Amy asked Julia Glass:

Do you create characters who are unlikeable in order to emphasize the complexity of being human (and therefore unperfect), or do you actually like any of your characters? And do you hope that your readers like them, too, or just learn to accept them as "real" people, in the sense that very few people are wholly likeable?

Julia Glass I've always been fascinated by the issue of character "likability." I don't think it's something an author should try to engineer too closely, but certainly no character will be compelling to a serious reader without a significant counterplay of virtues and flaws (one sometimes outweighing the other). Long before I started writing novels, I realized that the characters who "stay with me" longest in the stories I read are those who've had to win me over. My favorite protagonist of all time is Gwendolen Harleth in George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda." She is, at the outset, a vain, spoiled, self-centered, calculating, materially driven young woman, a virtual villainess; the reader almost cheers for her downfall. But as she makes choices that we know will not end well, we also come to know her inner complexities--and the outer factors, both familial and societal, that have influenced her follies. By the end of the novel, when she must face the dire consequences of the way she's lived her life so far, any decent reader's heart will break. Reading that novel, though it's not as "good" as, say, "Middlemarch," was a turning point for me in the way I thought about fiction and why we read it. The best fiction always reminds us how to be compassionate--toward ourselves as well as others. (By the way, Gwendolen Harleth is said to have been the inspiration for Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara.)

As for my own writing, characters are everything to me--where the story begins, how it unfolds: the plot is determined by the choices they make--and so I dig very deep into their psyches. Like my best friends, the characters of my own that I come to love (and sometimes it surprises me which ones I do . . . and don't!) are those who have had to struggle with heartbreak, the frictions of family relationships, and true regret. I'm not fond of people who walk away from or glibly ignore the effects of these virtually unavoidable hurdles. If I create a character like that--and I have--it will generally be to challenge the flawed but struggling people I want to write about. Accepting responsibility for our own foolishness is, to me, one of the greatest human virtues and the genesis of wisdom.

What I love about hearing readers discuss my characters is that different readers prefer different characters. Fenno McLeod--the protagonist of my first novel, "Three Junes"--inspired ire and contempt in a couple of book critics (those reviews were among my worst ever)--yet so many readers adore him. (And I guess I must, too, since he keeps coming back.) Some people love his strong-willed mother, Maureen, while others see her as a cold, unnurturing narcissist. Similarly mixed responses have been invoked by Greenie Duquette, the heroine of "The Whole World Over," and Kit Noonan, whose quest for a father is at the heart of my latest, "And the Dark Sacred Night." What this tells me is that all these characters are indeed "real" people, so fully dimensional that they repel some readers while endearing themselves to others. I certainly hope that readers will like some of my characters, but I can never predict which ones, so it's something I don't worry about.

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