Well, hell no, they're not. We did not write them to be likeable, we wrote them to be funny. And on another level, I have to disagree with this definition of likeable. I find myself more attracted to characters who have a bit (sometimes more than a bit) of dysfunction in their lives. In fact, the ones I tend to dislike, if you can dislike a fictional character, are women who whose hearts are pure, whose motives are good and whose lives are blameless. They make me feel bad about myself. They make me want to double up on my nightly glass of wine. They make me want to have a nasty gossip session with an equally flawed friend about them, even though they aren't real. (You know who you are, equally flawed friends. Kiss, kiss!)
In my humble opinion, women's fiction or "chick lit" has too long been divided into sorrowful realistic stories about women dealing with devastating issues like illness, abuse and alcoholism, and light stories that feature handsome men and happy endings, usually brought about by said handsome men. We also seem to like cozy tales about small towns filled with wacky but good hearted characters. I am not knocking any of these categories! I've read them all over the years. But I think there is room for more. We combine the horrible problems and the wacky characters, leach out some of the good heartedness as well as the sorrow and, for the most part, turn the men into idiots and don't let them do anything more complicated than changing a lightbulb. We think this mix, in Queen of the Court, is the Cosmopolitan cocktail of chick lit, smooth, fun, colorful, and still capable of knocking you on your ass (with laughter).
Think about the movie Bridesmaids. Yeah, Kristen Wiig kind of ends up with the Irish cop, and Maya Rudolph gets married. But do we care? No! We care that they bond and reassert their friendship. And do we want them to be good hearted heroines throughout? No. Maya is a social climber willing to throw her oldest friend under the bus for a designer gown, Kristen Wiig is jaded about life, work and men. And she cares less about her best friend's happiness than securing herself a starring role in the wedding. Melissa McCarthy steals puppies and has sex in an airplane bathroom, and we still love her. In fact, we love her more.
In Queen of the Court, Caroline overeats and ignores her bills, Taylor drinks too much, Allie is over controlling and Shana is trying to make up for a questionable past. Karen thinks a Harvard degree and her Catholicism make her just a little bit smarter and holier and just plain better than everyone else. Which of us has not, in a minor way at least, done or been or thought some version of those things? We make it all little larger and more colorful than life and give readers chance to have a good laugh at a bunch of flawed women who aren't always very nice to each other or themselves. Think about it - would we have loved a skinny, successful Bridget Jones? Or a sane, friendly Bernadette Fox? There is a reason Pride and Prejudice is about Lizzie Bennet and not the perfect, mild-mannered Jane. No offense, Jane, but zzzzzzzzzzz..
So if you are looking for tragic and uplifting or wholesome and heartwarming, Queen of the Court may not be for you. But if you want to spend some time with a group of dysFUNctional women who may not be, at the end of the day, that much different than we are, pick up a copy of our book, grab your glass of wine and settle in for a good, cathartic laugh.