In Pamela Ribon's You Take It From Here, a woman, Smidge, is dying of lung cancer and wants her best friend Danielle to essentially finish the job of raising her daughter and being her husband's companion in grief. The book's premise is an interesting one, but what really stands out is how deeply unlikable Smidge is. She is the kind of person who, it might seem, shouldn't have any friends. She's bossy, intense, controlling, unrepentant, and manipulative. And yet. She has a best friend, a daughter, a husband, and a community of people who will deeply mourn her when she is gone. Ribon's steadfastness in this character's lack of likability is admirable. She never panders by making Smidge somehow have some kind of epiphany of character simply because she is dying. Ribon is unwavering in what she shows us of Smidge and the novel is the better for it.

A customer review of You Take It From Here on Amazon from Danae Savitri states, "I never warmed up to Smidge as a character, thought she suffered from borderline personality disorder, common among people who are charismatic narcissistics, who alternately bully, manipulate, and charm others around them." Instead of judging the book, it is a woman's likability that comes into question. Again, there is an armchair diagnosis of mental disease. It is an almost Pavlovian response to pathologize the unlikable in fictional characters.

Dare Me by Megan Abbott is a book about high school cheerleaders, but it's nothing like what you might expect. Populated by women who act with boldness, resolve, independence, and a prioritizing of the self — these mighty principles from Treasure Island!!! — Dare Me is both engaging and terrifying because it reveals the fraught intimacy between girls. It's a novel about bodies and striving for perfection and ambition and desire so naked, so palpable, you cannot help but want the deeply flawed women in the book to get what they want no matter how terribly they go about getting it. The young women at the center of the novel, Beth and Addy, are friends as much as they are enemies. They betray each other and they betray themselves. They commit wrongs, and still, they are each other's gravitational center. On the phone, after a drunken night, Beth asks Addy if she remembers "how we used to hang on the monkey bars, hooking our legs around each other, and how strong we got and how no one could ever beat us, and we could never beat each other, but we'd agree to each release our hands at the count of three, and that she always cheated, and I always let her, standing beneath, looking up at her and grinning my gap-toothed pre-orthodontic grin." It is a moment that shows us how Addy has always seen Beth plainly and understood her and loved her nonetheless. Throughout the novel, Beth and Addy remain unlikable, remain flawed to an extent, but there is no explanation for it, no clear trajectory between cause and effect. Traditional parameters of likability are deftly avoided throughout the novel in moments as honest and no less poignant as these.

Susan Lindley, a widow, has to move on after her husband's tragic death in Lydia Millet's Magnificence. From the outset we know she was unfaithful to her husband. She inherits her uncle's mansion, filled with a rotting taxidermy collection, and sets about making some kind of order, both in the mansion and in her own life. She has a daughter involved with her boss and a boyfriend who is married to another woman. She feels responsible for her husband's death but is matter of fact in reconciling this. "Was she relieved, slut that she was?" Susan thinks to herself. "Was there something in her that was relieved by any of this? If anyone could admit such a thing, she should be able to. She was not only a slut but a killer." Susan does go on to acknowledge she feels a profound absence in the loss of her husband, a "freedom of nothing," and throughout the novel, she indulges in this freedom; she embraces it.

So much of Magnificence is grounded solely in Susan's experiences, her awkward perceptions of the world she has created and continues to create for herself. We also have the pleasure of seeing a woman in her late forties as a deeply sexual being who is equally unashamed in her want for material things as she becomes more and more attached to the mansion she has inherited. Though the prose often gives over to lush excess and meditation, what remains compelling is this woman who reveals little remorse for her infidelities and the ways she tends to fail the people in her life. In a lesser novel, such remorse would be the primary narrative thrust, but in Magnificence, we see how a woman, one deemed unlikable by many, is able exist and be part of a story that expands far beyond remorse and the kinds of entrapments that could hold likable characters back. We are able to see just what the freedom of nothing looks like.

The short story collection Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins contains many stories with seemingly unlikable women. As much as the stories are about place, all set, in some form, in the desert of the American West, several stories are about women and their strength, where their strength comes from and how that strength can fail in unbearably human ways. The phrase "battle born" is, in fact, Nevada's state motto — meant to represent the state's strength, forged from struggle. In perhaps the most powerful story "Rondine Al Nido," there is an epigraph at the beginning. Normally, I do not care for epigraphs. I don't want my reading of a story to be framed by the writer in such an overt way. This story's epigraph, though, is from the Bhagavad Vita and reads, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." From the outset, we know only ruin lies ahead and the story becomes a matter of learning just how that ruin comes about. We learn of a woman who "walks out on a man who in the end, she'll decide, didn't love her enough, though he in fact did love her, but his love wrenched something inside him, and this caused him to hurt her." Really, though, this is a story about when the woman was a girl, 16, with a friend, Lena, the kind who would follow the narrator, "our girl," wherever she went. There is an evening in Las Vegas, and an incident in a hotel room with some boys the girls meet, one that will irrevocably change the friendship, one that could be avoided if a flawed young woman didn't make the wrong choice, the choice that makes the story everything.

Perhaps the most unlikable woman in recent fictional memory is Amy in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, a woman who goes to extraordinary lengths — faking her own murder and framing her husband Nick, to punish his infidelity — and keep him within her grasp. Amy was so excessively unlikable, so unrepentant, so shameless, that at times, this book is intensely uncomfortable. Flynn engages in a clever manipulation where we learn more and more about both Nick and Amy, in small moments so that we never quite know how to feel about them. We never quite know if they are likable or unlikable and then we do know that they are both flawed, both terrible, and stuck together in many ways and it is exhilarating to see a writer who doesn't blink, who doesn't pull back.

There is a line of anger that runs throughout Gone Girl, and for Amy, that anger is borne of the unreasonable burdens women are so often forced to bear. The novel is a psychological thriller but it is also an exquisite character study. Amy is, by all accounts, a woman people should like. She's "a smart, pretty, nice girl, with so many interests and enthusiasms, a cool job, a loving family. And let's say it: money." Even with all these assets, Amy finds herself single at 32, and then she finds Nick.

The most uncomfortable aspect of Gone Girl is the book's honesty and how desperately similar many of us likely are to Nick and Amy the ways they love and hate each other. The truth hurts. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. When we finally begin to see the truth of Amy, she says, of the night she met Nick, "That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hotdogs into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding… Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they're fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl."

This is what is so rarely said about unlikable women in fiction — that they aren't pretending, that they won't or can't pretend to be someone they are not. They have neither the energy for it, nor the desire. They don't have the willingness of a May Welland to play the part demanded of her. In Gone Girl, Amy talks about the temptation of being the woman a man wants but ultimately she doesn't give in to that temptation to be "the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn't ever complain." Unlikable women refuse to give in to that temptation. They are, instead, themselves. They accept the consequences of their choices and those consequences become stories worth reading.