Am I A Monster?

An excerpt from Claire Dederer's new book, Monsters.

More than a few of you will remember Claire Dederer’s viral Paris Review essay, “What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?” The question she posed was so thorny, so engrossing, and so pressing, that it required further investigation. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, arrives today and it’s fucking excellent. Erudite and unpretentious, ruthlessly honest, a searching self portrait as well as moral inventory of good artists doing bad things. My friend, artist Terri Loewenthal, recently referred to a conversation we had as “smart people candy,” and that, my friends, is the best way I can describe Monsters.

This piece spoke to me at every level. I often wonder about the monstrosity of motherhood (Lisa Taddeo and I talked about it when Animal was released), the monstrosity of artists, their intrinsic narcissism, and if you’ve read Sweetbitter or Stray, I’ve used monsters in both. Tess is called a “baby monster” as her appetites take over, threaten to undo her. In the memoir, my semi-affectionate name for an ex who deeply hurt me was The Monster. As an adolescent I had a fondness for Nietzsche’s monster, and later for Clarice Lispector’s. I think it’s that I aspire to monstrosity, with its totalizing needs and wants, and find myself disappointingly soft, human.

One housekeeping note, thank you for reading my last essay about cooking and my mother. I was hesitant to publish it, and I’m grateful to my editor, friends, and sister who urged me forward. I don’t know what viral is, but over fifteen thousand people have read it. That means some of you sent it to a friend. Thank you.

Next week, your April recommendations, then paid subscribers will get an in depth look at Beat Sheets. Sending love to you and yours. Now over to Claire Dederer…

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Am I a monster? I’ve never killed anyone. Am I a monster? I’ve never promulgated fascism. Am I monster? I didn’t molest a child. Am I a monster? I haven’t been accused by dozens of women of drugging and raping them. Am I a monster? I don’t beat my children. (YET.) Am I a monster? I’m not noted for my anti-Semitism. Am I a monster? I’ve never presided over a sex cult where I trapped young women in a gilded Atlanta mansion and forced them to do my bidding. Am I a monster? I didn’t anally rape a thirteen-year-old.

Look at all the awful things I haven’t done. Maybe I’m not a monster.

Even so, I’ve bumped along through life, like any human, totting up at least my fair share of bad behavior. And moreover I’ve done this: Written a book. Written another book. Written essays and articles and criticism. And maybe that makes me monstrous, in a very specific kind of way.

The critic Walter Benjamin is said to have stated: “At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism.” I wonder: At the base of every minor work of art, is there a, you know, smaller pile of barbarism? A lump of barbarism? A skosh? (Further investigation reveals that what Benjamin actually wrote was closer to this translation: “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.” This tightens the noose a bit, I think.)

There are many qualities one must possess to be a work- ing writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shut- ting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.

I have to wonder: maybe I’m not monstrous enough. I’m aware of my own failings as a writer—indeed I know the list to a fare-thee-well, and worse are the failures that I know I’m failing to know—but a little part of me has to ask: If I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness?

Every writer-mother I know has asked herself this question. I mean, none of them says it out loud. But I can hear them think- ing it; it’s almost deafening. Does one identity fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That’s the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: is your mother- hood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.

As a child, I believed there were four kinds of person you could be, and I had them not-quite-consciously ranked in my head:

man

boy

girl

woman

I dreaded being a woman. And maybe I was onto something. Almost all the grown-up women I knew were mothers, and even then I balked at the selflessness that motherhood seemed to call for. Motherhood seemed to me a dead end, a death of the self.

As an adult, I’ve found the unselfishness of motherhood one of my great trials and my great gifts. The erosion of the self that comes with motherhood has been very difficult on every meaningful level—personally and politically. (What a world of pain is contained in those cool words.) But it’s also been the making of me. It’s taught me how to be a person who is for something other than myself. I’m not saying the childless don’t learn that lesson as well—I’m saying that, in my case, it was motherhood that taught it to me.

The exigencies of motherhood are inexorable. You will be forced into selflessness, once you’ve become a mother.

But what if you also happen to be an artist?

For the everyday kind of artist—not your groupie-fucking rock star or what have you—the drama of selfishness gets played out within a particular context: the context of the family. What the artist or writer or musician needs desperately is time. And what the family needs is time. This conflict is not necessarily solvable. In her aphoristic memoir 300 Arguments, Sarah Manguso writes: “It can be worth forgoing marriage for sex, and it can be worth forgoing sex for marriage. It can be worth forgo- ing parenthood for work, and it can be worth forgoing work for parenthood. Every case is orthogonal to all the others. That’s the entire problem.” The art/family problem is, or feels, orthogonal. (Though that word makes me feel a little like I’m a project lead at Microsoft.)

The truth is, art-making and parenthood act very efficiently as disincentives to one another, and people who say otherwise are deluded, or childless, or men.

