A Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf, 273 pages.

Reviewed by A. Iwasa


Dederer starts the book with a prologue about her Roman Polanski fandom; a film maker whose monstrousness she aptly compared to the void-like incomprehensibleness of the Grand Canyon.  But she really gets into the specifics of why she thinks Polanski's genius equals his monstrosity with the same poetic flourish.  It's the passion and horror that puts the fan in fanatic when you get into the personal details of many great artists, which is exactly what this book is an exploration of.

She branches out less specifically into other complicated talents such as John Lennon, Lou Reed and Ezra Pound, while trying to figure out what conclusions other critics have come to about measuring the crimes of an artist against the greatness of their work.  I had a bit of an of course moment here reading, apparently the Germans have a phrase for this:  Liebe zur Kunst.

What follows is sometimes just the name:  Woody Allen, William Burroughs, Sid Vicious.

Sometimes a bit of exploration, like "how can one watch The Cosby Show after the rape allegations against Bill Cosby?

The wider political contexts such as Donald Trump on Access Hollywood are addressed at other points.

Dederer weaves in her personal experiences as well as she articulates her fandom and feelings of horror.

Chapter 1 is titled "Roll Call," and after using Woody Allen as both a subheading and a name on a list, Dederer eventually backtracks to him in depth as the point of reference for being an artist whose behavior was bad enough to possibly not consume his work.

Dederer is asking questions whole heartedly, rather than telling you how to make your decisions on when an artist has gone too far.  I can't overstate how Dederer is writing this as a fan grappling with these questions.

Chapter 2 is a similar treatment of Michael Jackson.  Though it's not just Dederer's thoughts and feelings; it's an ongoing discussion with others such as other critics and her readers.

Some problematic women are mentioned in passing, but Chapter 3 sets its sites on J.K. Rowling.  The chapter's title is "The Fan," and includes one of the best descriptions of fandom I've ever read:  "An audience member is a consumer of a piece of art; the audience member is not defined by that piece of art.  A fan, on the other hand, is a consumer beyond, a consumer who is also being consumed.  She steals part of her identity from the art, even as it steals its importance from her.  She becomes defined by the art." (Italics in the original.)

Dederer delves deeply into the psychology of this sort of fandom, and in turn, parasocial relationships:  "the belief that we have real emotional connections with the artists whose work we love."

Dederer changes gears a bit with Chapter 4, "The Critic."  Rather than having a monstrous artist's name as a subheading, she zooms out and begins to explain how she became a critic, defines her form of criticism, and criticizes other critics.  But this is still all wrapped up in the context of monstrous artists and fandom.

Plus Dederer makes up for skipping a chapter's subheading by using two for Chapter 5, "The Genius," staring Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway.  Hey!  I thought Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole?!

It's an exploration into whether or not someone can be so great at their work that it overshadows what's problematic about them as people, or if even they have to be problematic to create as they have.

Also, I thought I was being pretty sophisticated with my reference to "Pablo Picasso" by the Modern Lovers above, but within 12 pages Dederer is writing about how it's "dependent on the idea that everyone but everyone has" already of Picasso.

But back to the point:  Dederer pushes it to the limit.  "The questions is, I suppose, whether lunacy makes a great artist, or or whether all that freedom makes a person crazy."  Or inherently miserable.

Then she ups the ante the ante with Chapter 6, "The Anti-Semite, the Racist, and the Problem of Time."  Subheading:  Richard Wagner, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather.

Analyzing Wagner in the Trump era, Dederer masterfully argues against the school of thought defending such people as nothing more than products of their time.  Woolf and Cather get the same treatment but to a lesser degree.  There's at least some wiggle room with Woolf:  her husband was Jewish so it's complicated.  To me, it's the classic, smug, latent racism of Liberalism (and the Left in general to be blunt).

Dederer sort of tones it down with the next chapter, "The Anti-Monster."  subheading Vladimir Nabokov, she suggests in regard to Lolita, "To read the book is to engage with the monstrous.  And surely the man who wrote the book must be a monster.

"But was Nabokov a monster?"

I don't know, but the chapter was even grosser than my previous understanding of Lolita.  Dederer has an interesting take on it.  Not interesting enough to make me try to read the book, but the chapter is a thought provoking exercise in separating an artist from a character.

The next chapter is equally depressing in its own way.  "The Silencers and the Silenced" names Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta as its case studies.  Visual artists in the 1970s and '80s, I was unfamiliar with their tragic story.  The chapter is short (nine pages) and I have no idea how to write about it without spoilers.  It's shocking but fits into the over all narrative of the other artists I've been mostly familiar with.  I suppose it just seems extra disturbing to me because I had been unfamiliar with Mendieta and Andre.

Chapter 9, "Am I a Monster?" begins with a meditation on the author's own "fair share of bad behavior."  She moves on to an in depth examination of the family/work tension of an artist from a mother's perspective.  She mentioned it here and there before in the text, but Dederer gives it the treatment she's considered many of the other subjects.  Not just mentioning her own views and experiences, she quotes from the folk wisdom, "It's generally believed that the orphan fantasy is a way of metaphorically killing off a repressive parent."  Also from other authors, such as from 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso, and Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly, and the 1990 film, An Angel at My Table.

The methodology of this book is deep yet accessible.  If I only have one complaint, I'd say that I think a great deal of what Dederer seems to suggest to be unique to women in general or women artists in particular rings true to me as being the experience of most subaltern people in the US.

