Aaron Tracy

Oh, I love that.

I'd never thought of it that way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I did try to title the book, The Heart Wants What It Wants, and my editor just laughed me out of the room.

She's like, no, we're not calling it that.

Something that I certainly think about a lot is whether or not the artist's personal beliefs or prejudices infects their work.

And with someone like Roman Polanski, I'm not sure I see it, which maybe is why it's easier to watch those movies.

With Dahl, it's complicated.

Some people certainly do make the case that there are figures in the witches that can be construed as anti-Semitic tropes.

I don't know how I feel about that, but I don't really see his anti-Semitism in his work.

So that becomes much easier for me.

Yeah, I think that there's kind of an interesting lineup of the way these things work.

I think you have someone like Woody Allen, where the thing that people perceive as objectionable is so inherent in the work when you watch Manhattan and the way that young women are presented and used in his films.

So that's a place where the biography and the work are really close together.

And that's disturbing in a way.

And then you have, you know, something like Cosby, where there's such an incredible chasm between Dr. Huxtable and what he is said to have done that that makes the work sort of upsetting in a different way.

And so I think that Dahl is fascinating because there is a sense that he is somehow uniquely tapped into what makes a person ugly in their heart and

And he's found a way to express that through these different characters, sometimes the minor characters in a book, sometimes a more major character.

And that is always fascinating when somebody has this darkness inside them or has this dark quality and then they express it through character.