In these essays, Gay is not a polished, aloof critic. Grouped into five categories ("Me," "Gender & Sexuality," "Race & Entertainment," "Politics, Gender & Race," and "Back to Me"), Bad Feminist's essays explore a variety of topics, ranging from the personal to cultural flash points such as the depiction of blacks in American cinema ("Surviving Django" and "Beyond the Struggle Narrative"). The essays that appear in Bad Feminist are culled from columns that have appeared in the past few years at places such as The Rumpus, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Salon, among others. Many of the issues raised in her essays I first experienced in truncated form on Twitter, but in both media, what immediately becomes apparent is Gay's wit and honesty. It is a different experience witnessing a writer and cultural critic holding forth on a variety of issues "in real time" before sitting down and reading her debut collection of thirty-eight essays, Bad Feminist.
I have been following Roxane Gay on Twitter ever since I read and reviewed her debut novel, An Untamed State, back in June. Lionel Shriver notes, in an essay for the Financial Times, that "this 'liking' business has two components: moral approval and affection." We need characters to be lovable while they do right. Why is likability even a question? Why are we so concerned with whether, in fact or fiction, someone is likable? Unlikable is a fluid designation that can be applied to any character who doesn't behave in a way the reader finds palatable. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability. Critics who criticize a character's unlikeability cannot necessarily be faulted.
Characters who don't follow this code become unlikeable. In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be.