She does write a fair amount about race and ethnicity, and a little about LGBTQ+ artists, but when I'm not thinking, "That's my experience as a mixed race artist of color," I'm thinking of other marginalized folks who aren't women that share most if not all of these experiences in the US.

Though I do find myself cringing here and there recognizing that cluelessness that I spent plenty of my own energy displaying as someone socialized male in the US when I aspired to be a working musician through most of the 1990s.

In other words, as Dederer examines her own potentially monstrous nature, one that perhaps motherhood saved her from, it's easy to apply the text to my own life and my artist mother's.  This is, to a certain degree what I picked the book up for.  If I'm going to continue writing about music, I need to address the question of monsters in the scene.  If I'm going to continue writing and publishing, I need to make sure I don't become a monster.

In a similar vein, Chapter 10 is "Abandoning Mothers," starring Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell.  Dederer proclaims, "The abandonment of children is the worst thing a woman can do."  But later admits, "This idea of mothers abandoning their children has always held a lurid fascination for me."

Dederer used to ride freight!  One of the many noteworthy revelations you'll find in this chapter.  Though I can't help but wonder if her kids have read this when she writes things like, "when my daughter was three years old, I used to pay myself to play with her."  Ouch!  Or how she "regarded the landscape between the making of dinner and the singing-to-sleep as a vast wasteland, on a par with the bleaker landscaped from Planet of the Apes."

I don't agree that the worst thing a woman can do is abandon her children.  Plenty of women don't have kids, and some children are better off getting raised by someone other than their biological mothers.

Nevertheless, Dederer relentlessly backs her arguments and explores potential answers to her questions with quotes taken from book, after book, after book as elsewhere in the text.  I'm down right amazed at her depth and scope of literary knowledge which she went as far as to refer to as her vocational; reading being her main interest when she was a 21-year old punk rock, freight riding, warehouse worker.  The proof is in the pudding:  quiet a few books have landed on my two read list as I read this book.

Dederer's knowledge of music and film is similarly impressive.

In Chapter 11, "Lady Lazarus," she goes on to examine the potential monstrousness of a woman outside of questions relating to motherhoodwith none other than Valerie Solanas, though she shares the subheading with Sylvia Plath.

Earlier Dederer labeled Plath's suicide an act of child abandonment, which I thought was unfair.  Here it gets interesting though, as she asks, "What if Sylvia Plath had shot Ted Hughes instead of gassing herself?"

Here I'm forced to think of the number of feminine presenting who approached me when I was reading Plath's The Bell Jar.  I frequently read in public, even at social events sometimes.  Only once in a great while does someone say something to me from a familiarity with the text.  It was kind of disturbing.

But more than anything I think the chapter is the most interesting thing I've ever read about Solanas, and could probably stand alone as a 'zine.

Chapter 12, "Drunks," features Raymond Carver.  Unbeknownst to me, he was from the Pacific Northwest, so he was important to the author not only as a regional literary hero, but one who stayed in the area before Seattle and Portland achieved their current levels of fame as artists' meccas.  Dederer claims his "alpha and omega were the Pacific Northwest."  She outlines his biography from birth in Oregon to death in Washington, including the low points of domestic violence and hospitalizations for acute alcoholism, to a life of fulltime sobriety.  She proclaims, "the tale of Carver's redemption is one of the great late-twentieth-century literary stories."  Furthermore, Olivia Laing and Leslie Jamison have both "made Carver's grave a center-piece of their books about writers and drinking and writers who drink and drinkers who write."

But of course Dederer wants to examine the details of what happened.  She also wrestles with her own monstrousness though this time in the context of alcoholism she confesses to being a monster in no uncertain terms.  I actually laughed out loud when she wrote, "The fact is, alcohol is a really useful way of managing trauma-until it is not."  

She also gets back to the core issue of "what we do about monstrous men" in the context of the Trump era, #MeToo, capitalism and liberalism.

She concludes, "In fact, you will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end.

"The way you consume are doesn't make you a bad person, or a good one.  You'll have to find some other way to accomplish that."

I agree about 50%.  I think people who believe everything is personal responisibility are just as whack as people who believe everything is the system.  Generally, the older I get, the less I think of anything as absolute.  I think the way you consume in general, and art in particular can make you a bad person.  But I also think don't think questions of personal consumption are the be all and end all that some people make them out to be.

Case and point:  edge lords who listen to white power or fascist themed music no matter what their reasoning are always sketchy.  People who listen to it because they actually agree with it are acting poorly, to write the least.  Listening to Skrewdriver or Death in June, etc. is not a passive act of artistic consumption.

The next chapter, "The Beloveds" features Miles Davis.  It's particularly interesting because Dederer wasn't much of a fan of Davis before #MeToo.  She writes, "when I looked around for writing on the separating-the-art-from-the-artist question, a series of false starts and missteps led me to Pearl Cleage's essay 'Mad at Miles.'"

After working through some of the essay's finer points, Dederer uses Cleage's Davis fandom as example of others:  her mother's reading, a gay friend "closeted (even to himself)," in the 1980s avid movie watching, etc.

If you've read this far, it's probably because you can relate at least on some level.

Also, to be fair, Dederer doesn't just blame the system:  "consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting:  the biography of the artist, which might disrupt the consuming of the art; and the biography of the audience member, which might shape the viewing of the art.  I repeat:  this occurs in every case."

Further, she brings it out to the much larger question:  "what do we do about the monstrous people we love?"  (Italics in the original.)  This is the clincher, and you're going to have to read it to see where she's going with it.

I still don't have a solid answer for what we do with the art of monstrous people, but I feel less about not knowing what we do.

Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is available here from the publisher.