In many ways, he is someone who’s not only closest to my heart in terms of the work but he perfectly personifies this idea of “Good Art, Bad Person.” It’s not just that I’m some arbiter sitting up there saying, with great authority, Rosemary’s Baby is a great film. The other side of it is the emotional response to his work. So I’m coming to it with this incredibly complex emotionality of my own biographical history. There’s a much less cold experience of that story, which are my own experiences with sexual assault. It’s not just that I think what he did was wrong - which is a very cool, not as in hip but as in cold, way to put it. And, the nice thing about being an older author who is further along in your career is when something comes along that has a lot of juice, you recognize that you could spend a few years thinking about the topic.Ĭan you talk a little bit more about your initial internal dialogue on Polanksi? Part of that included an open letter to Roman Polanksi - I love his work, and I found I was still able to watch his films and I thought, ‘well this is really interesting.’ All of my books are, in some way, preoccupied with the question of how to be good, and what is goodness, so it all sort of came together. I had written a memoir called Love and Trouble, about the sexually predatory nature of the 1970s, and it looked at my own experiences of growing up as a girl who was predated upon in that era. Most of us started really heavily thinking about the art-vs-artist dilemma after the Harvey Weinstein investigative pieces what was it that led you to this topic years before the movement? Ahead of the book’s release, Dederer speaks to THR about her own fandoms that inspired the book, how society judges the work of men and women, and how she wants the book to be used. The culmination of Dederer’s years of work on the topic, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, publishes on April 25.

“That was encouraging to me as I was writing, but also to me as a citizen - to see that not everything has to have black-and-white thinking or a reductive stance.” “It looked like a hot take, but the essay had a lot of ambivalence and nuance and people responded really well,” the author tells The Hollywood Reporter. Brittany Snow Hopes Her New Mental Health Book Helps Readers Feel 'They're Not Alone'

Creating Monsters by Christopher Rankin