These ladies scheme, swear, rage, transgress, deviate from convention—and best of all, they seldom genuinely apologize for it. It’s the literary equivalent of the feminist catchphrase originated by Amy Poehler: “I don’t fucking care if you like it.” More than being “unlikable,” these female characters directly challenge the institutions and practices frequently used to measure a woman’s value: marriage, motherhood, divorce, and career. They defy likability in their outlandish occupation of the roles to which women are customarily relegated—mother, wife, daughter—resisting sexist mythologies and social pressures. Perhaps most refreshingly, these novels aren’t so much heralding a new age of female-centric literature as they’re building on a much older English-language tradition of works about complex women.

For one, these novels allow their protagonists to navigate vulnerability, pain, and disappointment—and all the awful thoughts and behaviors that may arise. In After Birth, Ani adjusts to the toll motherhood can take on one’s relationships and psyche, dispelling the myth of delirious happiness emblematized by modern baby showers. While Hausfrau’s Anna loves her children, being a stay-at-home mother and the comfortable wife of a banker isn’t enough to cure her profound unhappiness. And Girl on the Train’s 32-year-old Rachel Watson simply gets to be a spiteful complicated mess: an addict who loses her job and routinely lies to her roommate.

Luckiest Girl Alive’s Ani FaNelli is acutely aware of the ridiculous expectations placed on her as a woman, but she’s willing to play the game anyway to get ahead: from extreme dieting to picking the “right” man to marry to improve her social status. Fates and Furies cleverly splits its narrative in two to show how two people in the same marriage can have grossly distorted views of their relationship: In the first part, told from the husband’s perspective, Mathilde is an angel who puts his career before her own, while the second part reveals Mathilde’s darker, more violent side. The end result in all these cases is a fairly uncommon one in literature: sympathy for a woman who has done terrible things.

Heightening the complexity of these novels is that their narrators and characters fall on a spectrum of unreliability—characters whose recounting of events, plots, and details might, or it is later revealed, be entirely inaccurate. There’s a certain appeal, as a reader, in being kept guessing or intentionally deceived by a character’s tenuous relationship with reality.

It’s worth noting that all of these transgressive fictional women are white and come from a very specific socioeconomic background. Still, what Hausfrau, Girl on the Train, After Birth, and Luckiest Girl Alive have in common with 2012’s Gone Girl is their attempts to examine and complicate their own version of white suburbia and upper-class normativity. Each protagonist toys with the notion of having “made it” (or conversely having lost it) in primarily upper-middle-class worlds with the traditional markers of house, spouse, children, and career.