Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

We haven't been short of think pieces on the subject of, to borrow the title of Claire Dederer's viral 2017 essay that was one of the seeds of this book, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men," but perhaps that makes a book like this even more necessary. It's the opposite of the quick takes we're used to: she turns her subject over and over, looking at it, and herself, and ourselves—the people who make art and the people who love it—from every angle. It's the first book of hers that likely won't be shelved in "Memoirs," but it's still deeply (and, as always with her writing, appealingly) personal, and ultimately a moving examination of why we love art, and why we keep loving it. I'm tempted to call this the last word on the subject, but her passionately open-ended approach makes clear that there's no such thing.