We enjoyed the Bob Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown" over the holidays. You should go, though it may help to be of an age to have lived through a lot of the Dylan era. But the music is terrific throughout, and the acting too.
It also made pretty clear that young Dylan was a self-centered, arrogant, inconsiderate asshole most of the time -- as well as being some kind of genius. The creative life came first, all others were secondary.
I was also reading the long article in the New Yorker about Alice Munro and the sexual abuse of her daughter. I met Alice Munro a few times, always with groups of writers, and she always seemed a lovely person to be around. Alice Munro comes out as kind of horrible, too. Indeed, the Robert Thacker biography of her, which I read about a decade ago, made quite clear that when she left Victoria and her husband Jim Munro in the early 1970s, she also left behind her three daughters -- and motherhood, pretty much. She was going to write, and there wasn't room for children in that plan.
The New Yorker article makes clear, without specifically saying so, that when her new partner began abusing her youngest daughter, she pretty much held to her earlier decision: not my problem, I have to write.
Reading the article, I reflected that never have I read a story in which I have some personal acquaintance with so many of the people interviewed or discussed. I have liked and admired almost all of them. Few come out very well in this story -- human failings, not artistic ones, mostly.
