The Seattle native Claire Dederer – best known for her book Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses – has been publishing reviews for more than two decades, boasting bylines in the New York Times and the Atlantic. Indeed, her 2017 Paris Review essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”, published during the height of the #MeToo movement, went “viral” – as the copy for the book commissioned off that essay, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, proudly states.
Yet even after all that time – and a half decade’s labour on her new release – Dederer confesses that she’s not all that sure if there is a point to criticism. In one of this book’s many memoiristic passages – it is more memoir than criticism – she harkens back to her days as a young writer for the Seattle Weekly. When she attended film screenings with other critics from the area, she found herself filled with disdain for the self-serious attitudes of her (overwhelmingly male) peers.
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