Claire Dederer

This is a very thought-provoking book. This review discusses Dederer's arguments in detail, so if you would rather get the thesis in detail from her instead of me, you might not want to read this review.

In the first half of the book, Dederer takes on the familiar question of "how do we respond to art by monstrous people?" She starts with Roman Polanski, who created some amazing movies, but also anally raped a teenager. Especially in the wake of #MeToo, we want a formula for whether it is "okay" to enjoy art by people who have done horrible things. These are not new questions, and have been examined to death for decades if not centuries, so Dederer takes a new approach: instead of thinking about the biography of the artist, she wants to think about the biography of the audience. She starts by talking about the audience rather generically, as an anonymized "we," which she acknowledges is a way of hiding her own personal responsibility in a collective cloak. However, as the book progresses, it gets much more personal, and by the end, the "we" has been entirely replaced with "I," and Dederer's personal biography overtakes the audience's biography in ways that made it hard for me to follow her to the same conclusions.

Dederer examines one of the common responses to the question of how to respond to good art by terrible people: many people (mostly men) will tell you to ignore the artist's biography and judge the work on its own merits. Dederer argues that this isn't possible or even desirable. Despite what (mostly male) critics would have you think, there is no objective measure of what makes art good or bad: ultimately, our response to art is emotional and subjective, and that is what makes art pleasurable. Likewise, our response to knowing the artist's biography is emotional, often visceral, and just like we can't ignore the sheer joy that some art evokes, we also can't ignore the disgust or horror that some artists evoke.

The second half of the book gets far more personal, and Dederer's vocation as a memoirist takes over. She examines the sins of women artists: while men can be labelled "geniuses" and thus excuse their violence and rape, women don't have such an easy get-out-of-jail-free card. For women artists (and, I would argue, women of all walks of life), the ultimate sin isn't violence, it is the abandonment of children. Dederer looks at Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell, two women who abandoned children in the pursuit of art. However, it becomes clear that in writing this chapter, Dederer is really examining her own guilt about being a writer, and taking time away from her own children to write. I wish she had taken the time to examine another kind of monstrous woman: the woman who enables the monstrosity of men. She could have written a chapter about Marion Zimmer Bradley and Alice Munro (although Munro's sins were not known until after this book was published): two feminist writers and icons who condoned and abetted their husbands' abuse of other women. I think Dederer skips over this kind of monstrosity because she is more interested in answering her own personal questions about how monstrous it is for a woman to prioritize her art over her children, even just a little bit.

Dederer really gets to the crux of her own personal issues when she admits that she has been an alcoholic. She talks about her own slide into alcoholism, and her own realization that she is herself a monster and she needs to fix it. In this chapter, it becomes clear that the question that is really driving this book for Dederer isn't "how do we respond to art by monstrous people?" but "am I a monster?" In the final chapter, she focuses on Miles Davis, and particularly the writing of Pearl Cleage, a Black woman who grappled with her own love of Miles's music and her own hatred of his shameless abuse of women. Ultimately, Cleage still loves the music, and for her, the hatred of the man does not eclipse the hatred of the music. Here, then, is the answer to the question of "how should we respond to art by monsters?": it's personal. It's up to you, and how much you love the art.

However, Dederer completely reframes the question in the final chapter. She says that really, the question of what we do about art we love by horrible people is really a stand-in for the bigger question of what we do about the horrible people we love. Here is where Dederer lost me, because I think her own biography has changed the question for her in ways that don't work for everybody. I think these questions are actually a stand-in for Dederer's own personal question of "am I a horrible person for being an alcoholic and sometimes prioritizing writing over my children, and can people love me anyway?" She says "What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them.... Families are hard because they are monsters (and angels, and everything in between) that are foisted upon us. They're unchosen monsters... And yet somehow we mostly end up loving our families anyway." As someone who has had to cut off contact with an abusive father, I disagree with this. Not only do I disagree with the assertion that "we mostly end up loving our families anyway," I also do not think that continuing to love people who are monsters is healthy. Dederer sees herself as a monster and wants her family to continue to love her, so I think she ends the book with this platitude as a way to find her own redemption.

I also disagree with the premise that the question of how we respond to art by monsters is a smaller part of the bigger question about what do we do about the monsters we love. I think they are separate questions. The reason the question about art is so difficult to answer is that the art is, in some ways, separate from the artist. It is possible, if one is naive or oblivious, to experience art with no awareness of the artist and their biography. Once you know the biography, it is very hard to separate the art from the artist, but they are, ultimately, two different things. Family, by definition, cannot be separated from biography. You can have a different relationship between yourself and the art and yourself and the artist, but with a family member, there is only one relationship, only one thing to relate to. Also, with art, you have a choice about what art you engage with. With family members, you don't get a choice.

Even if I disagree with where Dederer goes in the last few chapters, this is an excellent book. Her writing is witty and engaging, and there is a lot of excellent food for thought here.… (more)