The Perils of Writing to Find Friends

On unlikeable characters, writing and control issues, Big Tracy Flick Energy, and learning to let go

Of all the authorial humblings I’ve experienced, having the autobiographical protagonist of my debut novel deemed generally unlikeable has been one of the more complicated to process.

And this is mostly because I never saw it coming, which seems naive now. Especially when you consider that my character was inspired by Harriet M. Welsh, of Louise Fitzhugh’s novel Harriet the Spy, a prototypical unlikeable character. Harriet isn’t kind, she isn’t generous, she hurts her friends’ feelings, she’s stroppy and impatient, her emotions overflow into an abject rage that she refuses to contain.

But upon my first encounter with her when I read Fitzhugh’s children’s novel (somewhat late at age 27), I didn’t find Harriet unlikeable. Instead I loved her. I identified with her and admired her profusely, aspiring to know myself even half as well as she did. It was the fundamental honesty at her core that attracted me the most and inspired me to create my character, Sarah Lundy, the heroine of Mitzi Bytes. I wrote Sarah as a kind of woman’s fiction fantasy, imagining a world where a Harriet-type never grew out of her spirit and her confidence, holding on to her sense of self-worth even after she’s done terrible things—Sarah is outed as author of a popular anonymous blog where she’d been dishing about friends and family for years—and it seems like the world has turned against her.

Even after such a colossal error of judgement as all that, here is the great subversion of my story: Sarah Lundy still likes herself, and the people who love her still like her too.

But oh, some of the people on Goodreads sure didn’t. Turns out my fantasy was a fantasy after all. They declared my literary creation conniving, duplicitous, disloyal, craven, selfish, petty and mean—and they weren’t entirely wrong. But still, it was hard to hear, partly because I hadn’t been writing a difficult character intentionally¹ and really had expected everyone to understand her, adore her. And also because of all the ways she was a xerox of my soul.