All writers struggle to find our way into that blessed place: a room with a door that locks from the inside, against the family. The writer alone, in a space with a door that closes against the world: that’s the very picture of happiness. Some imagi- nary ideal mother-writer might not mind a knock at the door, but most of us don’t have beautiful natures and we really mind being interrupted. Doris Lessing wrote in her memoir Under My Skin: “Very few people—perhaps one in fifty?—respect women’s privacy. If you say, ‘I spend my mornings writing’ that will not prevent the furtive knock on the door, and then a moment later, the guilty, embarrassed, smiling face appearing around the edge of the door. ‘I’ve just dropped in for a second.’ ”

Philip Larkin gets at this ideal state of pure selfishness in his poem “The Life with a Hole in It.”

. . . the shit in the shuttered chateau

Who does his five hundred words

Then parts out the rest of the day

Between bathing and booze and birds

Larkin shows us the ideal writer’s life: the (male) author whose needs are tended to, whose emotional connections are secondary to his work, whose selfishness is unquestioned, whose freedom is total. I mean, it sounds heavenly, right? From the point of view of a regular well-adjusted member of society, you would think that loneliness would be a serious problem. If you retreat from the world, and serve only your own needs, you’re bound to get lonely, right? The thing is, writers don’t really get lonely. Liking being alone—even liking loneliness itself—is part of what makes a writer a writer. After I had children, I was an almost full-time mom, working about a quarter time at freelance writing. I thought to myself, how lucky that I am a writer, so that when I am working I get all this lovely restorative alone time. It was years before I realized: Oh. I became a writer so I could be alone all the time. It wasn’t a by-product, it was a motivator.

The kinds of lives that are typically thought of as nice by non-writers, lives that involve things like unending vacations; things like never having to work again—these kinds of lives don’t sound nice to writers. Not really. Writers want to be left alone to write, and be waited on.

The female artists and writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in offhand ha-ha-ha ways: “I wish I had a wife.” What does that mean, really? It means you wish to aban- don the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist.

What if I’m not monster enough?

In a way, I’d been asking this question privately, for years, of a couple male writer friends I believe to be actually great— including the Manhattan-admiring man of letters I mentioned earlier. I write them both charming emails, but really I am always trying to find out: How selfish are you? Or to put it another way: How selfish do I need to be, to become as great as you?

I made friends with these men, flirted with them . . . for what? For thrills of course. I’m not a nun. But also I wanted details of how they got their work done. How did they arrange their lives?

When one described working through Thanksgiving and Christmas, I made a note of it. When another described leaving his wife with their child so he could work while they vacationed in Nova Scotia, I said to myself, hmm. It turned out, of course, that they in fact didn’t arrange their lives. That was the essential point. They had someone else, a wife, to do it for them. In the main.

Of course, to have someone arrange your life, you must believe in yourself, in the value of the thing you are making. Many years ago, at a smoky drunken party, I was chatting with a pal who recently published a novel. “You should buy it,” he drawled. “It’s a very important book.” (Unwittingly, the novelist was echoing Gauguin and his near-lunatic self-confidence: “I am a great artist and I know it.”)

For years thereafter my artist friend Victoria and I tried in vain to copy the novelist when we talked about our own work: “It’s a very important book,” I attempted. “It’s a very important paint- ing,” she tried. We couldn’t make ourselves do it, with a straight face, in public. We collapsed in laughter.

But, really, what’s so funny about saying your life’s work is important?

And if you can’t say your work is important, how can you, well, do it?

Ambition and self-confidence are all bound up together. Ambi- tion is the thing that men have. In my usage here, “ambition” is an entirely positive word. Ambition is the key that turns the lock of art. Ambition simply means this: I’m not just trying to make something . . . I’m trying to make something great.

It turns out this is not such an easy word, for women. When the word is used about a woman, it is a pejorative. An ambitious woman is to be castigated or mistrusted. An ambitious woman is severed, perhaps tragically, from some essential feminine softness. (In my inmost child-of-the-eighties heart, the idea of an ambitious woman always makes me think of Leona Helms- ley, hair high, lipstick dark, screaming at her underlings.)

When the word is used by a woman, it’s seen as hubristic at best, and possibly a sign of total madness.

A few years ago I told my (former) male shrink I was trying to write an ambitious book. I said it falteringly. I was, in fact, afraid to say it. This is just the kind of thing you’re supposed to bring to your shrink, right? Not just your ambition but your shame and embarrassment about your ambition?

Me: I want . . . to write . . . a very . . . ambitious? Book.

Gerald, my ancient Jungian shrink, from underneath his shrinky nimbus of white hair, his antennae almost visibly prickling: Talk more about that.

Me: I just want to write something that attempts greatness. I want to be more       ambitious in my work.

