on likeability
2021 has been several things so far, including practice in building patience and a winter of peril and significant possibility. It’s also been a pretty good reading year. First I finished Madeline Miller’s Circe, which held the perfect amount of melancholy and gorgeous to match the new year mood. Then there was Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji, which wrecked my insides with all the ways it felt familiar and unfamiliar. Then there was Raven Leilani’s Luster, a book that did not wreck me with gorgeousness but angered me profusely.
Our protagonist, Edie, is not so much self-destructive as she is numb. I am angry when she counts off the many men she recklessly sleeps with at her publishing job. I am angry when she has no choice but to move in with the sanctimonious white couple whose messy life she’s placed herself in the center of. I am angry when Edie does not know how to care for herself without depending on the kindness of strangers, even though there’s a good chance that she never learned how.
This anger isn’t unlike the anger I felt towards Esch in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage The Bones, and the carelessness & youthful stupidity to which she relinquishes her body to the boy who impregnates her. I am angry, knowing there are already strikes against her for being poor and Black and girl, knowing that an impending hurricane will make everything worse. In some ways, Edie & Esch are victims of circumstance. And maybe it’s not fair to dislike them for what they cannot help. But I do.
There are all kinds of tips and tricks to help writers write more likable characters. You can make them funny, give them extraordinary talents, plant hopes and dreams in their souls. But how much weight should we place on seeing those we can positively relate to? What’s so bad about characters who are messy, irritable, and unsure about anything they want? The latter is often more relatable. Most of us are unsure about what we want. Some of us are too busy trying to hold the seams of our lives together to emit compassion at every turn. What makes Salvage the Bones and Luster poignant is that brand of relatable, the kind that reflects your own self-destructive tendencies back to you . Likable can mean smoothing over the kinks that bring out our ugliness. Ugly is more compelling. Ugly is what we don’t want to recognize in ourselves.