Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

By 2018, Dederer recalls that she had grown accustomed to an ever-enraging, ever-dire, news cycle (she highlights the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as one of the many events that infuriated her). Her therapist tells her that “[r]age is the emotion of the powerless” (210). She looks to the life of Valerie Solanas, a radical feminist best known as the author of the SCUM Manifesto to understand feminine artistic rage. In Solanas’s calls for the eradication of men in the manifesto and her assassination attempt on Andy Warhol, Dederer sees the powerlessness to which her therapist refers. In the work of Sylvia Plath, the poet notorious for her struggles with depression and suicide, Dederer finds more power. These findings invert traditional understandings of the two women, with Solanas as an aggressor and Plath as a victim, exposing what Dederer thinks are the limits of radical feminism. Dederer wonders if her preoccupation with male monstrosity has somehow blinded her to greater truths.

Dederer describes Raymond Carver as a male “monster” with whom she has identified for most of her life. She recalls being ecstatic as a child that a world-famous poet came from the same part of the world as her.