Welcome to significant others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien and in yesterday's episode

we learned about one of the more unusual love stories in the history of art. Today

we're joined by best-selling author Claire Dieterer

whose essays have been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review,

and The Atlantic, just to name a few.

Claire, thank you so much for doing this.

I've been excited to talk to you in general,

but also especially following the episode that we aired this week

about Dali and his wife Gala.

But before we get into that, I did want to start with your book, which is called

Monsters a Fans dilemma.

And I wanted to talk a little bit about that subtitle and what it means to be a

fan because it's such a specific type of relationship to be in.

Yeah it's interesting that you've homed in on the subtitle because the, it was actually incredibly

hard to write the subtitle.

I kept trying to make it centered around the audience and the fan is really the core relationship here and I think what the fan

indicates that the kind of a chillier word audience doesn't sort of put across is the idea of love.

A fan is connecting to the work with intensity, with all different kinds of emotion,

but most of all with this kind of love and with a quality of personal relationship.

The fan has a connection with the work that's beyond just a mere audience member or a mere admirer of the work.

And the book is very much about trying to take apart what emotions are in place when an audience member, a fan, engages

with a work of art.

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