Unlikeable Women: It’s Okay To Dislike Her, But Respect Her
I have been fascinated by unlikeable women in fiction, of late—Eriko and Shoko in Hooked, Rika, Riko and Kajii in Butter, the self-destructive Taiye and the gold-digging Evelyn Hugo. These books explore female rage, manipulation, ambition, self-destruction and the uncomfortable question of whether women must be likeable to deserve respect. My reading seems to echo my state of mind the way my writing once used to. I have felt very unlikeable in the past year.
A year ago, I wrote about Mad Women in Books, describing six books in which I had seen female characters deemed as delusional, psychotic, schizophrenic, bipolar and otherwise mentally unstable. That post helped me concretise what these books showed me—the nature of our pain, rage and other such things that the world deems as madness.
And this year, almost to the day, I have another post with a new insight from the most recent books that I have been reading. It is a lifelong war, being a woman, and one that only ever ends in defeat. Why is it necessary to be likeable?
I say, as these unlikeable fictional women do,
Dammit, respect the fight.
The idea for this post came from a conversation with a friend about my most recent book-love. I called Hooked, the Gone Girl for the 2020s. We examined the nature of unlikeable women. I found myself saying, even to this close friend:
“If Amy Dunne really existed, I don’t think we would be friends because a person like that has only contempt for others. But I would respect her so much. I have never known an Amy Dunne.” And silently I also thought, many people see me as a kind of Amy Dunne.
It wasn’t even a reach for me to see myself in Eriko, the meticulous, hardworking, perfectly polished corporate star. And for obvious reasons, the blogger Shoko, as well. I shivered involuntarily several times when reading the book. And I read this book across three days of the hottest summer that Mumbai has had in ages. It’s so uncomfortable to face the aspects of yourself that make other people uncomfortable.
Interestingly, both Hooked’s Eriko and Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne are intelligent and strategic. It would be an easy thing to identify that these are traits that make people uncomfortable when they appear in a woman.
But what about the things that I could not see because they didn’t make me uncomfortable? A book club conversation and a penpal brought me perspective. I enjoyed Sybil’s letters in The Correspondent, so much that it propelled me to write again. I started writing letters again and I found a way to reconnect with people.
One of them was a person who took a very different view from mine at the book discussion. Our conversation took us into the realm of forgiveness, culpability, guilt and absolution. Do we punish people with dislike because they have hurt us? Yes. And it’s as hard to separate respect from liking as some people find it is to separate art from artist.
We conflate forgiveness and absolution, and with good reason. We are constantly set upon by the world to make things okay by erasing what has been done to us, to let the people who hurt us breathe easier.
This is why I loathe internalised misogynists who are shielded by the ‘women hold up other women’ mantra without living the same ideal in return. This is why I abhor professional victims who use trauma or mental illness to excuse misbehaviour. This is why I don’t forgive weakness and it is easier to say that I just don’t like the behaviour of weak people.
A woman may have respectability but not respect. They say that reading fiction teaches you empathy. I wonder if it is because of this that I found myself able to return to Butter Honey Pig Bread which I had picked up in enthusiasm and drifted away, unable to explain why. It really is such a beautifully written book. But it also contains characters that I find abhorrent. The writing does such a good job of making them sympathetic. And it is why I was able to finish the book, feeling the pain of growth and not of war. I will try not to divulge too much about the book, so I will just say its themes of absent motherhood, cheating and self-sabotage made me grind my teeth. Weak, weak, weak. Whatever the reason. I suggested this book to another penpal who was gracious enough to immediately check it out of her library and read it. She enjoyed the book. I will send her this post and perhaps she will teach me about how to respect the unlikeable.
sAnd finally, a book whose entire point is to force you to respect the unlikeable. It’s even there in the title. Can you truly say you don’t roll your eyes and maybe shudder when you read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo? Evelyn is neither respected nor respectable. I did not enjoy this book, simply because of this brute force approach to female agency. I also disliked the shields of race and sexuality that the author constructed around the story, to keep detractors such as myself from calling it out. Evelyn Hugo is a manipulative narcissist. The other major female characters are self-absorbed narcissists. Maybe this is the nature of the beast called Hollywood, where the story is set. I hated it but it only proves my point. This is the kind of book that people hate-read, with the same disgusted glee with which they consume reality TV and influencer content. This is dislike toxified into capitalism without an ounce of respect.
