The Innocent Wife

Poor Samantha, the protagonist of The Innocent Wife, gets a lot of stick for being an unlikeable character. She's got extremely low self-esteem and makes some terrible choices but this is why I found her so interesting to write. I don't want characters that do exactly what they're supposed to, what fun is that?! When Sam and Carrie first meet in the novel they riff on the idea of what a „strong woman” is. There's a temptation to make every woman character in your novel a kind of role model, a feminist badass who we can all look up to. Or at least to make them „likeable” (*shudder*), relatable and inoffensive. I'm here to fly the flag for the deplorables. I say, let women be awful too! Aren't we all a little awful sometimes? Male characters are allowed to be flawed but we hold women in fiction to a different standard. Take, for example, the way Hannibal Lecter was received when Silence of the Lambs was in cinemas. Some audiences applauded each time he appeared on screen. They revelled in his evil; they loved to be afraid of him.