Dederer

Christopher Borrelli | Chicago Tribune Claire Dederer does not carry a portable confessional, but she might want to consider the investment. We sat beside each other recently in the lobby of a School of the Art Institute of Chicago building on Michigan Avenue. I wondered: Are people asking you to judge them? She smiled a big smile that could only be interpreted one way: You have no idea how many people ask. Dederer, an author and essayist from Seattle, was in town to talk about “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” her latest…

Is it OK to love a film, a book or a painting if its maker turns out to be a bad person? Not just lovable aw-shucks everyday bad, the sort who forgets to pick the kids up because he or she is too busy making art, but someone whose behaviour is immoral, illegal or both? A monster, in fact.This is the dilemma that Claire Dederer addresses in this exhilarating, gnarly inquiry into the business of separating the author’s repugnant life from his or her magnificent work. It is hardly a new topic – in the middle of the last…

Claire Dederer is a journalist from Seattle and the author of two memoirs, the most well known of which is Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses. In 2017, she wrote a piece for the Paris Review entitled What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men? in which she described the experience of rewatching the early films of Woody Allen (Annie Hall, Manhattan) in the context of the allegations of abuse made against him by his adopted daughter, Dylan. The #MeToo movement was then just beginning and this piece, according to her…