In the healthier climate ushered in by the #MeToo movement, there are stories and investigations that offer no surprise. There are people so clearly predatory and cruel in their public personas that proof of more predatory and cruel practices is received with a nod if not a shrug.

And then there are those who surprise the hell out of us.

For me, the most recent experience is centered around writer Neil Gaiman. He writes beautiful books that I rarely read—not because of their quality but because of their genre—but he also writes some of the most eloquent and surprisingly helpful observations on writing that I’ve heard from anyone. He’s helped me become a better writer through listening to his words and taking his suggestions on board.

I posted a quotation from him on social media and immediately got blowback from the community, all of which revolved around the number of recent accusations of sexual predation on his part. How could I? He deserves to be wiped from our minds, his works from the canon!

Gaiman unfortunately is far from unique. After all these years of the public learning about great artists doing terrible things—63 years after Norman Mailer, 46 years after Roman Polanski, 33 years after Woody Allen, seven years after Junot Díaz and Louis C.K. and Kevin Spacey and and and and… it starts feeling disingenuous to be shocked.

For me, it all became far more complicated last year when the daughter of the late Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro revealed that Munro’s husband had sexually assaulted her (the daughter) when she was nine. She told Munro years later, and Munro chose to side with—and protect—her husband, including for decades thereafter. It was made worse, somehow, by Munro’s own fiction, stories of women and girls, some of whom are abused: she looked at her fictional characters, it seems, with more compassion than she did real women, even her own daughter. There’s a disconnect there that’s jarring.

So here’s the question: Knowing what I now know, are her stories less powerful? Should I burn all the pages in my journals where I’ve quoted Gaiman?

There’s an argument that we should be able to separate them out in our minds and hearts, the art and the artist. A century ago T.S. Eliot argued that a creation must stand apart from its creator: poetry must be self-referential. It didn’t matter what was in the poet’s mind; what mattered were the words on the paper.

Roland Barthes carried Eliot’s hypothesis a step further. The author, he holds, doesn’t create the text; the text is created in the reading of it, and is therefore open to whatever the reader, not the writer, brings to it.

While I hate to admit it (I sweated too many hours over his work on semiotics to ever really forgive him), I get what Barthes is saying, though I think it’s only a partial understanding. Humans interact with art, and find themselves changed by it. Do they change its meaning in the process? That’s harder to argue; but I do think the interaction is part of what makes art real.

But just as humans interact with art, humans create it, too, and their context is part of what gives it meaning. That context takes a lot into account: the time in which they write, their beliefs, their influences. Are their actions part of that context? I think we have to say yes: actions reflect if not mirror beliefs.

So at the end of all this I’m still left with a sense of ambiguity. Is there a way to hold both of these truths together? To say of someone that they are both great and awful? Or do we feel that listening to their words, now that we know the truth, becomes somehow tainted?

I’d argue, I think, that people who are capable of inspiring us, entertaining us, challenging us to think and grow and feel are also… people. Their moral compasses are no better and no worse than anybody else’s. It’s us who want them to be different. We want heroes. We don’t want to see the man behind the curtain. We want to keep our illusions intact.

But, sometimes, it’s the illusions that keep us going. The words that inspire. The paintings that uplift. The music that mesmerizes.

A poem I like a lot reads,

Tell her that goes

With song upon her lips

But sings not out the song, nor knows

The maker of it, some other mouth,

May be as fair as hers,

Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,

When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,

Siftings on siftings in oblivion,

Till change hath broken down

All things save Beauty alone.

Nice, eh? Speaks to the moment. Oh, but I should add—it speaks through the voice of an avowed fascist, Ezra Pound.

None of this is easy.