Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

I so thoroughly enjoyed this book, and in large part of what Dederer doesn't do: she's not preachy, she's not minimizing of the severity of her task (making sense of the art of “monsters”). Rather, she takes seriously both the work of some many great and their crimes, moral if not also legal. She does this while taking you along for the ride and forcing (helping?) you interrogate how you square what you love with what you believe, as she does so well in this passage:

“[W]ho is this ‘we' that's always turning up in critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking the mantle of easy authority. It's the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist. Can you? When I say ‘we', I mean I. I mean you“