I think what makes it complex is that I count these books as feminist because they are about women who refuse to apologise for being who they are. But sometimes, women like these (women like us?) blunder into refusing to be accountable for our actions. This is why I think it is important to examine what makes us dislike these women and which parts of those we would accord respect if we saw them in men. Can we even distinguish them from respectability, when all it takes for a man to be respectable is to exist?
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My actual book reviews run long, because they are all the writing I’ve been getting done. Feel free to stop reading here if you are satiated. Or if you feel like going deeper in any (or all!) of these books, here’s the list:
A Stalker and A Lazybones:
Hooked by Asako Yuzuki
I loved Butter. It made me faintly worried about reading this because it feels heartbreaking when a book lands as such a revelation and then the next one by the same author that you read doesn’t work for you. I was really worried that it would be a formulaic ‘more of the same’. Was it?
So, these two books show me some patterns in Asako Yuzuki’s writing. Both books are about the complexities of women’s relationships with each other. And they are both undeniably about female rage. Butter’s Kajii smothers it in food while Hooked’s Shoko dissociates into a blog. But it smells and sounds and tastes unmistakably like female rage.
Most other female rage fiction tends to center male characters, even in feminist prose, as big villains and with revenge sagas. In Butter as well as in Hooked, the men are treated as weak burdens to be outlasted, rather than the women’s villain origin stories.
Butter creates a relatable protagonist—Riko—and places her in one unsettling situation after another, all by her own choice and forces her to face why she makes the choices she does. This is where Hooked diverges. For one, it starts off letting you think you know who the protagonist (or victim) is but along the way, you are swimming with the Nile perches of different women’s anguish and fear. It gets hard to tell who is the protagonist. It even makes them all relatable.
It is for this reason that I think Hooked is a better book than Butter. But I also think Hooked will have fewer fans than Butter did. It is relatively easy to sit in discomfort if you believe that the chair belongs to another. But Hooked makes you notice the rot festering under your own skin and all the things that you let grow which make you the violator of all that you claim to hold precious. This is a horrid, unseeable thing to have to experience.
Both books also do one other thing in a similar fashion, which is lulling the reader into a sudden dark place where all things appear lost and you believe you hate the book. With Butter, it is the chapters that Riko spends in Kajii’s hometown with her family. Hooked does this much more subtly but in a more diabolic manner that makes your head spin as you realise you don’t know who to relate to, who to sympathise with and how to find a way out of the mess that women live in, every day of our lives.
Curiously, the book does manage to lead you out of it. All characters get redemption arcs, even if not necessarily happy endings. And honestly, this doesn’t diminish the book for me one bit. Now I’m only sad that I’ve already consumed my ‘Butter’ of this year.
A Rich, Cold Bitch:
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
This was the exact book I needed at this time. I was recovering from a long-term illness, which among other things had distanced me from the people in my life and also created a writing block. Sybil’s letters reminded me of how easy it would be to pick up writing again, if only through correspondence.
I say, ‘the lost art of letter-writing’ which sounds cliched but it’s only in my middle age that I am realising just how much of an art form it is. For those of us born before the internet became a reality, we were taught letter-writing in school. Entire social rituals were built around letters. When you moved to a new address, you would need to ask people to update their address books and also find the nearest postbox. Household inventory would always include envelopes, stamps and writing paper. One of the milestones of my childhood writing journey was being trusted to write the address on the envelope, in addition to the childish prattle and drawings inside. The new term after a vacation would usually begin with a writing assignment of an essay or a thank you letter to whomever we had visited.
When I entered the working world, these instincts led me to think deeply about how to end my emails. “Your faithful/obedient servant” had been relegated to the British-style education of Indian schools. This was the new millennium after all. “Yours sincerely” sounded too archaic for the new medium called email. I eventually settled on “With regards” which felt both polite and avoided overt emotion or obsequiousness. I still use these as well as beginning with an address. It seems extremely rude for me to dash off an email without at least saying hello first.
Sybil’s letters also made me realise how much of the craft I was already practising, such as beginning by thanking the person. If you can find a way to begin with a thank you, you’re off to a pleasant start. And this allows you to bring up difficult subjects, express dissent or say no, with firmness without fear of being rude. Of course, the whole thing needs an approach of sincerity. Generic thank yous are no better than the average hospitality industry worker parroting the words in a bored turn. They need to be a personal acknowledgement of something the letter writer truly feels, even if nothing else but gratitude for being allowed a chance to express something.
Last year, I found myself put off by the epistolary format after soldiering through the excruciating, self-indulgent and lazy River of Smoke. I am so glad that it turned out to be an exception. As I now recall, I have enjoyed this format before as well, in books such as The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and e Squared. Sybil’s letters are thoughtfully crafted. And one is never confused about who is writing, because the replies that she receives are distinct in style and tone. There is a different sort of challenge in carrying forward a plot entirely through written correspondence only. Especially when a story such as this goes back and forth across nearly 80 years.
