It’s hard to imagine a scene of greater coziness and safety. My house sat in the middle of a field in the middle of the woods in the middle of an almost entirely crime-free island. The living room faced south and was flooded with light even on the gloomiest Pacific Northwest afternoon. The room was furnished haphazardly—frankly a bit shabbily—and filled with books and paintings. It was the kind of room that would be recognizable the world over as the living quarters of a culture worker, or at least a culture lover. It was a room that suggested—all those books—that human problems could be solved by the application of careful thought and considered ethics. It was a humanist room. I mean, if you were in a certain mood you could call it a room descended from the Enlightenment. That’s a lot for a room to signify, especially when the bookshelves are from IKEA. But it was clear to see: in this room, everything could be cured by thinking.

[...] I wanted for there to be a universal balance, a universal answer, though I suspected maybe that balance is different for everyone. A friend who was gang-raped in high school says that any and all work by artists who’ve exploited and abused women should be destroyed. A gay friend whose adolescence was redeemed by art says that art and artist must be separated entirely. It’s possible that both these people are right.

—

We don’t always love who or what we’re supposed to love. Woody Allen himself famously quoted Emily Dickinson: “The heart wants what it wants.” Auden said it more nicely, as he said almost everything more nicely: “The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.” The desires of the audience’s heart are as crooked as corkscrews. We continue to love what we ought to hate. We can’t seem to turn the love off.

But hold up for a minute: who is this “we” that’s always turning up in critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It’s the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say “we,” I mean I. I mean you.

That’s how the stain works. The biography colors the song, which colors the sunny moment of the diner. We don’t decide that coloration is going to happen. We don’t get to make decisions about the stain. It’s already too late. It touches everything. Our understanding of the work has taken on a new color, whether we like it or not.

The tainting of the work is less a question of philosophical decision-making than it is a question of pragmatism, or plain reality. That’s why the stain makes such a powerful metaphor: its suddenness, its permanence, and above all its inexorable realness. The stain is simply something that happens. The stain is not a choice. The stain is not a decision we make.

Indelibility is not voluntary.

When someone says we ought to separate the art from the artist, they’re saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that’s not how stains work.

We watch the glass fall to the floor; we don’t get to decide whether the wine will spread across the carpet.

I tried to hold still and focused on remembering to scribble my notes. This was before the internet; my reviews were built on whatever I walked out of the theater with. The fact was, I had to tank up on quite a bit of coffee to do my job. Though I had what is pretty much the textbook definition of a fun job, I sometimes grew weary of film, I’ll be honest. I got sleepy. The film critic life was not the life for me. My co-critics said things like: “If you sit here long enough, all of life will pass before your eyes.” I wondered what the point was of sitting in the dark and waiting for life. Why not just go out and, you know, live it. Cut out the middleman. I grew tired of having my days filled with night. But then something would happen—a movie would give me something that was not life exactly, but life with extra lightbulbs turned on.

In any case, I somehow never was able to transcend the sense that I was an audience member, rather than a professional.

I was young—young enough to stumble out of the darkened theater on glittery platform heels, to live on popcorn, to worry what the boys might think. Seattle, then, was still a boys’ club. This was the mid-nineties, when the city was in a growth spurt, like an awkward teenager—suddenly famous. Even so, it was the same old town where I’d grown up, a town where boys did things and girls watched. I dimly intuited that my authority was undermined by my very girl-ness. And maybe it was true. Or maybe my authority was undermined by my stubborn sense of myself as an audience member.

I didn’t see it at the time, but this “I” was a reaching for an authentic, maybe even heartfelt, response to the work. A desire to reflect on the page the emotions wrought in me by the work, with an understanding that my emotions, my experience, are not yours, and yours are not mine.

Did you ever know a genius? I knew one, and she spiraled into schizophrenia. And then I knew another, and he was the most regulated person I ever met—his rules for himself a kind of bulwark against the chaos inside of him.

[...]In an interview with Vanity Fair, Wainwright said: “Married and the father of two small children, I was never home, drunk a good deal of the time, and apparently felt it necessary to sleep with every waitress in North America and the British Isles. But guess what. All these beans have been spilt in song…. Now we’ve stumbled onto the big, important question: Is it necessary to feel like shit in order to be creative? I’d say the answer is yes—unless you’re J. S. Bach.”

Is it necessary to feel like shit in order to be creative? To what degree does an artist need to slip the confines not just of societal conformity, but of mental or emotional conformity as well? [...]

Even when I was a little kid, lying on my tummy, flipping through the LIFE photo book, I recognized something in these men, something different. Something that made them subject to different rules than the rest of the adults were following.

We want the asshole to cross the line, to break the rules. We reward that rule-breaking, and then we go a step further, and see it as endemic to art-making itself. We reward and reward this bad behavior until it becomes synonymous with greatness. Not just because the gatekeepers and publishers and studio heads have traditionally been men, but also because we ourselves yearn for plot and action. We yearn for events!

And then we are furious when this eventful asshole commits a crime.

I kept toying with this idea—the idea that I was writing the autobiography of the audience. But I wasn’t seeing myself as an audience member clearly—was only dimly aware that my perspective from my perch in the Present was not necessarily enlightened. An autobiography of the audience should be subject to the same rules that govern all memoir, including the rule that the writer of memoir must be onto herself. Which is to say that bad memoir happens when an author is a little in love with herself—when she can’t see her own faults. The same thing could be said of the audience: we think we’re fantastically enlightened, but are we really so much better than the people who came before us?