Finishers are Always Monsters.

On the brilliant work of Claire Dederer and Jenny Offill and monstrosity

In Claire Dederer’s really wonderful and amazing book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (which has a gorgeous new cover for the paperback) she meditates on all kinds of monsters who make art. And then in addition to those monsters—or maybe this list is one and the same?—there are “art monsters,” a phrase that came form Jenny Offill’s novel Department of Speculation, which I also loved. In the novel, the character wants to escape the demands of life and become an “art monster,” someone whose desire for creative work flies in the face of her sense of what’s expected behavior for her gender. If art is “selfish,” mothering is “selfless,” meaning that while moms who make art aren’t monsters, they might feel monstrous.

Dederer includes herself in her remarkable book, asking herself where she fits in the spectrum of monstrosity. She asks herself about the effects of the fierce attention required to write and make things while parenting and loving. And at one point she writes, “Finishers are always monsters.” Dederer calls herself a finisher, pointing out the fierce and determined energy required not only to steal time to make art and continue a long conversation with one’s self, but also the extra level of fierceness required to complete things.

Image on left of Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation with an image of space punctured by circles through which you can see the text of author and title, and on right an image of Dederer's paperback cover, text and images in red, with image of two women below, one covering her eyes and one wincing with a hand to her chest.

I am a finisher: a monstrous, determined, focused, hawk-eyed creator of Word documents that then are resolutely attached to emails.

She asks about the quality of fierce attention, and if it steals from one’s children or family. I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot, remembering the fierce gaze I would turn on my son or husband when they interrupted me in a thought. It would be like if I were metal-smithing and had turned to them with an acetylene torch still lit.

I have had guilt—or maybe it’s shame—about the quality of my intense gaze when making things for a LONG time. It always felt somehow unkind, unnatural, which is I think the exact essence that the phrase “art monster” captures for so many, because I also know I was born to be an art monster. There is no love, there is no me, there is no family, without also the intensity of creation.

And of course I think there’s something about chronic pain and probably undiagnosed ADHD and anxiety, all of the summoning and fierce gathering of attention required to focus in the face of the world, against all the background noise telling me I shouldn’t want to make things, because making is evidence of having self-esteem, of wanting to express myself, of being curious, of wanting to be in dialogue with the world—all of those things that supposedly were not my right to claim.

I accidentally put out three books in three years—though I would say this was less the result of determination than the soul-chilling brush with death that long covid and personal crisis brought. I wanted to clear the decks while I was still alive. But right: I finish shit.

I understand completely how the concept of the art monster is liberatory—the phrase has spawned books and workshops and conversations and everything. I also love how the phrase creates a being, an image in one’s mind, as opposed to the silence of being a guilty contradiction. And yet, not to disagree with Offill but to set myself slightly outside the stream of conversation, I don’t feel like a monster. In the Frankenstein story, the monster is actually the scientist who created this mixture of parts and made it live, impelled by ego to play god. And poor Frankenstein’s monster was just misunderstood and neglected, like so many monsters. And then there’s the disability angle of the word “monster,” which would have us believe that non-standard bodies and minds are monstrous. And chronic pain is horrifying to many, with the very idea of it, or the expression of it, causing those without pain to recoil in despair, disgust, incomprehension.

I really don’t feel like a monster because I feel as though my work has dignity and intelligence. It it created in quiet, and if there is chaos, it is careful chaos. I’m not trying to raze cities or fuck shit up for no reason. I see my work as careful, and hopefully as adding to conversations with people I’ve learned from and been inspired by. (Although one could say, and this might also be true, that my ability to feel this quiet dignity is enabled by the space that the phrase creates.)

I get how the word “monster” allows a person to channel and feel fierce abandon. And I love the act of taking a pejorative like “queer” and reclaiming it. But I don’t feel that way about the word “monster.” I’ve been called too many negative things, so that they are still a drum-beat in my head. I don’t want another noun. Sometimes I just feel like a weird old man wiring lamps in his basement, puttering away. And I know that if I have my time to putter away, I am a better person in the rest of my life, despite the fierce gazes when I am interrupted. I feel most at peace when I am putting thoughts together, making images and connections. If I am a monster at all, I’m Grover or Elmo. (Actually my vibe is much more Grover.) I am not apart from the community, wandering the hills and ransacking villages. I am an essential part of the village. I am the shoemaker.

My finishing is my expertise. It is the crack of a baseball bat, a home run, a door with its casing that slides exactly into the space I made for it. If other people think I’m a monster, so be it, but listen: I think I’m just kind of good at this thing, and people will have to be uncomfortable with that, if for some twisted reason that makes them uncomfortable. It might partially be uncomfortable because of the separate slots of sexism, homophobia, and ableism: how can you skip tracks and be an expert if you are supposedly also x, y, and z, all the pejoratives?

I am reading Emma Sheppard’s Chronic Pain, BDSM, and Crip Time (Routledge, 2024) and recently copied out this quote:

“As being crip can also be understood as becoming crip—a process rather than a fixed state, notions of crip time need to have space to include ways of being/moving that are both normative and crip within the same body mind—thus, while some aspects of an individual’s ways of being/moving may appear distinctly crip, they may also perform distinctly normative ways of being/moving.” (70)

What seems monstrous from the outside—the fact that I supposedly “do too much” while also managing chronic pain, the fact that maybe both things are my fault, the fact that I manage to be a finisher—may in fact just be a secret. Maybe it’s complex and threatening because it’s hard to explain to non-crips how we crips can bend time.

I have been trying to address the fierce gaze of making in therapy, and trying to be extra-present with my family members, and trying to understand the fear and economic pressure, the domestic abuse, and work harassment, and all the other pressures that had sharpened my gaze to where I am now. I want to have interruptions be tinged with less fear. I want to listen to people around me. And also: I am the village knife-sharpener. I teach others how to sharpen knives. I will warn you about how sharp I make your knives and tell you to wield them carefully, and I have cuts and scars on my own fingers from the knives I handle, but this is my job.