“Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma” moves through a catalogue of familiar names associated with both genius and monstrosity, considering whether it is possible to separate an artist from his art.
,” a riveting account of her erotic reawakening in her forties. “Monsters” was incited by a confrontation with the monster lurking in her own artistic canon, the disgraced auteur Roman Polanski, whose films she worshipped. When Dederer was a young film critic in the nineties, it was impossible to avoid his influence, and she considered him a genius.
In thirteen chapters, “Monsters” moves through a catalogue of familiar names associated with both genius and monstrosity. The usual suspects—Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby—all make an appearance, as well as many others, sorted into categories such as “The Genius,” “Drunks,” and “The Silencers and the Silenced.” There are monsters who spewed bigotry and monsters who embodied the modernist ideal of the heroic artist who made women into their fetish objects .
Unlike the male critics she knew, Dederer was not raised to identify with the perspective of the auteurs. She had a less inflated sense of her response to art—that it was, simply, her response. “I knew I was different from the other critics,” she writes. “My subjectivity seemed incontestable, yet shameful.” Almost thirty years later, Dederer is no longer ashamed of her incontestable subjectivity. She has placed it at the center of her book.
As a female writer I am intimately acquainted with the little savageries Dederer describes, the tension between commitment to one’s work and commitment to other people. Memoir, the art that Dederer and I practice, has its own particular savageries. “As a memoir writer,” Dederer writes, “it’s my job to answer the question: What is it that I am feeling, exactly?” Answering this question honestly can feel like doing violence to others and often requires identifying the monster in myself.
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