In 2014, the writer Claire Dederer was researching one of her favorite filmmakers, Roman Polanski, for her memoir Love and Trouble. That spring and summer, as she rewatched Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, and Repulsion, she was overwhelmed by both his genius as an artist and his monstrousness as a person. In 1977, Polanski was notoriously accused of drugging and assaulting a 13-year-old girl; he pled guilty to charges of statutory rape but before his sentencing fled to Europe, where he quickly resumed his prolific career. The harrowing details of his crime were seared in Dederer’s mind. And yet her eagerness to watch his films endured.
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The deep discomfort of continuing to love the work of an abusive artist would inspire Dederer’s viral 2017 Paris Review essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” Her piece wrestles with the ways that men hailed as artistic geniuses have had carte blanche to commit sexual violence, and how we, as an audience, should deal with them. Do we cancel them? Separate the artist from the art? Weigh the brilliance of their work against the ghastliness of their crimes? Six years later, Dederer’s third book of nonfiction, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, answers the questions that her essay did not.
We shouldn’t close our eyes to the depravity of our favorite artists, Dederer argues. Nor should we feel obligated to chuck them aside. She empathizes with the desire to take a moral stand through the art we consume. But, she argues, individual choices can’t effect the kind of large-scale change needed to correct institutional problems. That’s true whether we’re talking about our culture’s permissiveness toward sexual violence, racism, or climate change. Focusing on the individual rather than the collective is what ultimately keeps us disempowered.
Monsters is both a nimble exploration of fan culture and a spirited call to action. Through chapters on characters as disparate as Woody Allen (who married one of his adoptive daughters with ex-partner Mia Farrow and allegedly molested another), Miles Davis (who physically abused his romantic partners), and David Bowie (who slept with a 15-year-old fan), Dederer insists that audiences are capable of handling more complexity than the cancel culture wars give them credit for. Reached by phone from her home in Seattle, Dederer spoke with GQ about problematic faves, virtue signaling, and the agony of loving monsters.
GQ: Beyond Polanski and Allen, whose work you were already a fan of, how did you decide which other artists to include?
Claire Dederer: I was thinking about the experience of the audience and in taking the attention off the artists and putting it back on us. The people I talk about are those whose stories and relationships with fans illustrated ideas I wanted to think about. I chose Hemingway and Picasso for the way they inhabited and shaped the idea of genius, and the way that term shapes the audience’s experience of their work. I chose Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta as a way of illustrating how artists are silenced in various ways, including institutionally. [An ascendant Cuban-American artist, Mendieta fell from an apartment window to her death in September 1985 after an argument with Andre, a renowned sculptor she had married earlier that year; he was later acquitted of second-degree murder, though some of Mendieta’s supporters remain unconvinced of his innocence.]
Did you include any artists whose abuse allegations came to light while you were working on the book?
My editor was interested in having non-contemporary examples. So much of what makes the book useful is the way it pushes against being a hot take. She encouraged me to write about people who had been accused of things not so recently to get out of that feedback loop of responding to the latest thing. One of the ghosts, or the boogeyman, of the book is social media.
On social media, so much of the discourse around engaging with “problematic faves” feels deeply condescending in how it frames the vulnerability of the audience.
Yeah. It’s infantilizing on both sides. On the one hand, you have people who think that artists who have done something awful and made something great should just be tossed. That we can’t handle knowing what we know about them and still consume the work. On the other hand, you have people who believe in separating the art from the artist and that stories of abuse don’t matter. Who want to protect an “innocent” viewing of the art free of that information. There’s this refusal on both sides to accept that audiences are smart enough to handle this complexity.
These conversations get especially charged around artists like J.K. Rowling, who has doubled down on her transphobia in recent years, and David Bowie, who slept with a 15-year-old fan. They’re heroic figures for a lot of young people.
J.K. Rowling is one of the only people whose controversy really emerged after I started writing the book. I felt it was important to write about, because so much of the book is about heartbreak—the peculiar sadness of seeing beloved art become stained by the biography of its maker. The dilemma isn’t meaningful unless you love the work.
Both J.K. Rowling and David Bowie create imaginary worlds that young people participate in. They build these incredible fan communities. For teenagers in particular, Bowie is really important because he’s just so fantastically weird. Kids feel that they are not alone when they dwell inside his music. If you feel a sense of un-belonging, Bowie is celebrating that and including you in this secret group. There’s a really strong sense of identification. When that’s betrayed, it goes toward this core sense of self in young people who are still in the midst of identity formation.
Given that, what ethical obligations do teachers, writers, critics—those with the platform to shape the legacy of these artists—have when engaging with their work? Take, for example, writing instructors who teach the work of abusive men. How should they frame the work for their students?
It’s my belief that teachers, writers, and critics have different roles depending on their relationship to institutional power. A teacher certainly has an obligation to complicate an artist’s legacy by bringing up these issues, rather than pretending they don’t exist—but I also believe a teacher has a personal responsibility to teach work that he or she believes is great.
Why don’t our individual decisions around what art to consume effect change on a large scale?
I think it’s fascinating that when an artist is accused of something terrible, the response jumps to the consumer’s responsibility—the question becomes, “Well, are you going to give up X’s art?” We’re so trapped inside our role as consumers that it’s our only conceivable response—rather than demanding institutional responsibility, which requires a collective response. Our inflated notions about the power of our individual choices keeps us trapped and powerless.
What would demanding institutional responsibility look like?
