Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of rape, sexual assault, pedophilia, suicide and suicidal ideation, antisemitism and racism, anti-trans bias, genocide, domestic violence, and alcohol use disorder.

In spring 2014, Claire Dederer sets out to make sense of Roman Polanski, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker and convicted child rapist. She is plagued by the question of how, as a viewer, to reconcile an artist’s monstrous actions with their beautiful art. Combing through Polanski’s films, she hopes to come up with a clear-cut answer to this question by watching all of his movies and reaching out to former professors who might be able to share relevant literature with her. Frustratedly, however, she realizes no such answer exists. She also realizes that the problem of consuming beautiful art made by a “monstrous” person might not be solvable by thinking, but rather by feeling.

Dederer sets out to write what she calls an “autobiography of the audience,” that will place emphasis on the reception of problematic artists, rather than on the problematic artists themselves. At the time begins writing, she’s unaware of the impending #MeToo Movement, which will place the questions she is trying to answer through her writing at the heart of the American zeitgeist in the late 2010s.