“Can I still listen to David Bowie?” That’s the question the essayist Claire Dederer hears over and over when speaking at colleges. Bowie had been a hero of Dederer’s own youth and of her adulthood, a musician whose strangeness reassured Dederer and her fellow misfits that “when we ourselves felt alien, we might take comfort in the idea that we lived among a secret race, our true family.” But after Bowie’s death in 2016, an as-told-to article in Thrillist resurfaced in which a groupie revealed that she had lost her virginity to the rock star at the age of 15. “All of a sudden, the bedroom door opens and there is Bowie in this fucking beautiful red and orange and yellow kimono,” the woman, Lori Mattix, recalled with wistful pleasure, but many contemporary readers didn’t see it that way.
Maybe a rock star deflowering an extremely willing groupie in the 1970s doesn’t seem particularly horrifying to you. (“Who wouldn’t want to lose their virginity to David Bowie?” Mattix said.) But when you believe an act to be wrong and regard the person committing it to be an avatar of yourself, it’s hard not to feel betrayed and even implicated in the misdeed—and wonder what that means for the art you once loved. The story left Dederer—and, apparently, a lot of college students—feeling “horrified and sad.” Were it some other, more conventional rocker of the period, that would be tolerable, but not “our guy.” Could they still listen to Bowie? How could they not?
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is Dederer’s book-length exploration of those two questions, expanded from an essay she published in the Paris Review in 2017, “What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?” It wrestles with how she—as a reader, filmgoer, art lover, and audience member—negotiates the difference between her moral values and what she calls her “art love.” The book is tangled and fascinating, chasing down arguments and questions that can’t always be easily resolved. Dederer’s shrewd, vivid descriptions of movies and books suggest just how much they mean to her and how deeply any sacrifices on the altar of contemporary sexual ethics might cut.
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