Everybody Draws Their Own Line: Thoughts on MONSTERS A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Derderer.

Recently, I read Claire Dederer's Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, and like all great non-prescriptive nonfiction, it left me asking more questions than it provided answers. The upside is that all those questions also got me thinking.

Audiobook cover of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

I first heard about this book from a Minniesota Public Radio broadcast of an interview with Ann Patchett in the show Talking Volumes. One of the audience members at the Fitzgerald Theater asked if she'd read any books she'd reccomend. Monsters was at the top of her list of nonfiction books. While I don't consider myself a disciple of Patchett or her work, the idea of this book made me immediately go get a copy. Of course, like all books it sat on my TBR pile for a long time before I finally got around to it. I was not disappointed.

Dederer's apporach to this book, which is part memoir of her own love of art made by questionable people and part cultural critical long-form essay of the art itself, is one of self-confessed bias and therefore (imo) honest assessment. Everything from movies by Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, to the paintings of Picasso, to the music of Miles Davis and David Bowie, to the fiction of Hemingway and JK Rowling passes before her critical microscope. 

She is fully aware at all times that she is not impartial to some of these works. Some, such as Roman Polanski's Chinatown, the short stories of Raymond Carver, or The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, are treasures of her heart. Others, like Woody Allen's Manhattan, make her sick to her stomach and cause her to ask, "Why do people like this again?" And in the end, she draws the conclusion that nearly all great analysts and philosophers of human nature reach eventually.

Human beings are complex. 

Every person, living, dead, and yet unborn, possesses, possessed, and will possess the capacity at all times to be both saintly and monstrous. What makes someone a monster or a largely benevolent figure in the eyes of history is entirely dependent on which part of that nature they choose to act upon the majority of the time. More so, it also depends on which actions posterity itself—e.g. historians, biographers, critics, and scholars of the future—choose to focus on and develop narratives atound. Although someone may devote their life to good works, they can still make monstrous decisions; likewise, a person may spend most of their life being a bastard, but they can still do good things. Andrew Carnegie was one of the most botorious robber barrons of the gilddd age, inrecnh8ng himself theough tge steel industry while doing all he could to keep workers' wages down and worker safety a last priority to maximize his bottom line. Yet, he also endowed, at the end of his life, the Carnegie Library System, making education and self-betterment accessible to all. Both are true. And how you view some depends entirely on the angle from which you view them.

That said, Dederer also concludes another unfortunate truth about people: because we're all equally capable of being saints and monsters, we're all equally capable of being hypocrites. We can say one thing and do another; we can fail to practice what we preach. More so, not only can we, we have, and no matter how hard we try, we will all be hypocrites in the future.

Despite all she knew about Polanski's crimes, Dederer could not bring herself to stop loving Chinatown. Despite knowing that Raymond Carver was an alcoholic and spouse absuer, she could not relinquish her love of his short stories. Despite knowing that Doris Lessing abandoned two of her children and her husband to flee to England to live the life of writing she had to live, she still couldn't throw away her.copy of The Golden Notebook. And despite this self-knowledge of her own hypocrisy, she still couldn't love Manhattan.

That begs the question: why?

Perhaps it's because these works of art were part of her own creative bedrock. They were such a part of her that, to turn her back on them because the creator of them turned out to be less saintly than she might've liked, would've been like trying to cut off one of her limbs. They'd been part of her for so long, no matter what, she couldn’t just give them up because of the revelations she uncovered later.

I understand that desire to keep hold of something made by imperfect people. Plenty of artists of my childhood and teen years have since showed themselves to be capable of repugnant actions. Yet, their art shaped me into who I am and made me want to make what I make now. And, while I can't necessarily forgive the people in question for the actions taken or the statements made, I also can't quite let go of the work because of how vital to my own creative foundations they were.

So where does that leave us? What are we to do the next time some creative whose work we once admired ends up outed for doing or saying something distasteful? Do we purge our libraries of their books? Do we refuse to attend a gallery at an art museum displaying the work of an artist who, as a person, we can't stand? Do we take to sociL media and constantly rant and rave against these artists and try to convince others never to support them financially ever again (which Dederer notes is an exercise in futility)?

Here's what makes this book great: Dederer doesn't say.

She leaves it up to us, the readers to decide how we handle this. Rather than doing the stereotypically feminist or fashionably leftist thing, which is to say, proselytize in favor of all the suggestions I mentioned above, Dederer leaves it up to all of us to decide what to do because that's what she does.

In the end, despite Raymond Carver being an alcoholic wife-beater, she couldn’t bring herself to throw away his late collections of stories he wrote after he was sober. Despite Roman Polanski being a criminal at large and a rapist, she couldn’t bring herself to discard her copy of Chinatown. As a self-confessed recovering drinker and a writer, Carver and Chinatown shaped who she is and she could not deny that. Yet, as a mother of children she deeply adores, she could not forgive the abandonment of Lessing or the creepiness surrounding Allen, even if she could still love Lessing's work and not stand Allen's.

In other words, she embraces the grayness and complexity of human character. We all have sins we cannot forgive in others. But we also have sins we're willing to forgive because we ourselves have perpetrated them (even when we don't admit to them in public, we know the truth in our hearts). And, still, we hope only that people will judge and remember us for our best actions rather than condemn us for our worst.

We all have a decision to make: where do we draw our lines? Only once we've answered that question can we begin to decide where to stake our positions.

"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." John 8:7, King James Bible.

— IMC 🙃