Claire Dederer had a Roman Polanski problem. She loved the director’s movies, but in 2014, as she researched his life for a book she was writing, she couldn’t get past what she calls his “monstrousness.” He’d made Rosemary’s Baby, and he’d raped a 13-year-old girl. What was she supposed to do with this cognitive dissonance? Moreover, could she still watch Woody Allen movies? Listen to Michael Jackson’s music? She found herself less interested in the question of how a monster can make sublime art than in the audience’s problem: What to do with your love for the art when you’re disgusted by the artist? Further immersion in this question led to Dederer’s new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (Knopf, April 25).

It wasn’t a problem that could be solved by thinking, she discovered. “You do not need to have a grand unified theory about what to do about Michael Jackson,” she writes. “The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.” Speaking over Zoom from her Seattle houseboat, Dederer recently addressed this and other issues. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You say that in certain ways this is a book about broken hearts. What do you mean by that?

I think that one of the central ideas of the book is that knowledge of these artists’ biographies comes to us whether we want that knowledge or not—we can’t avoid it. And sometimes we really don’t want to know. So if you accept the idea that we can really love a work of art—and especially in that section about broken hearts, I was writing about music and the way music can become so interwoven with our lives that it almost feels like you’re speaking it yourself—and then to find out that the person who made the music has done something awful: It’s a specific kind of heartbreak. It’s just a deep sadness.

The book is called Monsters, but you’re focusing on the audience, not the artist—how the monster’s work is being received.

When I wrote my last book, Love and Trouble, I was writing about predation of young girls in the 1970s. It’s about my own experience, but I used Roman Polanski as a sort of central figure to help me think about this problem. And when I finished the book, I was still watching Roman Polanski movies, even though I knew so much about him, and I thought, Well, that’s an interesting problem. So I came to this book with this idea of the problem of my own experience. And I think I really benefited from my experience with having written two memoirs, because I was already comfortable with the idea that you can write from your own experience and, in doing so, find a way to reach your audience and have them think about their own experience. I think if I had just been coming at it as a critic, I might have balked more.

You mention that when you started writing for the New York Times Book Review, your editor told you “no swearing” and said the use of I is discouraged. It felt like in this book you were rebelling against that kind of criticism. You swear, you insist that impersonal subjects like “we” or “women” actually mean “I,” and you use a lot of exclamation points!

I think that a lot of what the book is about has to do with the irrepressibility of our enthusiasm as fans, and that’s why fans is foregrounded in the title. There were a lot of other words that came up for the subtitle, but fan held its own. And I think that irrepressibility of love for the work, and enthusiasm for the work, sort of rides through the book, and I think it does erupt syntactically in those exclamatory moments. And, you know, as a critic, that’s a really frightening thing to do. It’s vulnerable—to show that emotion, to be enthusiastic, to be a cheerleader in that particular kind of way, is not a safe place to be. But it was really important to me because, first of all, it’s very easy to talk about the argument against consuming the work, the badness of the act. It’s much harder to talk about the love of the work, so I really wanted that to animate the book.

It’s interesting that you say enthusiasm makes you vulnerable. You write about how you don’t approach criticism like you’re standing on Mount Olympus declaring a piece of art a success or failure.

When a critic makes a pronouncement like that, when they say This is the best or This was a success, that’s a way of cloaking one’s subjectivity in the garb of authority. And that can be fun, because it’s so ridiculously arguable, but it’s inherently bananas.

Does it make a difference if the artist isn’t making money from your consumption of their art?

There’s a certain kind of person who, when they hear about my book, says, “Well, you just don’t pay for their work.” And they’re sort of done and dusted; you can see them dusting off their hands. But if you start thinking about it, where do you draw the line? How do you decide what’s monstrous enough to stop paying for it? I think it’s falling back on a very limited role that we can play in a capitalist world, our role as consumers, and that that is ultimately a false sense of power and a false sense of meaning.

You say that sometimes we’re attracted to artists—male artists, mostly—because they’re assholes, not in spite of the fact. Why do you think that is?

Yeah, let me point at the history of rock. I think there are these kind of avatar figures that we allow to enact freedom, and somehow that freedom always involves being a dick. They’re performing urges and actions that we’re constrained from performing in day-to-day life. So I think they’re acting on our behalf. And also, we live in this maw of information, there’s just a constant flow of information, and being an asshole is a way of moving the plot forward. It’s something that happens, and we all get to talk about it. So on its most basic level, I don’t know if we’re attracted to that, but we’re certainly attracted to talking about it.

Is there a difference between just, say, watching Woody Allen’s Manhattan or agonizing over these questions and then watching Manhattan? What about the critic who says the artist’s biography doesn’t matter?

I like the idea that people who are critics and read all the time and think about things to the point of absurdity can agree that agonizing over it makes them a better person—so I’m tempted to just say, yeah. But what I really think is…let’s say I watch Manhattan. And I’m somebody who was predated and molested as a preteen, so that isn’t something I’m choosing to agonize over; I’m forced into a position of agonizing by that film. Whereas somebody who didn’t have that experience isn’t forced into the agonizing position. And everybody who has a history or a biography has something in art that’s going to be agonizing for them. So I guess to me, the problematizing of the consumption comes from my biography and yours, and this person’s and that person’s, and to say that the two things should be separated is to diminish a person’s biographical experience that is different from yours.

So the people who say that biography doesn’t matter are basically the people who had the same biography as the creator?

Exactly. There’s this transmission from somebody who’s from this narrow range of human experience, and then that’s called an objective appraisal of the art. But what it is, in fact, is a misunderstanding of one’s own role in history.

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.