By Kelly Sokol, Author of Breach 

I find it impossible to get to know someone, I mean really get to know someone based on their likes. You like dogs? Yes, me too. You love a good book? Same girl, same. The beach is pretty, you’re right. I also like peace, nature, equality, a runner’s high. Who doesn’t?

Likes are just anodyne, and, really, pretty blah. I know I’m on the way to finding a real friend when I can lean in and whisper, “Yes, I’m a dog person. But I can’t stand doodles”—really it’s the owners of doodles that enrage me, the way they insist on their dogs’ innate right to run around leash-free inside a city of two million people, but I digress. I do love to read, but I’ll pass over plenty of canonical tomes. Running gives me life, but don’t expect to see me at a 5K, because I’m too slow to be competitive at short distances. The beach is peaceful, all sun-gilded waves and coconut oil. Nonetheless, I sit there pining for a mountainscape, the icy lick of a glacial lake as I plunge my toes in. (Really, it’s because of the free-range doodles all over the beach.)

The takeaways, aside from questionable taste allowing me to blog about myself? I like certain dogs better than others, because I have associated one breed’s owners with entitlement. I’m a voracious reader, but not wedded to genre. I have an ego around my running, no matter how much I’d like to deny it. Finally, I’m comfortable showing less skin and will never attain a “bikini-ready” body. Would you have learned that from my likes?

Likes are the prettied up and packaged versions of our dislikes and it’s the dislikes, the hates, the can’t stands, that reveal character. Our likes are vague and emotional. Our dislikes are sense-based, visceral. As early as the year 900, Japanese lady-in-waiting Shei Shonagon wrote a list of “Hateful Things” in her Pillow Book, as well as “Things That Give an Unclean Feeling.” Items on Shonagon’s lists include: “a very ordinary person, who beams inanely as she prattles on and on.” Also, “little sparrows.” Characterizing choices, no?

The same goes for fictional characters. I write women who interest me, women who offer a mirror, even if the reflection in the glass is troubling. All of the characters I write, particularly the female protagonists, are flawed and they prefer to contour those flaws away from public view. They share their likes with the world, trying to convince everyone that’s who they truly are. They hide their dislikes. Hiding is a kind of secret. Where there are secrets, there is narrative tension. Narrative tension makes good fiction.

In The Unprotected, Lara James internally ridicules the coworkers who step out of the corporate fast lane to build families. That is, until she decides she wants a baby and suddenly can’t get pregnant. And once Lara gets what she wants most in the world, after sacrificing her health, career and marriage, she has no idea what to do with the life she created. Likewise, Marleigh in my novel Breach is hell-bent on keeping her family afloat. Even so, she can’t help internally judging the people who purport to help her. Do these behaviors make the characters likable? No. They make them real. To me, that’s more important. I don’t have to like a character to invest in her. I can read on in hopes of comeuppance as passionately as for a dream fulfilled. 

Somewhere along the line, a decision was made that female characters in fiction must be likable. Having protagonists that readers care about certainly makes a writer’s job easier, but no one told Holden Caulfield or Ignatius J. Reilly that they had to be likable. If you search reviews of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the most consistently negative comments are how unlikable the two point-of-view characters are. I remember reading Flynn’s work and experiencing that like a revelation. People can be despicable and interesting at the same time. So can characters. No one is all good or all bad, not in life or on the page. Characters who struggle with their own way of being in the world fascinate me. I have to hope they do the same for readers.

Maybe I write difficult women because I crave honesty in fiction. Honesty from the mouths, and unedited thoughts, of women can be pretty terrifying, but I can’t get enough.

Kelly Sokol is the author of Breach and The Unprotected, which was featured on NPR and named one of Book Riot's 100 Must-Read Books of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated author and MFA creative writing graduate. Her work has appeared in Alpinist, UltraRunning Magazine, The Manifest-Station, Connotation Press, and more. She teaches creative writing at The Muse Writers Center. When she is not reading, writing or parenting, Kelly dreams, in color, of the mountains. She can often be found running in the backcountry. She resides in Virginia with her family. For more information, please visit https://www.kellysokol.com