On the simplest level, it’s the kind of stuff that sometimes gets made fun of as “woke.” If, for example, when museums show Gaugin’s work, they talk about the way that he abused young girls and the colonialism of his project. They can still show the work while acknowledging the biography. The more responsible institutions are also thinking about how you uplift work by other groups as a kind of counterforce to all the space taken up by monstrous men. That doesn’t mean that artists from non-white, non-male groups aren’t going to do awful things. People are people, they do awful things. Representation doesn’t mean you get away from monstrousness. But representation makes the institution fairer.
It’s absurd that sharing an artist’s biography could be perceived as participating in some kind of woke mob. That makes me think about how, as a critic, you encountered a lot of men who believed that certain films, like Manhattan, are objectively good and must be judged only on aesthetics. Why do you think it’s important for critics to acknowledge their subjectivity?
Whether we recognize it or not, we’re all defined by history, culture, race, and gender. Certain people don’t perceive themselves as being defined by these biographical elements; that tends to be white straight men who are reviewing or consuming work by other men like them. Their subjectivity can become invisible, because we’re so used to seeing that work that it comes to seem like the norm. The best thing we can do is bring our subjectivity forward, acknowledge it, and write criticism that comes from that place. Rather than simply asserting that one is objectively correct without talking about where that assertion is coming from.
You argue that we should look for ourselves in these monsters. Where did that realization come from?
A big project of the book was to undermine authority. One of the things I was trying to do was to both acknowledge my own subjectivity and to encourage others to look at their own. I was thinking about the self-congratulatory impulse to believe we would have risen to the occasion at various moments in history: We tell ourselves we would have resisted the Nazis, would have fought to end slavery. It’s part of our belief that the past is different, that they need us to time travel back there and introduce our more excellent contemporary morals. But we’re making plenty of choices now that might seem equally horrific to people in five hundred years—evidenced by the fact that there might not be people in five hundred years. In other words, we should be looking at our own lack of response to racism, to the accumulation of wealth, to the corporatization of private life, and to climate change.
As a memoir writer, there is a necessary moment when you self-indict. If you are going to offer something useful to a reader, self-questioning is crucial. It was very natural for me, halfway through the book, to ask, “Am I a monster?”
Which monsters did you see yourself reflected in?
The person I identify most with in the book is Raymond Carver. He was a drunk and was abusive toward his first wife. He was kind of a rotten person in his early life, and then he had this golden second act when he became sober. During the writing of Monsters, I became sober. Raymond Carver had been important to me my whole life. I looked at my own sobriety through the possibility of redemption I saw in Carver’s story, but also the realization that I too had a monstrousness, otherwise I wouldn’t have had to quit drinking. You don’t have to stop being an addict unless something’s gone wrong. That experience became a place for me to find, I don’t want to say forgiveness, but more compassion for the humanity of these rotten people.
That reminds me of the Mary Karr quote you include: “The problem isn’t that your mother hit you on the head with a brick. The problem is that you still love her…” How did you realize that this book is about the larger question of what to do with the monstrous people in our own lives?
It was about halfway through the writing of the book. I was sitting around a campfire with some friends, and one of them said to me, “Hey, are you still writing that book about monster artists?” He began to tell me the story of his stepfather, who’d been a pretty bad guy. My friend was dragged from state to state in this really difficult situation, and there was a lot of volatility and abuse in his childhood. My friend wanted me to know that he still loved his stepdad, even after everything. Sitting there by the fire, the top of my head just about lifted off—my friend was forcing the question into a larger arena, the arena of human love, and this reignited me about the project of the book.
What was your writing process like?
It was chaotic. There’s an E.M. Forster quote, possibly apocryphal, that goes, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” There was a long first draft that was just finding out what I thought, which then had to be rewritten with much more biographical material. And then the whole thing had to be rewritten because my own thinking and politics were so dramatically affected by the events of the last four years.
Which events specifically?
Certainly the George Floyd protests, and then the pandemic and the response to the pandemic. And then, strangely, probably the most powerful event that shaped my thinking were the West Coast fires over the last few years. The horror of what we were living with dramatically affected how I looked at not just the problem that I was writing about, but all politics.
That feels so true to the artistic process—that what seems like an unrelated issue to the idea of monstrous artists could build an argument about the failures of individual solutions at solving systemic problems.
I think that the fires were such a tangible experience of the failure of telling ourselves that we could solve our problems through improving ourselves as individual consumers.
The paper-straw-ification of it all.
Exactly. My younger child read the book when it was getting toward the end. And they were like, “The person who we meet at the beginning of the book is not who’s actually writing the book.” The person at the beginning of the book is a more punitive, liberal, carceral feminist. And the person who ends up doing the thinking of the book is not that person. Then there was this project of reflecting that transformation in the narrator. The events of the last few years pushed me to the left.
Monsters is the kind of book that you could keep revising forever, as new discourses enter the culture. You mentioned that J.K. Rowling was your cutoff for contemporary examples. Is there anyone else you would have included if your publication date had been pushed back, let’s say to 2024?
There was a moment where I thought about adding an epilogue listing all the artists who were accused during the writing of the book. That epilogue could unspool forever.
Do you find it any less agonizing to engage with work by monstrous artists after writing this book?
No, I find it more agonizing. I’m even more alive to the complexity of it.
Do you think you’ll watch new Polanski and Allen films in the future?
I don’t know. It’s really complicated. How good will the work be? Yeah, I don’t know.
Ruth Madievsky is the author of a novel, All-Night Pharmacy, which will be published by Catapult in July.