"I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors"
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The “likeability” test is a polite way of policing women, and Sittenfeld names the rigged game with a novelist’s precision. Her theory isn’t that readers never scrutinize male characters; it’s that the scrutiny becomes a reflexive moral audit when the character is a woman and, crucially, when the author is, too. The double bind is baked in: write a complicated woman and she’s “unrelatable”; write a warm, accommodating one and she’s “thin.” Meanwhile, men on the page are allowed to be brutal, selfish, or absurd without being treated as a referendum on the author’s ethics or the sex they represent.
What makes the line work is how it slides from craft into power without grandstanding. “Likeability question” sounds harmless, even consumer-friendly, the way publishing and reviews often frame it: Would you want to have a drink with her? Sittenfeld exposes how that framing shrinks literature into etiquette. It replaces curiosity with compliance, turning character into conduct and asking women to earn narrative space by being pleasant.
The subtext also takes aim at a specific cultural pipeline: reviewers, book clubs, marketing copy, social media discourse. Women’s novels are routinely pitched around “a heroine you’ll love,” as if her primary job is to be agreeable rather than interesting. Sittenfeld, whose fiction thrives on sharp interiority and social discomfort, is defending the right to write women who are ambitious, petty, sexual, or wrong - and to have those traits read as human complexity, not authorial failure.
What makes the line work is how it slides from craft into power without grandstanding. “Likeability question” sounds harmless, even consumer-friendly, the way publishing and reviews often frame it: Would you want to have a drink with her? Sittenfeld exposes how that framing shrinks literature into etiquette. It replaces curiosity with compliance, turning character into conduct and asking women to earn narrative space by being pleasant.
The subtext also takes aim at a specific cultural pipeline: reviewers, book clubs, marketing copy, social media discourse. Women’s novels are routinely pitched around “a heroine you’ll love,” as if her primary job is to be agreeable rather than interesting. Sittenfeld, whose fiction thrives on sharp interiority and social discomfort, is defending the right to write women who are ambitious, petty, sexual, or wrong - and to have those traits read as human complexity, not authorial failure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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