But the book reminded me of the genuine empathy that must underlie all human communication. A need to connect, to ponder together, to know about the other person, to be impacted by their life and to express this impact. All in all, it was a gorgeous experience. I blazed my way through the book, all the while trying to slow down simply because I couldn’t bear for the letters to end. As it is only March, it feels premature to say this but this is likely the best book that I will read this year.
A Social Climber and a Mid:
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
This was my second Taylor Jenkins Reid book and I’m glad it wasn’t the first. I’m not sure I’d have gone back for her writing, had I only consumed Hugo. Because that’s what her writing is-an elaborately presented, wildly appointed meal to be devoured.
This style works well if you’re trying to get out of a reading slump or not yet ready to let go of the feeling of savouring a feeling like a good book gives you. That’s how I first came to her writing, when I went looking for more epistolary novels after ‘The Correspondent’ and found her novella, ‘The Evidence of an Affair’. Perhaps because that was a novella and happening to ordinary people, it was a tasty and tasteful morsel.
Evelyn Hugo, though? In all the ways of cinema that are at once impressive and immediately leave you with a headache and realising it’s all just shallow, scratchy tinsel….this book and this character are like that.
First for Evelyn herself. She comes from hard beginnings but I’m willing to bet she’d have been a convincing, manipulative narcissist even if she had been a rich, white girl with a flat chest. But instead, her Hispanic heritage is exoticised, her ample bosom fetishised and the aura around her femme fatale self hyped up to no good end.
Then there’s the narrator Monique, presumably a stand-in for the reader and bland in the most generic Meg Ryan Daffy Duck ‘I’m so ordinary and deep’ way possible. She’s supposed to be biracial but all that feels like is she’s etched in black and white. She is supposed to have penned a sensitive piece about the right to die but she has about as much perception as a toddler. She’s a contemporary New Yorker writing puff pieces but she calls Evelyn a lesbian seconds after hearing about her multiple husbands and hearing about a girl crush. And Evelyn has to define bisexuality for her in a way that would set Monique right at home in a prequel of Mad Men. Utterly unbearable.
I can see that this book was supposed to have been about how hard it used to be for queer people, how difficult peoples of colour have it, what a filthy place Hollywood is. But you know what? Every single thing fell flat. It was just too many caricatures without a trace of nuance or sensitivity.
I’m not sure if I’m just not the right audience for this book because I didn’t like the movie ‘Once Upon A Time in Hollywood’ either and for exactly the same reasons.
The author appears to enjoy writing celebrity scandals and I’ll admit she can write. But when I get past an article or even a novella, I do want characters that I can care about. Evelyn Hugo did not bring me one.
An Absent Mother and a Cheat:
Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi
This was such a complex meal, full of flavours both comforting and disturbing. A woman moves through the world, feeling torn from her natural essence, loves and lives in rebellion of that self, realising that she chooses every piece of pain but unable to walk away from it. Her two daughters start from this place. A very bad thing happens that wounds each of them in different ways. They each move through grief, betrayal, anguish and desperation realising only later how much of it was love and hope.
The food descriptions are magnificent and lush. Many feel familiar as I’m from a tropical, hot country as well. There are words that I don’t recognise which sound sumptuous. And there are others I do (nagchampa, naan) which sound delightful written in the voice of a person from another continent albeit with the same familiarity.
The depictions of womanhood, queerness and polyamory are so much gentler, more nuanced, less defensive and more authentically painful than what I’ve seen in Western literature. Every character feels real, it feels cruel to judge any of them for their choices or their pain. There’s an all-consuming feeling of “We are all children of the earth”.
The plotting and writing is very unusual. The chapters move through different points of view of the three main characters Kamibirinachi, Taiye and Kehinde. But occasionally also dip into how each of them is perceived by the many who love and hate them (Salome, Isabella, Timi, Earnest, Hachim). The book dips naturally into fantastical conversations with ‘Kin’ and ‘The Lady’ and flows into kitchens around the world, places of worship, bedrooms, shops and gardens.
It took me some time to finish this because this is an intense experience to be savoured not snacked on. Curiously, I completed it in April, making it a perfect queer read.
If you read this far, do drop a comment telling me what you thought.
If you’d like to read another essay like this, please see the ‘My Soulmate is a Book‘ posts.
You always have such good book recommendations!