Friday Q&A + Links

We're talking to the smartypants author and critic Claire Dederer, and in links, we're learning about Dolly Parton's morning routine and more.

I am such a fan of Claire’s: she writes, in her most recent book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, about the tricky topic of loving the art of bad people. And she does so remarkably engagingly, and so without pretension. She’s the kind of writer you feel smarter after reading, and completists will want to check out her two previous books as well, both memoirs: Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses and the remarkable Love and Trouble: a Midlife Reckoning.

Your most recent book, Monsters, was reviewed pretty rapturously, and made so many year-end best-of lists. How easy or hard do you find it to embrace this level of success?

It’s not so easy for me. I was really braced for this book to start an argument. (And it did, to some degree.) This is a challenging moment to publish into, but especially challenging for a book that takes on issues around #MeToo. I was also worried about publishing a book where the plot, such as it is, involves me just, you know, thinking for a couple hundred pages. I was really surprised that so many people connected with the book, took it on its own terms and read it as I hoped it would be read–as a personal exploration rather than a series of pat answers. I’m a person who naturally focuses on the negative–a critic, after all. Every night at bedtime, my boyfriend made me spend a few minutes thinking about the good things that happened that day with the book’s reception. 

If you couldn’t have been a writer, what would you have done?

Oh, lord. I had absolutely no bright ideas about things I might be other than a writer. This was the only thing I ever really wanted to do. When I was in grade school, I used to write little chapter books about pioneer girls with long braids and dead parents. When I was in my twenties, I worked for a while as a book editor, but this was strictly because I was afraid of pushing all my chips in on writing. Becoming a writer was more about overcoming my fear than anything else. 

When I was about 10 years old, I did have a brief fantasy of running a hotel in the Alps, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count.