Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma came out in 2023, a year before Alice Munro devotees had to reckon with the book’s central question: what do we do when an artist’s reprehensible behaviour curdles our appreciation of their work?
A writer friend recommended Monsters over coffee one day, when several of us were glumly dissecting the cognitive dissonance that had set in following the news of Munro’s silence, neglect, complicity—even what to call it was in question—in connection with the sexual abuse of her daughter. We talked about other fallen stars, like Joseph Boyden, Woody Allen, J.K. Rowling. The writer Sherman Alexie was not mentioned, but he was there, in my thoughts. He was? is? one of my favourite writers. I’d felt a visceral blow on learning that multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct in 2018.
Monsters is a smart, wry, readable blend of criticism and memoir that approaches the stained artist and their work from many angles, one of them personal (“Am I a monster?” Dederer asks.) From Roman Polanski to Michael Jackson, Doris Lessing to Miles Davis, Dederer juxtaposes behaviours we revile against creations that we may still, somehow, admire and sometimes love. She wonders if there’s a kind of moral calculus we could use to assess an artist’s actions—how destructive they were, how immoral, how (un)forgivable—alongside the work itself and how beautiful, unique, and transcendent we find it to be. Dederer is too nuanced a thinker to lay out such a calculus, but she suggests factors that might go into it.
I finished Monsters earlier today. An hour later, I put You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Sherman Alexie’s 2017 memoir, on my to-read list. It’s not that Monsters gave me permission to read Alexie again; nor did it withhold permission. What the book did is to remind me of how I’ve felt while reading his work, how I’ve savoured every word and character, how I’ve been moved again and again by his searing layers of pain, laughter, and humanity.
I love Sherman Alexie, I used to gush. “It’s too easy,” Dederer writes, “when we’re running the calculus, to forget love. Love that is a quiet voice next to the louder call of (even deserved) public shaming.”
— Frances Peck edited and rewrote other people’s words before rediscovering her own. Her first novel, The Broken Places, was a 2022 Globe and Mail best book and a finalist for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. Her second, Uncontrolled Flight, landed on several book-of-the-year lists. Visit her at www.francespeck. com. “What Was Her Name” was originally commissioned by the Fraser Valley Writers Festival for their 2023 festival.
You can read Frances Peck’s story "What Was Her Name" in Issue 304 (Summer Creative Nonfiction 2025). Order the issue now:
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