What If True Heroines Were Tired, Flawed, and Quietly Furious?

A dirt road to a countryside thriller

We often hear that literature needs strong female characters, as if a heroine’s role were to embody a model, defy norms, right wrongs, and shine with brilliance. But there is another kind of strength — quieter, rougher — the strength of women who remain standing despite their failures, who don’t try to seduce or persuade, who move forward in a mix of smoldering anger, fatigue, and misplaced tenderness.

Claire, the protagonist of Of Flesh and Tears, is one of them. She is no blazing warrior. She flees more than she fights, grates more than she dazzles. She inhabits her body like a burden, clings to a dog with almost desperate intensity, and bonds with a nature she doesn't fully understand. Divorced, exiled, walking a fragile line — and yet she may resemble us more than the smooth, luminous heroines we’re so often offered.

Claire is a damaged woman, not always likable, often withdrawn, but deeply human in her contradictions. She lies sometimes, manipulates her emotions, pushes away those who love her. She seeks comfort in food, in her affection for animals, and in working the earth. She wants to heal, though she doesn’t know how.

What I wanted to explore through her is not a fall, nor redemption, but that murky in-between we sometimes go through — when we no longer know what’s expected of us, or what we expect of ourselves. When the familial, professional, emotional bearings have all been shaken, and yet something within us still resists — a curiosity, a fear, or perhaps simply a survival instinct.

Claire is a woman in anger, but her anger is not spectacular. It is tired, internalized, expressed through long silences, misplaced gestures of protection, and hesitant eating habits — somewhere between orthorexia and a gentler kind of wisdom. And yet, despite her doubts and weaknesses, she never gives up. She is, in her own way, a heroine — steadfast in the midst of complexity.