If there’s a topic that ignites readers in book clubs and reading groups around the world, it’s the subject of unlikeable characters. Do we have to like the main characters in our beloved stories in order to root for them? And are readers, generally, tougher on female protagonists than their male counterparts?
We’ve got just the person to explore this topic. This week, our graduate Kate Weinberg publishes her second novel, There’s Nothing Wrong with Her, with Penguin in the U.S. and Bloomsbury in the U.K. Described as ‘the best thing you’ll read this year’ (Kiley Reid) and ‘beautiful’ by Sarah Jessica Parker, Kate’s novel is a complex, tender depiction of modern life, medicine, and mental illness.
In There’s Nothing Wrong With Her, Vita Woods suffers from a condition that not even doctors (or her boyfriend) can diagnose. It’s mentally and physically exhausting, trapping Vita in what she calls ‘The Pit’—a semi-conscious, socially cut-off state of being in her basement apartment. It’s been months. Until one day, an unexpected delivery forces Vita upstairs where she encounters her neighbors for the first time, and she likes them. Against the judgment of her boyfriend and medical professionals, Vita sneaks out of the basement and starts to question the nature of her ‘condition.’ The problem might be Vita herself. But as far as anyone can prove, there’s nothing wrong with her.
In this article, Kate encourages writers not to be afraid of making characters ‘unlikeable.’ Her protagonist and narrator makes mistakes, morally murky and confusing ones, which make her seem unlikeable. But as Kate demonstrates, your main character does not have to be entirely likeable. Really, readers love unlikeable characters. Kate Weinberg challenges the tradition of people-pleasing female narrators, and argues for a messy, immoral narrator—the kind readers love.
Kate’s debut novel The Truants was similarly written during her time with The Novelry. Published in 2020, The Truants was an Observer, i and New York Times Book of the Year, with Kate’s writing described as ‘in the vein of Agatha Christie herself’ (Irish Times). There’s Nothing Wrong With Her is available to purchase in hardback in major bookstores and in ebook version on Amazon.
Congratulations, Kate!
Why your character should behave badly
The term ‘people-pleaser’ has become so overused that like any cliché it washes through the synapses, without prompting new reflections. But lately, it’s been playing on my mind. I’m in the process of creating a narrator for my third novel (like my first two novels, I plan to write again in first person). With the benefit of hindsight, I’m taking more time to understand my own motivation in how likeable I want her to be; how distinct this is from her being a people-pleaser, and how to go about it.
There are, very broadly speaking, three categories for narrators. There’s the classic observer-narrator (think Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, Richard Papen in The Secret History) who tends to watch the heightened dramas of more charismatic characters from the sidelines and, while often implicated, takes on something of the fairly trustworthy role of the reporter.
Then the unreliable narrator, who is distorting or hiding things from the reader’s view, and sometimes themselves. And lastly the narrator who is at the centre of the drama, who is most changed or affected by the story being told (but can also be unreliable).
Developing your narrator means first working out where they stand in your story and how much they know, or don’t know, at the start and end of it. But it’s also about working out the choices they are going to make through this story, and how that’s going to affect their relationship with the reader. And that’s when you’re going to need to question yourself and your own psychology. How much is that character a reflection of you, your own limitations and desires, either to please, shock or impress?
The narrator in There’s Nothing Wrong With Her
There were two moments in the writing of my novel when I really struggled with my narrator.
Vita is a feisty, flawed character who starts obsessing about an ex-boyfriend when she’s just had sex with her current one; who buries bits of her past that she can’t quite face and has a habit of talking to Renaissance ghosts and goldfish. But she makes two big choices in the novel which really cross a line. She steals something of sentimental value, for seemingly no good reason, from an old lady that’s been kind to her; and she tells a big lie, a real whopper, about a dead child. Both are perplexing, shocking, reprehensible. In real life, the kind of actions that may make you decide a person is so dubious and untrustworthy you don’t want them in your life.
I wanted my character to do these two things, but would it make my readers part company with her too much? Would these be unforgivable choices? My instinct to ‘please’ my reader made me waver. And here I had to dig a little deeper.
Every writer of first-person novels knows that readers will assume some of the thoughts and actions of the character come directly from the author’s personality and experience. Throw in the fact that they may share the same gender and some circumstances with the author (in my case, having been bed-bound with a sickness similar to Vita’s) and it’s not a giant leap for the reader to identify the character as ‘being’, to a greater or lesser extent, a thinly veiled version of the author. Knowing this, I then had to ask myself: was I worried about my readers disliking Vita, or disliking me? The question was enough to tip the balance: I made Vita lie and steal.
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Readers love immoral characters
I was both relieved and a little surprised when early readers pointed to these moments as two of their favourite bits in the book.
Because here’s the thing: readers do not expect the same moral standards of their characters as they do from their friends or relationships in real life.
In fact, pretty much the opposite is true. Readers want characters to push boundaries, to be outspoken and difficult, to lie, to cheat, to think bad sex thoughts. Looking at some contemporary successes, in Monica Heisey’s Really Good, Actually, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss, Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family, Miranda Cowley Heller’s Paper Palace and Miranda July’s All Fours we keep seeing this. All have narrators that behave badly. And readers love them.
I think there are several reasons for this. Partly it’s because it’s a safe way for the reader to experiment with behaviours and choices that they pull back from in their lives. They can feel what it’s like to sleep around, or leave their family behind for an adventurous life, or take drugs or even kill someone without consequences. In extreme cases they can explore the minds of characters who behave in atrocious or disgusting ways that they can’t wrap their heads around (the most famous being the paedophile Humbert Humbert in Lolita).
The people-pleasing female protagonist
You may have noticed that all the narrators in the above examples I’ve cited are female. This may be no accident. After centuries of men behaving badly (and getting away with it), readers are thrilled to follow female characters who ride roughshod over the social norms that have been prescribed for women, and follow their hearts, instincts or loins.
But even more fundamentally than this, I think the non-people-pleaser narrator performs quite a critical role for our psyches. Whether we think of ourselves as people-pleasers or not, most of us spend a fair bit of life pretending. Whether out of love, tact, or more pragmatic reasons, there are certain compromises we make with being truthful every day. Whether that’s being polite with someone who is boring, not telling someone they look terrible in their outfit or inappropriately lunging at someone we fancy, remaining faithful to whatever contract we have with our friends and families or refraining from throttling an awful relative: often this involves some degree of repression, tongue-biting or self-editing.
Spending some hours with a character who does less of this than we do in life can be liberating and inspiring. Which is why I won’t apologise for my narrators. In fact, I’ll do my best to make the narrator of my third novel behave even worse than the one before.
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