"Ooof I think Claire Dederer mentions praxis only once in this book and it shows. Maybe some people find this book helpful and I don't want to poo-poo them. I don't think this book is entirely without merit, but I also don't think that this book is the "ambitious" book that the author says is her goal nor is it a deep dive into the question of meaningful art created by monstrous people that the book advertises itself as. I will separate this review into the reasons I did not like this book:

1. It feels fundamentally dishonest
I think what I find frustrating is that this book feels to me like a dishonest attempt to address the subject this book claims to be about. The question the author is actually interested in asking is "Am I a Monster?" and "What do we do with the people we love who are monsters?" which I do not think is about art or celebrities. She gives some lip service to evaluating parasocial natures of relationships but does not seem interested in actually examining that in-depth or even really acknowledging the author's own conception of art or genius that is in and of itself inherently parasocial. Which is weird because she is constantly reminding the reader of her own subjectivity, which like I get it I've read Derrida too, but I feel like if she were truly leaning into her own subjectivity she would admit that part of her motive for even evaluating this question is to reaffirm her own humanity for the unnamed bad things she did while an alcoholic and reckon with the ability to still love people who have harmed us.

Instead the book neither really evaluates the question of good art by bad people nor how we conceive of or enact justice or forgiveness. I don't know Claire Dederer and this might be a mean thing to say, but from my outsider perspective it feels like Dederer is not actually interested in answering or investigating these questions at all and in fact the ending is just like "I guess we love people who hurt us oh well" which almost seems like what someone who does not want to reckon with their own monstrousness would say.

2. It feels out of touch both in the culture and in the discourse around this subject
Listening to this book, mostly the end but also at certain points throughout, was a less uncomfortable version of watching that scene in °Õá°ù where Cate Blanchett continuously bullies a non-binary Julliard student of color for deciding to opt out of performing and promoting the music of people who would've had no respect for them as brown person and for their non-patriarchal gender identity. They want their respect for the artist to be met with an artist's respect for their inherent humanity. °Õá°ù is threatened by this both because she gained and maintains her power in the industry through her complicity in upholding these oppressive power structures despite her oppression under these same structures and therefore does not meet this requirement and because she has deep emotional "art love" (Dederer's phrase) for these "important" "genius" composers. Like °Õá°ù, it does not feel like Dederer is interested in exploring what happens if we decide to open our heart to "art love" for people who are (to our knowledge) not exploiting the power they have been given in society. If we, like the Julliard student, want to opt out of this system how do we find the people to replace the monsters? How do we help them exist in a fundamentally exploitative system? Can funding art and creators through platforms like Patreon disrupt these exploitative systems or does it reproduce them differently? Are so many celebrities monstrous because monstrous people are drawn to power and acclaim or because the system that they are in encourages or even creates monstrous behavior? Dederer might not be interested in these questions but many people are interested in these questions and are evaluating them. This is where the discourse is going, not "is it ok to like David Bowie?"

Furthermore her examples of monstrous people just seem stale and bordering on irrelevance. My children might never see a Woody Allen movie, not because I will refuse to show it to them and not because he doesn't have great films that can't still hold meaning outside of his philandry and pedophilia, but because his works are becoming culturally irrelevant. Who we are as a society is changing and I would not be surprised if some of my favorite Allen films like Crimes and Misdemeanors, Radio Days, and Scoop do not resonant with my future Gen Alpha children because what we consider important as a society and the questions we think are interesting are changing. I never liked Annie Hall not because it isn't a "good" film, but because who Annie Hall is and what she represents changed between its release and when I saw the film in my twenties. In our post manic-pixie dream girl world I'm not charmed by Annie Hall and in a world where we are unlearning and unpacking our fetishization of relationships with age gaps I am in no way invested in her relationship with Allen (fyi I saw this film before I knew anything of Allen's personal life). The magic of Annie Hall (except that Christopher Walken scene, which still slaps) rings as false and unbelievable as the Orientalist magician from Oedipus Wrecks. As a society we are fundamentally questioning the importance of upholding and including the (mostly white male) figures that we uphold as "important" and "genius". We are rewriting the canon and in schools we are starting to evaluate books as "relevant" and "relatable" instead, replacing 1984 with The Hunger Games , The Scarlet Letter with All Boys Aren't Blue , and Cry, the Beloved Country with The Hate U Give . And this is good actually especially since classic or more difficult texts are not eradicated entirely but instead exist alongside contemporary work. Dederer mentions people in passing who are culturally relevant and are still shaping society like Elon Musk and Kanye West but decides to focus on Doris Lessing and Roman Polanski instead? This book almost ages out of its own relevance before it is even published.

