I finished Claire Dederer’s Monsters. The first two thirds of the book are interesting enough but I had planned on finishing the book and putting it on the cycle-out-of-the-house shelf. The last third has me reconsidering that though. It’s the part of the book where the author grapples concretely with what to do with the work of monstrous people and whether she is a monster herself. It’s where the work shows that it’s been suffuse with a strong foundation in theory all along. I picked up the book as a literary life preserver. I discovered this book around the same time that the band Anti-Flag broke up due to internal monstrosities. I hoped that reading the book would allow me to rescue something important. Even if my path will not be the same as Dederer’s, grappling with monsters alongside a fellow traveler is preferable to grappling alone.