In April 2024, British author J.K. Rowling appeared in the news for the same reason she’s been wont to gain attention lately—not for writing acclaimed new books, but for writing long social-media rants against the transgender community. In the latest iteration, she offered to go to jail under Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act.

Many fans—including queer and trans readers who took refuge in the world that the Harry Potter series conjured—feel that Rowling has betrayed them. They find themselves in the position of choosing whether to renounce a beloved fandom or look past a politics they find hateful.

But Harry Potter fans aren’t the only readers facing this dilemma. In recent years, the ability to follow the lives and politics of writers in real time through social media has changed the reader-author relationship. How much should we allow the life of the author to influence our experience of their work?

When a beloved local used bookstore recently closed down after 30 years in business, I found myself in my personal version of this saga. For my final purchase, I chose Henry Miller’s memoir Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch from its discounted, dwindling stock.

It was the end of an era—but also, my conscience ached. I was going home with yet another book that I felt that I shouldn’t have, written by an author who was an absolute fiend to women.  I have a row of Henry Millers. All the F. Scott Fitzgeralds and George Orwells any English major would ever need. Jean-Paul Sartre’s mammoth Being and Nothingness.

Miller is perhaps the most guilt-inducing. Though a brilliant writer, he saw each and every woman he encountered—including his five wives—as a character to exploit in his books. When women appear on the page, they’re mostly just bodies, available (or not quite available) for sexual encounters. Here’s his idea of a simile, taken from his autobiographical novel Tropic of Cancer: “Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can’t wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.”

George Orwell’s female characters—either whores or prudes—don’t fare much better than Miller’s. And while his Down and Out in Paris and London shattered every one of my naïve illusions about the 1920s, he couldn’t write a three-dimensional woman even if it could have ended a war. Orwell’s first wife was deeply involved in the early work that made him famous, but largely erased from his stories. In his private literary notebook, he wrote down “two great facts about women”: “One was their incorrigible dirtiness & untidiness. The other was their terrible, devouring sexuality …” Fitzgerald, meanwhile, stole entire excerpts from his wife’s diary for his books and had her locked up in a mental institution. Sartre saw women as either mistresses or unobtained conquests, on the page and in life.

I have read biographies of and memoirs by all of these writers, and I always come away feeling uncomfortable about their treatment and views of women. And yet, these are some of my favorite writers. I confess to loving everything they have written. Their prose styles possess me. I look to them for inspiration in perfecting my own craft as a writer. Still, more often than not, I thumb past the icky bits of their books and their biographies. I burn simultaneously with admiration, jealousy, and discomfiture.

In 1967, the literary theorist Roland Barthes proposed a very simple concept in an essay titled “The Death of the Author.” Barthes argues that an author’s personal traits or biography should play no role in a reader’s interpretation of their literary output. The reading experience should remain objective and unrestricted; the written work should exist almost as an individual of its own, separate from its creator.

So, do I have the right, in this current cultural climate, to exercise the “The Death of the Author” clause to keep reading the books I like? “To write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me,’” writes Barthes. In other words, it’s what an author has put on the page that is up for scrutiny and debate—not the background circumstances or life events that may or may not have influenced the writing.

This quotation particularly speaks to me because as a writer, I fret about my readers scouring between the lines of my fiction for traces of me rather than accepting my characters and worlds as imagined ones. Likewise, I wouldn’t want a reader to look more or less favorably upon my work because of my personal life or political views.

As readers nowadays latch on to “receipts,” meaning the author’s life choices or past errors, as indicators of the worth of their work, “The Death of the Author” has evolved in meaning. Subsequent critical approaches have argued that it’s important to incorporate the world in which a book was written into its reception. Furthermore, in this age of social media, authors’ lives unfold in real time for all to see, as opposed to the more private past, where they largely controlled how much and what of their private lives were made public.

One of the most visible sites of this debate is Rowling’s aggressive campaign against trans people. Some Harry Potter fans have renounced Rowling’s work entirely; others remain staunchly loyal to Rowling as a literary icon, whatever her prejudices. And then there are those lingering in the middle who follow the “Death of the Author,” and continue to appreciate the Harry Potter series on its own, as a separate entity from its notorious author.

In contrast to Rowling, the authors on my shelves—Miller, Orwell, Fitzgerald, and Sartre, and their misogyny—are all long in the past. They’re not personally profiting off my purchase of their books, nor are contemporary women being personally harmed by the writers’ objectification of them. The death of the author—taken literally—is my greatest consolation.

I’m also consoled by the knowledge that difficult authors still have lessons to impart and important conversations to start—not just in spite of but sometimes because of their odious points of view. My advice to the Harry Potter fans, in their precarious situation, is not to feel overwhelmed with guilt. They need to remember that they are just readers, not gatekeepers, and they are not responsible for Rowling’s unfortunate views. Fans of the Harry Potter series are also not obligated to side with her in real life just because they enjoy and appreciate a fictional fantasy world (which, by the way, can be enjoyed without necessarily purchasing the merchandise).

Our relationships with books can operate on the same basis as our relationships with people: They are not obligated to be perfect, and they would be unhealthy and under too much pressure if they were. My flawed array of writers forces me to think critically about what I’m reading. I can appreciate their prose styles without adopting their beliefs. I am also challenged by these authors to expand my repertoire to include other artists, whose work doesn’t have so much baggage attached.

Reading widely and diversely is one of the greatest forms of lifelong learning. It’s important to read beyond the views that one agrees with, and to understand that writers, like all human beings, are complex and flawed. For the sake of my education as a reader, writer, teacher, and person, I have to keep telling myself: I am doing no wrong.