Can we love the work of artists such as Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Miles Davis, Polanski or Picasso? Should we? In this unflinching, deeply personal book, Claire Dederer explores the audience's relationship with artists from Michael Jackson to Virginia Woolf, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? And if an artist is also a mother, does one's identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. Does genius deserve special dispensation? 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?

Claire Dederer is a happily married mother of two when she suddenly finds herself totally despondent and, simultaneously, suffering through a kind of erotic reawakening. LOVE AND TROUBLE shifts between her present experience as a middle-aged mom in the grip of mysterious new hungers and herself as a teenager --- when she last experienced life with such heightened sensitivity and longing. She exposes herself utterly, and in doing so captures something universal about the experience of being a woman, a daughter, a wife.

After she put her back out while breastfeeding her baby, everyone told Claire to try yoga. She finally gave in, and over the next decade, her yoga practice led to unexpected revelations about her outlook on life.