses “Annie Hall” as an example to discuss the fact that Woody Allen is not the only one who worked on this movie: do we throw Diane Keaton’s performance in the trash along with all of Allen’s movies? It’s not that simple – and I think of the other three musicians who worked tirelessly on my pile of stained records, the way their own trust was betrayed by a bandmate, the shock, guilt and horrible feelings they must be experiencing. Do I throw their labor, their creativity, their genuine love and commitment to their art and fans to the trash? Is it inextricably linked to the deeds committed by their bandmate? Do all the good things that came from their work (the people they inspired to get into music, into activism, into politics) go away? It’s a lot to chew on, and frankly, I have no clue.
Dederer’s floundering and refusal to take a stance clearly annoyed a lot of readers, and I get why, I really do: it is much more simple to just draw a hard line, but I also think that life might be too complicated for that. I think that because our relationship to art is so deep and so personal, untangling our feelings about it requires more introspection than a lot of people are comfortable doing; in the book “Your Favorite Band is Killing Me”, the point is made than when we support an artist, we often see it as taking a moral stand, so if an artist we supported turned out to be a terrible person, we see our continued support of their work as a moral failing on our part, or even an endorsement of their actions – hence the need to learn to pry artist and art apart.
Dederer is also careful to make a difference between an audience member and a fan, which she defines as someone who makes the art part of their identity; the fans tend to have much bigger reaction to transgressing artists than audience members, which makes quite a lot of sense, and absolutely resonates with my personal experience with these situations. Add to that the relatively modern phenomena of parasocial relationships and how fandom is linked to consumer culture, and you have a disaster waiting to happen every time an artist puts a toe out of line.
She also makes a very interesting connection between cancel culture and consumer culture, and ponders if the two are not inextricably linked, which also circles back to the concept of fandom, which is often expressed via consumption of goods. The way personal identity becomes fused with fandoms and with our consumer habits is something we do agonize over, because we feel that we ought to spend our money (which is power in the capitalist society we live in) ethically, on things that reflect our values.
A few people have expressed frustration that Dederer looks at a lot of monstruous men and few monstruous women in this book, but I got the feeling that she explains the double-standard well enough: some behavior will be excused in men and be considered unacceptable in women. I do wonder if more women would act the way those famous, monstruous men did if societal norms would have allowed them to get away with it, but there are different standards between genders, or at least, there have been for a very long time. I was especially struck by the idea that Joni Mitchell is a monster for putting her daughter up for adoption (bad mother!) but there are legions of famous absentee fathers that people still idolize, and that aspect of their personal life is rarely questioned or held against them.
Dederer is a beautiful writer, and while this book can feel at time more like something she wrote for herself, to help herself untangle feelings she doesn’t know “where to put”, I can truly appreciate the obvious talent she is working with. The second half of the book meanders a bit more, and while it is still interesting, it feels less tight and engaging than the first half. Her chapter on Nobokov actually makes me want to re-read "Lolita". I found her chapter on the historical rear-view mirror very interesting, because I often wonder if we do in fact, know better now than people did 30, 60 or 100 years ago; I am glad to see I'm not the only one who isn't so sure about that...
By the end of the book, I was left with a simple and yet infinitely frustrating (and somewhat depressing) conclusion: art is complex and powerful, and we need it to support us, make sense of the world, fill us with wonder, hope and inspiration. But art is made by humans, and humans are, statistically speaking, often total dicks. Which means we will inevitably consume art created by a total dick at some point or another. That's the sad reality, and it is up to the reader/listener/viewer to determine where their personal line in the sand is about this.
"Genius is the name we give our love when we don't want to argue about it, (...) when we don't want to hold our heroes accountable."
The musician I mentioned at the beginning of the review wrote some amazing songs that have shaped the way I think in many ways; he also offered to buy me a drink after a show about 15 years ago, and I now wonder if I would have been one of the women quoted in the Rolling Stone exposé about him if I hadn't been surrounded by male friends when that happened (there is also the equally horrifying possibility that at 25, I might have already been a bit too old for his taste). I may never know what the fuck to do with any of that. I may never have the capacity to enjoy that music again "in spite of everything", and that makes me sad. I am glad he is being sued for his alleged crimes, and I am heart-broken for the people he hurt. But I may never throw out those records.
Fuck.
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