Gerald: I think we should talk about that. Where does this ambition come from?

Me: I guess from being a, um, writer?

Gerald: I wonder how we can address this issue of ambition.

Me, confused: By trying to write a great book?

Gerald: Do you think it has something to do with your father?

The idea that my ambition might be a virtue and not a symptom—that didn’t occur to Gerald. To be fair, not every man pathologizes every woman’s ambition. One day, while out for a walk with a male writer, in the midst of a very serious heart- felt conversation about my memoir, I screwed up my courage and blurted: “I want to write a great book.” Without breaking his stride, he said expressionlessly, “Welcome to the Thunder- dome,” and we continued our walk, with me feeling secretly buoyant, as if I’d swallowed a balloon.

Another scene: One evening not too long ago I sat in the cha- otic, book-strewn living room of a younger writer and her husband, also a writer. Their kids were tucked into bed upstairs; the occasional yawp floated down from above.

My friend was in the thick of it. Her three kids were in grade school and her husband had a full-time job while she tried to carve out her career freelancing and writing books. A cloud of intense literary ambition hung over the house like a stormy little microclimate. It was a work night; we all should’ve been in bed. Instead, we were drinking wine and talking about writing. The husband was being very charming to me, by which I mean he laughed at all my jokes. He was also tightly wound and overly alert, perhaps because he was not having success with his writing. He reminded me of an avid dog. The wife on the other hand was having success—a lot of success—with her writing. She was also completely exhausted—if he was a dog, she was a pile of laundry with a woman residing somewhere inside of it.

She mentioned a short story she’d just written and published.

“Oh, you mean the most recent occasion for your abandoning me and the kids?” asked the very smart, very charming husband.

The wife had been a monster, monster enough to be ambitious, monster enough to finish the work. The husband had not.

This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always. The female monster is Doris Lessing leav- ing two children behind to go live the writer’s life in London. The female monster is Sylvia Plath, whose self-crime was bad enough, but worse still: the children whose nursery she taped off beforehand. Never mind the bread and milk she set out for them, a kind of terrible poem unto itself. She dreamed of eating men like air, but what was truly monstrous was simply leaving her children motherless.

Maybe, as a female writer, you don’t kill yourself, or abandon your children. But you abandon something, some giving part of yourself. When you finish a book, what lies littered on the ground are small broken things: broken dates, broken promises, broken engagements. Also other, more important forgettings and failures: children’s homework left unchecked, parents left un-telephoned, spousal sex un-had. Those things have to get broken for the book to get written.

Sure, I possess the ordinary monstrousness of any real-life person, the unknowable depths, the suppressed Hyde. But I also have a more visible, quantifiable kind of monstrousness—that of the artist who completes her work. Finishers are always monsters. Woody Allen didn’t just try to make a film a year; he tried to put out a film a year.

For me the particular monstrousness of completing my work has always closely resembled loneliness: leaving behind the family, posting up in a borrowed cabin or a cheaply bought motel room. If I can’t detach myself entirely, then I’m hiding in my chilly office, wrapped in scarves and fingerless gloves, a fur hat plopped upon my head, going hell for leather, just trying to finish.

The ambition and the finishing: These are what make the artist. The artist must be monster enough not just to start the work, but to complete it. And to commit all the little savageries that lie in between.

My friend and I had done nothing more monstrous than expecting someone to mind our children while we finished our work. That’s not as bad as rape or even, say, forcing someone to watch while you jerk off into a potted plant.

It might sound as though I’m conflating two things—male predators and female finishers—in a troubling way. And I am. Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.

As a memoir writer, it’s my job to answer the question: What is it that I am feeling, exactly? Not what am I meant to feel, or what is it politic to feel, or what is it convenient to feel. As Hemingway says in Death in the Afternoon, the greatest dif- ficulty in writing is “knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel.” And when I am honest, when I really examine what’s actu- ally going on, I have to admit that I have felt like I’m a terrible person when I shut the necessary door on my children in order to work. I’m not accusing women artists of being terrible people, only of feeling like terrible people. This is important because it affects how and when and if we make work.

When women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel like terrible mothers. Oops, slipped into “we.” When I do the writing that needs to be done, I some- times feel like a terrible mother. And because motherhood is so close to the core of me, I feel like a terrible person. Like a monster.

Hemingway’s wife, the writer Martha Gellhorn, didn’t think the artist needed to be a monster; she thought the monster needed to make himself into an artist. “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” (I guess she would know.) She’s saying if you’re a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you are going to do to it. In a way, this is a feminist revision of all of art history; a history she turns with a single acid, brilliant line into a morality tale of compensation.

But the question has to be asked: Are all ambitious artists monsters? Are all finishers monsters? Tiny voice: [Am I a monster?]

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Adapted from Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma © 2023 by Claire Dederer. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.