From the opening chapters on Polanski and Allen, Dederer moves in all sorts of productive directions. Almost immediately she undermines her own title, making a compelling case for the metaphor of “the stain” as a more apt alternative to the rage-filled “monster”. This whole conversation is predicated on a moment and a movement where people say when they were hurt by somebody, when somebody stands up and says, this happens to me. And the way that we deal, what happens after that person says that, is not perfect. But that moment of the person saying that this is wrong is crucial because if we don't listen to people when they say something's wrong, how can we do better?

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. DEDERER: But also it comes to stand in for these, like, eras in your life. You know, you remember when you were a teenager or when you were falling in love with your partner or whatever. There's often music that's really tied to that. So the musical examples tend to be the really heartbreaking examples for a lot of people. My question is, Can we take our criticism and make it a human engagement, both with our own history and with the work?” An] insightful exploration . . . Dederer’s case studies include Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, and Miles Davis, whose work she considers brilliant and important. What’s a fan to do? Dederer offers nuanced answers, challenging the assumption that boycotting is always the best response.” — BooklistMen make up the majority of the figures in Dederer’s pantheon of monstrous artists. “The violence of male artists,” Dederer writes, “has a story. The story is this: He is subject to forces greater than himself, forces that are beyond his control. Sometimes these forces get out of hand, and he slips up and commits a crime. That’s unfortunate, but we understand that these forces are the same forces that make his art great.”Dederer brings up Virginia Woolf’s casual antisemitism and Willa Cather’s racism, but the only category of monstrous female artists with enough candidates to justify a full chapter in “Monsters” is “Abandoning Mothers,” and its subjects include Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Joni Mitchell, and Anne Sexton. Dederer finds it relatively easy to forgive the sin of child abandonment in women artists. Her tolerance, she suspects, is partly by virtue of her own experience of parenthood. Unlike the he-man auteur, she can identify with the fleeing mother artists, the bind that prompts them to flee. “The truth is,” she writes, “art-making and parenthood act very efficiently as disincentives to one another, and people who say otherwise are deluded, or childless, or men.” Throughout the book, Dederer mines the tension between how she thinks she should feel as a feminist, and how she actually feels as an artist; how she wants to feel as a mother, and how she truly experiences motherhood. She isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, approaching these issues with rigorous curiosity instead of intellectual authority—and this willingness to challenge her own contradictory thought process is a welcome antidote to the dominant discourse surrounding the work of problematic figures, the societal mandates around which vacillate with the politics of the time. “The sense of trust between the consumer of art and the artist is in a state of flux right now; we’re living through this time where biography is inescapable, and humans are flawed and complex,” Dederer reflects, referencing a passage of the book in which she describes the internet as an operation, made up of disclosures about oneself and others—humming along, fueled by the monstrousness of individuals and the outrage of those who discover it. How to separate the art from the artist, and whether certain figures deserve to be “deplatformed” or “cancelled”, are part of a conversation native to social media. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t worth an intellectual intervention. How we decide who’s worthy of support and attention, and what line an artist must cross to have that support withdrawn, should be thought through – it’s just that it requires more care than you’ll generally find online. RASCOE: And so, to me, I do feel like that is just so key because it feels like when people say they are a fan of someone these days, they're not just saying, oh, I like their music, oh, I like their art. They're saying this person is a reflection of me and my values, and if this person is bad, then that means I'm bad, right? Like, is - am I reading that correctly? 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.

Slyly funny, emotionally honest, and full of raw passion, Claire Dederer’s important book about what to do when artists you love do things you hate breaks new ground, making a complex cultural conversation feel brand new. Monsters elegantly takes on far more than ‘cancel culture’—it offers new insights into love, ambition, and what it means to be an artist, a citizen, and a human being.” — Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis 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. Or why, in the immediate wake of his death, some trans people and their allies were compelled to call out the hypocrisy of a man who made his fortune performing in drag, yet purportedly sent a letter of support aimed at J.K. Rowling in support of her anti-trans agenda.Then friends and contemporaries of Humphries paid tribute. Film director Bruce Beresford described the Comedy Festival’s decision as a “disgrace” and Humphries as “one of the great comic geniuses”. Dederer first read Lolita at age 13 and was “horrified” by it, including because Lolita herself did not seem like a “real character”, only an “absence”. The adult Dederer comes to see that may be precisely the point, that Lolita is “a portrait of a girl’s annihilation”. Yet Dederer does not disavow her younger self, who after all was onto something. 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. As a female writer I am intimately acquainted with the little savageries Dederer describes, the tension between commitment to one’s work and commitment to other people. Memoir, the art that Dederer and I practice, has its own particular savageries. “As a memoir writer,” Dederer writes, “it’s my job to answer the question: What is it that I am feeling, exactly?” Answering this question honestly can feel like doing violence to others and often requires identifying the monster in myself. In the course of my life, I have followed my appetites to extreme lengths and into some painful, dangerous, and stigmatized places. I was a troubled adolescent who had many fraught early sexual experiences, a teen-age heroin addict, a professional dominatrix in my early twenties. In my thirties, more than ten years clean and sober, I was consumed by an addictive relationship that laid waste to my life. I have written about all these things. It has been tempting at times to sanitize my behavior in my books, to protect the people who loved me from the ugliest details and to avoid the risk of being censured by my audience. But eliding my own or others’ faults does not erase or redeem them, only the real stakes of my stories. There is no sense of freedom in such narrative manipulation—no discovery and no forgiveness. 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?

Strange idiosyncratic personal rules arise from such knowledge – I have a much easier time watching films that Polanski made before he raped Samantha Gailey. And yet at the same time, Polanski – predator, statutory rapist – collapses into Polanski the preternaturally talented Polish art student, wunderkind, Holocaust survivor. When we stream his 1962 psychological thriller, Knife in the Water, we wish we could give our few dollars to that blameless young Polanski. We wonder: how can we bypass this terrible old criminal? We can’t. We can’t even bypass our knowledge of what he’s done. We can’t bypass the stain. It colours the life and the work.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). 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. To get things going, Dederer offers up her own monstrousness. She is a mother who is also a writer, which means that she has been guilty of negligence on those occasions when she has accepted invitations for residential fellowships which have taken her away from home for weeks at a time. Worse still, she has hugged herself with relieved glee while doing it. On top of this, she spent 10 years as a functioning alcoholic, which is not something that usually combines well with engaged and committed family life. Then there’s Morrissey, the former lead singer of The Smiths (the greatest band of the 20th century!). He’s not mentioned by Dederer, but he is – for me, and at least five other people I know – our most beloved “monster”.

Claire Dederer discusses in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma if we can separate art from artist/their biography? With a book to play with, Dederer fleshes out her concerns, but Monsters is not – or not only – an extended version of her viral essay, or a catalogue of the monstrous acts of male artists. Through a blend of memoir, cultural critique and feminist analysis, Dederer offers a hybrid form that is far more ambitious, wide-ranging, slippery and complicated.Lolita is the scorched-earth offensive of pedophile novels (and sometimes, it seems, of novels in general) An invigorating, engrossing, and deeply intelligent book. By guiding us through her critical dilemmas, Dederer performs an act of generosity: she allows the reader the space and encouragement to interrogate their own beliefs. Monsters made me laugh, argue, tear up, and most importantly, think.” As personal as it is unflinching, Dederer’s exploration of the confusing boundaries between life and art refuses all the easy answers.” — Oprah Daily