Roxane Gay Instagram – In 2014, I published an essay, “Not Here to Make Friends” where I wrote about the importance and delight of unlikeable female protagonists. Likeability, I said, was a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be, a trap, constraining women to very narrow ideas about how they should be.
In fiction, characters who don’t follow this code are labeled as unlikable, as problems, as less worthy of taking up space on the page. I wrote the essay because of my own conflicted experiences with likability but also because I have spent a lot of time over the years thinking about unlikeable characters and how unfairly they are maligned.
Because I remain fascinated by unlikable characters, I’m putting together Acquired Tastes, an anthology celebrating unlikeable characters: how we create them, how we understand them, how we love them and how they enrage us, and why they are so necessary to our stories.
This call is for young adult writers, whose work I’d like to include in this anthology alongside some more familiar names. All submissions will be due by 11:59 p.m. on February 2, 2026.
Read more about the call here or at the link in my stories: https://ow.ly/pC5s50Xx1p3 | Posted on 24/Nov/2025 22:57:00
