The curse of the likeable female character

(or why you can be a crotch-kicker and still be admirable)

(Diana Taverner. Would you mess with her? No. Would you watch her all day? Absolutely.)

Do you have that one friend who, whenever you meet your other friends, inevitably becomes a heated topic of conversation; their decision to return to the toxic ex after months of claiming they’re done, racking up debts in different countries, or perhaps lying constantly – both to everyone else and themselves? You may not like them very much – but you are utterly compelled by them. Their actions are both fascinating and inexplicable (or perhaps they are fascinating because they are inexplicable). You end up discussing them far more than any of your other friends.

I love those people. I mean, I generally wouldn’t want to spend much time in their company, but I love how we are drawn back to dissecting them again and again, squinting at the microscope as we try to understand why they do the things they do. I guess on social media it might be termed a ‘hate follow’. But there’s a subtle difference between someone you just don’t like – in which case you probably don’t want to think about them at all – and someone who behaves so appallingly or self-destructively that they’re basically a human car crash, making rubberneckers of the rest of us.

I’m sure most of you never talk about anyone, and live your lives via admirable Buddhist principles, in which case you can skip to the end of this piece. But I think these are the characters to re-create in fiction – the complicated, messy ones you can’t stop thinking about. Unfortunately, if they’re female, they’re also the characters most likely to draw the dreaded response… “but are they likeable?”

My latest book is a case in point. There are two leads in Someone Else’s Shoes, Sam, a downtrodden middle-aged print sales manager, and Nisha, an American trophy wife who is, not to put too fine a point on it, an asshole. She is not just rude, but entitled, unreflective, judgmental and aggressive. Where Sam turns everything that happens to her inwards, considering everything to be reflective of her own failures, Nisha pushes it straight back out again. For the first three chapters she is almost irredeemably unpleasant. God I loved writing her.

But when the book went through its editing stages, a constant refrain from my editors (my US, UK and German editors work together, so that I don’t lose an entire year doing different versions) was “We just don’t think Nisha is very likeable. Can we soften her?”