All We Ever Wanted Was A Blog

This last weekend, I spoke on a panel at the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago (along with authors Therese Fowler, Kristina Riggle, & Kim Roby), and one of the questions that the moderator asked me was why I liked to create “difficult characters.” It was a question that really hit home for me, as I’ve been reading some of the Amazon and GoodReads reader reviews of “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything,” and one of the most common criticisms I receive is that my characters are “unlikable.”

I am always fascinated by this critique; and in some ways, I find it a compliment. As I mentioned in a previous post, my favorite literary characters are the ones who aren’t traditionally likable - like Humbert Humbert in “Lolita,” or Holden Caulfield in “Catcher in the Rye,” or the selfish Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or the repulsive Ignatius Reilly of “Confederacy of Dunces.” These are the characters that stick with me decades after I read the books: Characters that I might have found repellent or horrifying or annoying, but were always always interesting .

Unfortunately the popular mode of current thinking in mainstream entertainment is that lead characters should always be “likable.” As my friend Carina Chocano, the (much-missed) former film critic for the LA Times once wrote, “After watching “Monster-in-Law,” I canvassed a few writer to share directives they’d received while creating their romantic heroines. There is no such thing, it appears, as a romantic comedy heroine who couldn’t benefit from being just a little more “likable” than she already is. “Likable” of course, can mean many things in the real world; but for a studio it tends to mean that she does some kind of work involving animals or the elderly. Perhaps she’s a veterinarian, or a zookeeper. If she works in business, she has a boss who doesn’t appreciate her, or steals her ideas. Whatever it is, she has it tough. Sometimes she’s a single mother, “trying to hold it all together in this tough, dog-eat-dog world,” one writer offers. “Also, likable often means clumsy,” she adds. “She falls down a lot, but in an adorable fashion. Likable also means pretty. As we all know, the fat are unlikable.”

It strikes me that a lot of contemporary women’s fiction suffers from the exact same problem — and not just because some editors reject flawed female characters, but because readers reject them too — and the result is a glut of generic fiction packed with bland, unremarkable, supposedly “likable” heroines. Their biggest flaws are a workaholic streak, or a weakness for the wrong kind of men, or a habit of eating ice cream by the pint. Take the book (and film) “The Devil Wears Prada.” The most memorable character in the story (by far) is Miranda Priestly, the complex, ambitious, intolerant magazine editor; the supposed heroine of the book, her beleaguered assistant, is so plain vanilla and nicey-nice as to be completely forgettable. (In fact, I can’t even remember her name; whereas Miranda Priestly’s has been burned into my brain).

A character that is “nice” and “likable,” in my opinion, has nowhere to go. Whereas one that is deeply flawed — selfish, cruel, egotistical, materialistic, a drug addict or a hooker or a criminal, you name it — is the one who has endless possibilities before him or her. Not only do we get to see this person make bad decisions, but we also see how they actually grow as a person. There’s a possibility for a significant character arc. This was my goal with the three women in the Miller family — Margaret is given a chance to grow beyond her strident intolerance; Janice learns that her suppressed unhappiness and obsessive perfectionism has driven away her children; and Lizzie comes to understand that sex is not the same as love.

Perhaps some readers won’t love these characters; they may even hate them at first. But hopefully they’ll at least find them interesting.