Kirsten King’s A Good Person fits within a 21st-century literary trend that champions the “unlikable” female protagonist. These characters are often morally ambiguous, self-destructive, and refuse to conform to traditional expectations of “feminine” behavior. They are not necessarily aspirational, but their complex, often contradictory, natures challenge readers to move beyond simple judgments. The novel’s epigraph from Clarice Lispector (the protagonist of The Silence of the Lambs), “am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?” (vii), directly invokes this theme of questioning the boundaries of human nature and likability.

Several recent novels set the stage for this archetype. Gillian Flynn’s thriller Gone Girl (2012) introduced Amy Dunne, a woman who meticulously performs the role of the “cool girl” for her husband before orchestrating a revenge plot. With her character, Flynn critiques the societal pressure on women to be effortlessly appealing to men. This mirrors Lillian’s calculated approach to dating Henry, where she consciously crafts a persona, believing men want a woman who is “virginal to the rest of the world and a whore with them” (12). In another example, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) features a narrator who chooses radical apathy, using prescription drugs to sleep for a year to escape her life. Her detachment and disdain for the world parallel Lillian’s alienation from her coworkers and her general feeling of being “outside, looking in” (5).

The archetype has since sharpened into even more transgressive territory. CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly (2023) pushes this idea of the unlikable woman character into outright horror: Its titular narrator, a Disneyland princess performer by day and a devotee of American Psycho-style violence by night, weaponizes the aesthetics of feminine sweetness as camouflage for grotesque cruelty. Maeve’s gleeful embrace of monstrosity makes explicit what Lispector’s epigraph only asks, and her performative “good girl” surface finds a subtler analogue in Lillian’s own studied self-presentation. Mona Awad’s Bunny (2019) similarly blurs the line between social satire and body horror, following an alienated MFA student seduced by a clique of hyper-feminine peers whose rituals literalize the violence of female friendship. Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020) offers a quieter but no less uncomfortable variation, in which Edie’s self-sabotaging affair with an older married man exposes the racial and economic dimensions of female “messiness.” Halle Butler’s The New Me (2019) and Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed (2021) round out this landscape with narrators mired in workplace nihilism and consumptive appetite, respectively—women whose interior monologues curdle observation into contempt. Halle Butler’s protagonist Millie, in particular, shares Lillian’s employee malaise and corrosive view of colleagues.

Together, these novels form a genre in which female interiority is rendered without apology or redemption arc. Understanding Lillian as a successor to these characters helps contextualize her behavior as part of a larger cultural exploration of female rage, agency, and complexity—one that has moved from psychological thriller to literary fiction to horror without softening its central provocation.