Claire Dederer

A brilliantly buzzy consideration of how we - the fans - should respond to good art made by bad people

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A timely, passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of cancel culture, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. Can we love the work of controversial classic and contemporary artists but dislike the artist?" A lively, personal exploration of how one might think about the art of those who do bad things" --Vanity Fair - " Dederer] breaks new ground, making a complex cultural conversation feel brand new." --Ada Calhoun, author of Also a Poet From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, Monsters is "part memoir, part treatise, and all treat" (The New York Times). This unflinching, deeply personal book expands on Claire Dederer's instantly viral Paris Review essay, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" Can we love the work of artists such as Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Miles Davis, Polanski, or Picasso? Should we? Dederer explores the audience's relationship with artists from Michael Jackson to Virginia Woolf, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. Does genius deserve special dispensation? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art. "Monsters leaves us with Dederer's passionate commitment to the artists whose work most matters to her, and a framework to address these questions about the artists who matter most to us." --The Washington Post A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Vulture, Elle, Esquire, Kirkus

'Funny, lively and convivial... how rare and nourishing this sort of roaming thought is and what a joy to read' MEGAN NOLAN, SUNDAY TIMES'An exhilarating, shape-shifting exploration of the perilous boundaries between art and life' JENNY OFFILL'Monsters is extraordinary - engaging, enraging, provocative, and brilliant' ANN PATCHETTA passionate, provocative and blisteringly smart interrogation of how we experience art in the age of #MeToo, and whether we can separate an artist's work from their biography. What do we do with the art of monstrous men? Can we love the work of Roman Polanski and Michael Jackson, Hemingway and Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? What makes women artists monstrous? And what should we do with beauty, and with our unruly feelings about it? Claire Dederer explores these questions and our relationships with the artists whose behaviour disrupts our ability to understand the work on its own terms. She interrogates her own responses and behaviour, and she pushes the fan, and the reader, to do the same. Morally wise, deeply considered and sharply written, Monsters gets to the heart of one of our most pressing conversations.*BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK*'A blisteringly erudite and entertaining read . . . It's a book that deserves to be widely read and will provoke many conversations' NATHAN FILER'Wise and bold and full of the kind of gravitas that might even rub off' LISA TADDEO'An incredible book, the best work of criticism I have read in a very long time' NICK HORNBY

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A timely, passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of cancel culture, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. Can we love the work of controversial classic and contemporary artists but dislike the artist?" A lively, personal exploration of how one might think about the art of those who do bad things" --Vanity Fair - " Dederer] breaks new ground, making a complex cultural conversation feel brand new." --Ada Calhoun, author of Also a Poet From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, Monsters is "part memoir, part treatise, and all treat" (The New York Times). This unflinching, deeply personal book expands on Claire Dederer's instantly viral Paris Review essay, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" Can we love the work of artists such as Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Miles Davis, Polanski, or Picasso? Should we? Dederer explores the audience's relationship with artists from Michael Jackson to Virginia Woolf, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. Does genius deserve special dispensation? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art. "Monsters leaves us with Dederer's passionate commitment to the artists whose work most matters to her, and a framework to address these questions about the artists who matter most to us." --The Washington Post A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Vulture, Elle, Esquire, Kirkus

A hilarious and brilliant memoir from a unique new female voice, for lovers of Caitlin Moran and Lindy West

Blazingly intelligent, wickedly funny, and piercingly honest, a memoir that captures the perils and pleasures of girlhood, womanhood, and life itself. "One of my favorite books of the last few years." --Cheryl Strayed "Sentence for sentence, a more pleasure-yielding midlife memoir is hard to think of." --The AtlanticAt mid-life, Claire Dederer developed a sudden yearning for jailbreak. In this exuberant memoir, she reflects on two periods in her life uncannily similar in their emotional intensity: her present experience as a middle-aged mom in the grip of unruly and mysterious new hungers, and her recollections of herself as a teenager.

A Midlife Reckoning

National Bestseller Ten years ago, Claire Dederer put her back out while breastfeeding her baby daughter. Told to try yoga by everyone from the woman behind the counter at the co-op to the homeless guy on the corner, she signed up for her first class. She fell madly in love. Over the next decade, she would tackle triangle, wheel, and the dreaded crow, becoming fast friends with some poses and developing long-standing feuds with others. At the same time, she found herself confronting the forces that shaped her generation. Daughters of women who ran away to find themselves and made a few messes along the way, Dederer and her peers grew up determined to be good, good, good--even if this meant feeling hemmed in by the smugness of their organic-buying, attachment-parenting, anxiously conscientious little world. Yoga seemed to fit right into this virtuous program, but to her surprise, Dederer found that the deeper she went into the poses, the more they tested her most basic ideas of what makes a good mother, daughter, friend, wife--and the more they made her want something a little less tidy, a little more improvisational. Less goodness, more joy. Poser is unlike any other book about yoga you will read--because it is actually a book about life. Witty and heartfelt, sharp and irreverent, Poser is for anyone who has ever tried to stand on their head while keeping both feet on the ground.