What do you do when you love a writer but disagree or detest his personal choices and beliefs? When I was younger, a friend handed me Henry Miller. I was immediately seduced by his passion for life and his fast-paced language. He described everything with such joy and humor. He lived life to the fullest. This included using money his wife sent him to visit prostitutes. I was 18, and grew up a fundamentalist Christian. Paying women for sex was wrong. Cheating on your wife was wrong. Not having a 9-5 job was wrong. . . . There was a lot of wrong stuff happening in Tropic of Cancer. But I loved him and learned to separate him from his writing (which was tricky as a lot of his stuff is confessionalist.) But also, I was still brainwashed with these antiquated notions of what was right and wrong. Bukowski was another one. Dirty old man writing about drinking, women, gambling. But as I matured as a person and a reader I realized you could separate the artist from the art.
Goth Grammarist 