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This, I think, is what happens to so many of us when we consider the work of the monster geniuses—we tell ourselves we’re having ethical thoughts when really what we’re having are moral feelings.
We live in a biographical moment, and if you look hard enough at anyone, you can probably find at least a little stain. Everyone who has a biography—that is, everyone alive—is either canceled or about to be canceled.
There are two kinds of people who stop drinking: those who simply don’t care for the stuff, and those who care for it too much. I was the latter kind. And when a person like me quits drinking, they are confessing, on some level, that they have become an unmanageable monster.
In a nutshell, addicts are often people who have been badly hurt—sometimes by other people, sometimes by more structural abuses like poverty and racism. When we sit in a room and accept our fellow monsters, this knowledge—of our own experiences with pain—informs that acceptance as well. We’re monsters and we’re victims.
I guess all of this is a long way of saying: monsters are just people. I don’t think I would’ve been able to accept the humanity of monsters if I hadn’t been a drunk and if I hadn’t quit. If I hadn’t been forced, in this way, to acknowledge my own monstrosity.
If I was part monster, surely people who’d done crimes were part human?
We love whether we want to or not—just as the stain happens, whether we want it to or not.
The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.
My books kept me from loneliness, all my life.
Reading is an unambiguously good thing in a life that’s been filled with mixed blessings.
What do we do with the art of monstrous men? This question is the merest gnat, buzzing around the monolith that is the bigger question: what do we do about the monstrous people we love?
Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don’t love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason.
