We aren’t watching a charismatic actor decode and express a palatable neuroticism to us, in the way a beautiful person like Tina Fey is pretend unattractive within the context of her thespian and filmic pursuits. Caroline is maybe-sort-of being used as a mirror to the hypocrisy of a female lead needing to appeal to the audience:

Because that was what all the notes boiled down to, from the earliest stages of the project. Everyone was so worried about how audiences would respond to Jane, She was too passive, or too selfish, or too angry, or too confused about what she wanted. Executives knew they weren’t supposed to use the word “likable” anymore, but that was the essence of what they were saying, Audiences weren’t going to like Jane. And if they didn’t, they wouldn’t watch.

The author clearly knows what is up and is definitely saying something about who gets to be a female lead, because Caroline is deeply unpleasant but also insightful and interesting at times.

“Maybe she was was overcomplicating everything with her worries about what was good or bad to want and why, her insistence on measuring herself against the labels of good person or real artist or likable protagonist. Maybe she didn’t have to be any of those things.”

But spending two-hundred-plus pages with someone who misinterprets nearly everything as a personal failing—“When she cooked, she gripped a recipe like a lifeline, too timid to improvise and resentful when here meticulous instruction-following yielded lackluster results”—or a cosmic insult— “The wooden fish stared at her, its painted black eyes empty. What a grotesque fuckup you are, it observed.” is less a study in character work and more akin to masochism:

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