Claire Dederer
1. What does a day in the life of Claire Dederer look like?
These days: very eccentric! I’m currently living in my late father’s houseboat on Lake Union in Seattle. My two 20-something kids live down the dock from me, together, in a separate houseboat. In the morning one of the kids usually wanders over before work and steals some breakfast from me. Then my boyrfriend and I take his completely bananas dog, Ralph, for a big walk. After that, work. Usually two or three hours of writing, but these days I’m mostly working on logistical and promotional stuff for Monsters. Dinner at home followed by rabid card playing. It’s a quiet, very contented life. I spend a lot of time just looking at the lake.
2. What was the catalyst for writing the essay What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men, which you wrote for The Paris Review? And then to expand on it to make Monsters: A Fans Dilemma?
I had written a memoir, Love & Trouble, which tangles with the experience of growing up as a sexually predated girl in the 1970s. I used the story of Roman Polanski as a kind of prism to view my own story. Once I finished writing that book in 2016, I realized that although I knew a lot of really terrible stuff about Polanski, I was still willing to watch his films. This was long before the online #MeToo moment arrived, but I could see it was a really rich subject for a book, which I began writing in 2016. The essay was actually the first chapter of the book, and I’d already been working on it for about a year when it was published in 2017—it was always intended to be a book.
3. You must have gone through a mountain of research to create Monsters (evident in the Notes). There are so many monstrous men to plough through, how did you decide who would and wouldn’t make it into Monsters?
I didn’t want the book to be a catalogue of rotten people—I figured that would be an infinite and impossible task. Instead I chose subjects who would allow me to think about certain specific issues for the audience to unpack—Wagner, for instance, helped me frame some questions about how people thought differently (or not) in the past. The experience of the audience was always at the forefront of my mind, along with the experience of women artists.
4. One of the questions Monsters asks is how can we separate artists from their art? It’s a question that when asked today sounds like more of a riddle, because it’s never been discussed as epically as this before. Why do you think this collection and discussion is so necessary now and not when Polanski raped a thirteen year old, say?
The answer to this is complex and I’m not sure I’m the right person to answer it. I think Tarana Burke worked hard for years to push this question to the front of the conversation—and then I think the rise of Trump supercharged the conversation and made it feel more politically urgent.
5. When reading Monsters, I quickly realised your arguments were beautifully complex, refreshing, relevant, funny, nuanced and strong, and I imagined a hurricane of ideas on the matters of monstrous men, your own place in it all, the stains, the biographies, the legalities, etc. spiraling around in your head. What processes or techniques did you have for collating them and getting it all down on paper?
You’re right, it was an incredibly complicated book to write—almost every page weaves together research, criticism, and my own story. I wanted to pack the book densely with material, but have it read in a spacious way. How I did it: index cards. Many, many index cards. I feel like I single-handed kept the index card industry afloat. At any given moment, there would be a desk or dining table in my house absolutely covered with index cards, as I figured out how to slot each artist with each idea, and how to set all of them within an arc that the reader could feel, even if it was lightly done.
6. Given the attitude towards and take-downs of women who speak out against powerful, monstrous men, were you worried about publishing this collection?
I’ll just say that I’ve been exploring anxiety-management pharmaceuticals. It’s nervous-making—very—to publish a book like this, but I tried to use my fear to push me toward really interrogating every statement in the book, making sure I was saying what I really thought. I think the fear made it a better book in the long run.
7. It was revelatory to read your chapter titled, Am I A Monster? and Abandoning Mothers (as I sit here with my door closed on my toddler, escaping moments to write at any given chance). Here we have the monstrous woman -
“if the male crime is rape, the female crime is the failure to nurture. The abandonment of children is the worst thing a woman can do”.
What impact on this collection did you hope for in including the art of Doris Lessing, Joni Mitchell, and yourself, amongst the crimes of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Hemingway, for example?
I wanted to get at a feeling that a woman lives with—the feeling that when she shuts the door against her child, she’s doing something wrong. Of course I don’t think that act is monstrous, but I wanted to unpack the voices in a woman’s head that prevent her, sometimes, from doing her work.
8. When writing about the monstrous men did you have a set way of framing them to get your argument across? For example, I noticed that in the chapter Drunks on Raymond Carver, you paint a humanising account of him. Was humanising the accused/stained / wrongdoers something you aimed to achieve in order for us to consider your last point, which is “what about empathy for the stained among us?”
Acknowledging the humanity of Raymond Carver was crucial to that chapter, which deals with the idea finding forgiveness for the monsters among us. That’s not an abstract idea for me—my own experiences as a recovering alcoholic inform my thinking on this. We need to leave room for the humanity of wrong-doers, otherwise what’s the point of living? Knowing you’ve done wrong, wanting to do better—if we obliterate that possibility, we’ve surrendered the capacity to grow and the capacity for real empathy, all at once.
9. Of all the books you read to create this masterpiece, which one blew your mind the most that you’d recommend everyone reads after buying Monsters in New Zealand on April 26th?
I think everyone should Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, which radically altered my idea of how I live in the world, and what I want to do about it.
10. If you’re at a dinner party and someone asks, “so Claire - can we watch A Midnight in Paris without it being stained by Woody Allen’s biography?” What would you say?
I’m not here to tell people what to do; the book is, after all, about the primacy of the subjective response. So I’d say: Watch it if you want—with the caveat that I myself think it’s a truly terrible movie!