In other words, she lets no one off the hook. Allen and Picasso, Miles Davis and Ernest Hemingway, Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby: as far as the guys go, that list barely scratches the surface, yet Dederer is clear that in creating their art women too can be monsters of a sort, though their deeds-as in the cases of Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing-generally involve their identity as mothers. The list of those who have disappointed us, or worse, is long. Because the more deeply we engage with art, the more troubled we’re likely to be over the sins of the people who made it. Is it possible to ever separate the art from the artist? And if not, is it possible to find the sweet spot between our rage and our rapture? Those are just some of the questions Dederer both raises and responds to in Monsters, though this isn’t so much a book of solutions as it is an examination of how we approach the art we love. And yet-with her exhilarating book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, to be published April 25, essayist and critic Claire Dederer holds a small lantern aloft in the darkness.
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