Claire Dederer, author of “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this past weekend. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
When I saw the cover of essayist Claire Dederer’s new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, with a photo of Picasso holding a bull’s head on a beach, I knew this was going to be an exciting read. Since this is an extension of an essay Dederer wrote for the Paris Review, “What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” I expected the book to cover the well-documented exploits of terrible men: Picasso, Hemingway, Polanski. But I was deeply shocked when Dederer also included Sylvia Plath, Valerie Solanas, Doris Lessing and Anne Sexton.
By defining what constitutes these female monsters, Dederer reveals a devastating truth about the laws of our society and women’s creative work. She even turns the magnifying glass on herself as a writer and mother, and also approaches the audience as a monster. She’s a careful writer, weighing every sentence, and in our phone conversation – edited for length and clarity – she was warm and generous in discussing motherhood, art, memoir, recovery, the impossibility of ethical consumption, and like us really are all monsters.
To my surprise you have written a lot about motherhood and specifically about mothers who are artists. How did you come up with that in the writing process?
As a memoirist, I’m really interested in self-incrimination and figuring out where I fit in terms of history, in terms of my guilt. When I started writing about this subject, it was natural for me to write about my own feelings, about my own needs. I’ve been searching for the inner experience of the mother artist, and it can feel like what you’re doing isn’t right.
You write that Anne Sexton said in her therapy tapes, “Writing is as important to me as it is to my children,” but if you tried to say that, it sickened you. Why?
I think my perception of my own safety in the world has to do with being a person who puts their children first. I’m not saying that’s right or reasonable, but for me it’s the pressure of being the angel of the house. I experienced this pressure as absolute. It’s almost binary in my brain.
The main thing I think of is this line from the book: “If the male crime is rape, the female crime is failure to feed.” Abandoning children is the worst thing a woman can do.”
As a mother and a writer you really enter a labyrinth and the walls are very high and the direction you are moving is oppression. Being on this predestined path led to my feeling of choosing motherhood.
There is a chapter on Plath and Solanas and how their biographies cannot be separated from their work. But Ernest Hemingway – he’s a writer that students don’t immediately meet with the knowledge of his suicide. Does it stain his writing in the same way?
That’s a really interesting talking point throughout the book. I hadn’t thought to compare the two, but I think you’re absolutely right. What is it that we see differently about female suicide? A friend said, “I’m reading a book by this woman who went into the river with the stones in her bag,” and this is how he described reading a Virginia Woolf book!
Is there a difference between enjoying monster art and celebrating art? What do you think of Adèle Haenel and Céline Sciamma coming out of The Cesars in 2020 when Roman Polanski won a Best Director award and Haenel shouted, “Bravo, pedophilia!”
I think there’s a false dichotomy – that we pretend that the artist’s life doesn’t matter, or that biography and art are the same thing on the other hand. If the art is separate, you would adore Polanski. On the other hand, you would say that we can never show Polanski’s work. Consuming but not institutionally rewarding is possible. We do it all the time. If we have these rules, it seems like a good solution to the problem, but these rules don’t work well for queer people, women, and they don’t serve people.
Have you seen Tar?
I did. Oh no, I have nothing to say about Tár! I heard Will Menaker talk about the film as a fantasy of cancellation – because you don’t have to work anymore. One of the premise of “Monsters” is that we’re all trapped in the biography and there’s a way to escape the responsibility of the self, that person… so in a way it’s liberating. That’s a very AA idea, you’re only as sick as your secrets. Termination allows you to live your life freely.
Raymond Carver is one of your “mistresses” – an artist whose work impressed you greatly, as he was a “monster” who recovered (from alcoholism). Can you tell more about the artist who is “recovering”?
Again, this comes from my own journey with alcoholism. When I stopped drinking, I realized I had to address something in my own behavior.
One of the hardest things about the #MeToo movement was when the monster is a person of color. For example Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby and your example in the book, Miles Davis.
That’s why it’s so important that a cultural figure not be elevated by a point of view, the idea that we can decide what is good art or what is valuable. My experience with Bill Cosby or R. Kelly is completely different than anyone else’s. Part of it has to do with the idea of love: you haven’t lived with that person’s work like someone else. When we kid the subjective, the love of the fans, we give power to people they already have.
If we are to give artists outsized value in society, we must integrate these systems of violence that have affected them – racial violence, sexual violence – in the Polanski case, the Holocaust, the Tate LaBianca murders…
This is where the dichotomy comes into play. Polanski is the man in Western Civ. Everything happened to him.
I started working with this Books to Prisoners group in Seattle. You find books and try to fulfill their wishes. They often want to paint, learn to crochet or read fantasy novels. You have these desires [to do things] to make them feel free. You fill that need. It’s like dumbbells for empathy. You very rarely think about her crime. You think of a person in a cell who needs something. This experience goes deep into what I think about in the book, what it means to be a monster.
You are writing from a place where you want to know the answers, but of course there is no answer. How do you deal with doubts and missing answers in your writing?
One of the disciplines of the book was poking around in each sentence and making sure it was actually what I thought it was. Figuring out the truth of the book for myself took a few years of work. I circled the question and looked at it from different angles. The concept of ethical consumption is a red herring. This is probably the strongest conclusion.
However, there is no solution to the problem. One of the difficulties was not capitulating to the reader by offering a malicious solution. Here I lived more as a thinker than as a person who wants to avoid conflict. Melissa Febos has spoken out about this idea — that her students think someone wants to argue with them about their writing. You cannot write for the evil reader. You must write for the bona fide reader.
Ferri is the owner of Womb House Books and the author of Silent Cities San Francisco.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
Originally published Apr 24, 2023 @ 11:29am
