American · b. 1967
Claire Dederer is an American critic and memoirist, born in 1967 in Seattle, Washington, where she still lives, on a boat. She began as a film critic at the Seattle Weekly before moving into freelance essays and criticism for outlets including The New York Times. Her first two books, Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses (2011) and Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning (2017), are memoirs built around the practice of self-scrutiny. Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma (2023), a National Bestseller and New York Times Notable Book, expanded her viral Paris Review essay "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" into a book-length reckoning with how audiences separate, or fail to separate, great art from the misdeeds of the people who make it. Ranging across Woody Allen, Picasso, Michael Jackson, and Nabokov, the book argues that the discomfort of loving flawed artists' work is not a problem to be solved but a feeling to be lived inside. Dederer writes with the same unflinching self-interrogation she directs at her subjects, refusing tidy verdicts in favor of sustained ambivalence.