She tries to critique the construct of the genius but simultaneously upholds it by attributing the value of the film to the person that we attribute the creative vision to, ignoring other people who contribute to the art. Do I love Psycho because of undeniable asshole Alfred Hitchcock's directing and does it belong to him? Or do I love Alma Reville's keen eye for editing and Anthony Perkins' bewiling performance as Norman Bates and George Milo's evocative set design and Bernard Hermann's chilling, discordant score? Whether Hogwarts Legacy or Space Jam, people are asking how involved a monstrous person needs to be in a project in order to withdraw support and is it inadvertently punishing the other artists involved in the project who were not party to the abuse? By making each chapter about a different monstrous person and attributing the inherent quality of worthiness to their art she simultaneous upholds the construct of genius by saying that it is their something special that makes the art good while erasing the other people who collaborate on and create the art and ignoring questions that are more relevant to the current direction of the discourse.

3. It's argument is cynical and not backed up by facts and lacks praxis
When Dederer finally does make an argument almost 7 hours in for how we should evaluate meaningful art by monstrous people her answer boils down to more or less the structure of capitalism cannot be brought down through capitalist action of withholding capitol and then for the remainder of the 8 hour text returns to her personal anxiety and experiences. She does not list any examples of this not working (and there are many) nor does she collect or present statistics about say the financial effects or lack thereof of cancellation or boycott on celebrities. While there are undoubtedly many examples to support her point, what do we do with the examples that do not fit her point? Kevin Spacey and Roseanne Barr were fired and replaced from their own TV shows and have been mostly out of work and culturally irrelevant since. Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson lost their biggest platform and reach only a fraction of their former audience on Twitter. R. Kelly won his 2008 court case for sexual abuse of a minor WITH VIDEO EVIDENCE but lost his recent cases in no small part because boycotts of his work changed his ability to fund his legal fees. While I agree that "voting with your dollar" cannot be the end all be all of change and that we need to think of other strategies to affect change, we currently live in a capitalist system and I think we should also do this if it can sometimes affect change as shown above. I'm open to Dederer's argument but I won't be convinced by a short chapter where the only citations are from economic and social theorists and there is no hard data to back up her point and credible arguments against her theory are not evaluated and addressed.

Speaking of erasure, she has an entire chapter reflecting on the erasure of Dolores Hayes in the text of Lolita and how society often silences victims of abuse, but does not include the thoughts and opinions of the victims on the questions she purports to be interested in asking. Many victims of abusive celebrities are still alive and probably have feelings and opinions on the existence of the art. She seems to only bring up these opinions when they benefit her argument, such as with the woman who was raped by Roman Polanksi as a teen. Rowan Farrow, a victim of Woody Allen's parental abuse, did in fact call for a boycott of Allen's work when he exposed his father's misdeeds. Dederer could frame this in the context of victim centered justice, where the feelings and desires of the victims are considered above what our traditional pathways of justice are, but then that would require that Dederer be interested in the current evolving discourse around the topic that she is writing about. The things highlighted most in Dederer's text continue to be from those who are not involved in the despicable acts that she is trying to judge.

However, as mentioned above, Claire Dederer seems ultimately disinterred in actually evaluating a lot of the deeper questions around these phenomena and I think this is for two reasons. Part of this is her personal desire to humanize the category that she identifies with - monster - and the other is because she seems to believe that people are fundamentally interested in this question for some sort of desire to be "good" and promote their morality and separate themselves from those they call monsters. Dederer seems to be interested in evaluating this as a philosophical question and therefore her answer is a philosophical answer about theory and ideas. But real people were and are being hurt by these people. She quotes a woman who experienced sexual abuse's changing relationship with Miles Davis, but not those who experienced sexual abuse by prominent artists. Everything is one level removed. Were none of Danny Masterson's victim's available for comment? Could you not find anyone actually working on enacting alternate means of justice willing to be interviewed?

This is where the sense of cynicism comes from. The system is corrupt and this thing that we think can do something actually won't do anything and instead of spending time evaluating alternative systems or looking at work people are doing to dismantle it or listening to the people who are actively being harmed, she says we should just stop worrying about it and just watch/read/listen to the things by bad people. Which makes sense if you think, like she states, that people are fundamentally interested in this for some sort of virtue signaling. What she fundamentally fails to grasp is that these strategies and conflicts exist because people want to do better, people want to fix injustice. It's not just about convincing yourself and others that you are not a monster but understanding the practical effects of what is happening to people and trying to create a better world. "Voting with your dollar" is the only avenue that some people have been exposed to to make a difference and if you truly feel like we should throw that strategy in the trash, the most practical thing you can do is expose readers to things they can do instead.

Two stars for the very good chapter on Lolita and the banality of evil and for giving Wrock the respect it deserves."