J. K. Rowling, Monster?

It is not the likes of Roman Polanski, Richard Wagner, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, Pablo Picasso, Raymond Carver, Miles Davis, Ernest Hemingway, and V. S. Naipaul, but "the female monsters [that] she shies away from, most of whom traded their children for their art.  While Doris Lessing (who 'scares the bejeezuz out of me, even from the grave') left two of her offspring in Africa when she came to England, and Joni Mitchell gave up her baby for adoption, J. K. Rowling, having fallen out with many of her younger readers over gender, has apparently created a generation of orphans.  Dederer is a mettlesome writer, but when she turns to the backlash against Rowling she sounds gagged, as though afraid of the wrath of a pitchfork-wielding herd.  Rowling may be on the wrong side of history, but does that make her a monster?  Recalling her children's love of Harry Potter, Dederer's sharpness turns to whimsey:  'Hard to imagine a more delightful sight than the bland corporate halls of the Oregon Convention Center filled with shrieking eleven-year-olds swooping around in cloaks.'
     "Instead of interrogating the battle between Rowling and her readers, Dederer notes the 'deep sadness' of her fans, 'the sadness of the staining of something beloved'.  But what is striking in this case is that the art itself has not been stained.  Rowling's readers feel no ambivalence towards the world she invented; they have simply killed off its author.  I've yet to meet a fan who is struggling with the ethics of owning a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, who fears that the author's perceived transphobia might have retroactively stained everything that Rowling has to say about Hogwarts."

     Frances Wilson, reviewing Monsters:  a fan's dilemma (Sceptre, 2023), by Claire Dederer, Times literary supplement no. 6266 (May 5, 2023):  8.  Publisher's blurb:  "In this unflinching, deeply personal book that expands on her instantly viral Paris Review essay, 'What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?' Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? 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? She explores the audience's relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? 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."