Claire Dederer – författare

'How rare and nourishing this sort of roaming thought is and what a joy to read'MEGAN NOLAN, Sunday Times'An exhilarating, shape-shifting exploration of the perilous boundaries between art and life'JENNY OFFILLPablo Picasso beat his partners. Richard Wagner was deeply antisemitic. David Bowie slept with an underage fan. But many of us still love Guernica and the Ring cycle and Ziggy Stardust.And what are we to do with that love? How are we, as fans, to reckon with the biographical choices of the artists whose work sustains us?Wildly smart and insightful, Monsters is an exhilarating attempt to understand our relationship with art and the artist in the twenty-first century.'An incredible book, the best work of criticism I have read in a very long time'NICK HORNBY'Part memoir, part treatise, and all treat'New York Times'Clever and provocative'Daily Telegraph

Ten years ago, Claire Dederer put her back out while breastfeeding her baby daughter. Told to try yoga by everyone from the woman behind the counter at the co-op to the homeless guy on the corner, she signed up for her first class. She fell madly in love.Over the next decade, she tackled Triangle, Wheel and the dreaded Crow, becoming fast friends with some poses and developing long-standing feuds with others. At the same time she found herself confronting the forces that shaped her generation.Daughters of women who ran away to find themselves and made a few messes along the way, Claire and her peers grew up determined to be good, good, good. Yoga seemed to fit right into this virtuous programme, but to her surprise the deeper Claire went into the poses the more they tested her most basic ideas of what goodness really means.Poser tells the story of how yoga helped Claire to discover that being joyful is sometimes more important than being good. Witty and heartfelt, sharp and irreverent, this is a book for anyone who has ever tried to stand on their head while keeping both feet on the ground.

A hilarious, confrontational and moving story of one woman's attempts to navigate her way through the challenges of mid-life, for lovers of HOW TO BE A WOMAN and I'M NOT WITH THE BAND. 'Claire Dederer is not only a brilliant author, but an honest and brave one' Elizabeth Gilbert, author of EAT, PRAY, LOVEClaire Dederer's youth was wild, an endless cascade of beer and rock and acid and sex that left her benumbed and adrift. But then, after two decades of disciplined transformation, she'd become a successful writer, a faithful wife, and a mother - a real adult. That is, until one morning at 44, she found herself overcome by the same sexual cravings and ineffable sadness of her younger years. The hedonistic girl, 'that crazy bitch', was back - or had she never left?Frank and disarming, seductive and hilarious, Love and Trouble: A Mid-life Reckoning is Dederer's attempt to reckon with those urges, and to reconcile the girl she'd been with the woman she's become.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timely, passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of cancel culture, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. Can we love the work of controversial classic and contemporary artists but dislike the artist?"A lively, personal exploration of how one might think about the art of those who do bad things" —Vanity Fair • "[Dederer] breaks new ground, making a complex cultural conversation feel brand new." —Ada Calhoun, author of Also a Poet  From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, Monsters is “part memoir, part treatise, and all treat” (The New York Times). This unflinching, deeply personal book expands on Claire Dederer’s instantly viral Paris Review essay, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?"    Can we love the work of artists such as Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Miles Davis, Polanski, or Picasso? Should we? Dederer explores the audience's relationship with artists from Michael Jackson to Virginia Woolf, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. Does genius deserve special dispensation? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss?    Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.“Monsters leaves us with Dederer’s passionate commitment to the artists whose work most matters to her, and a framework to address these questions about the artists who matter most to us." —The Washington PostA Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Vulture, Elle, Esquire, Kirkus

From the New York Times best-selling author of Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, a ferocious, sexy, hilarious memoir about going off the rails at midlife and trying to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become. Claire Dederer is a happily married mother of two, ages nine and twelve, when she suddenly finds herself totally despondent and, simultaneously, suffering through a kind of erotic reawakening. This exuberant memoir shifts between her present experience as a middle-aged mom in the grip of mysterious new hungers and herself as a teenager--when she last experienced life with such heightened sensitivity and longing. From her hilarious chapter titles ("How to Have Sex with Your Husband of Seventeen Years") to her subjects--from the boyfriend she dumped at fourteen the moment she learned how to give herself an orgasm, to the girls who ruled her elite private school ("when I left Oberlin I thought I had done with them forever, but it turned out ...they also edited all the newspapers and magazines, and wrote all the books"), to raising a teenage daughter herself--Dederer writes with an electrifying blend of wry wit and raw honesty. She exposes herself utterly, and in doing so captures something universal about the experience of being a woman, a daughter, a wife.From the Hardcover edition.

The must-read book for fans everywhere ''How rare and nourishing this sort of roaming thought is and what a joy to read''MEGAN NOLAN, Sunday Times

''An exhilarating, shape-shifting exploration of the perilous boundaries between art and life''JENNY OFFILL

Pablo Picasso beat his partners. Richard Wagner was deeply antisemitic. David Bowie slept with an underage fan. But many of us still love Guernica and the Ring cycle and Ziggy Stardust.

And what are we to do with that love? How are we, as fans, to reckon with the biographical choices of the artists whose work sustains us?

Wildly smart and insightful, Monsters is an exhilarating attempt to understand our relationship with art and the artist in the twenty-first century.

''An incredible book, the best work of criticism I have read in a very long time'' NICK HORNBY''Part memoir, part treatise, and all treat'' New York Times''Clever and provocative'' Daily Telegraph