Photo by Brigitte Lacombe
Interview by Chimedum Ohaegbu
Mona Awad’s highly anticipated second book, Bunny (Viking, 2019), is a campus novel dipped in malice and wonder. The novel follows lonely MFA student Samantha Heather Mackey, who desperately longs for the company of her cult-like classmates, nicknamed “Bunnies”, while also deeply despising them. In this interview, Awad talks about the monstrosity of cuteness, maintaining a sense of discipline and play in writing, and novel playlists.
You’ve done a lot of higher education in creative writing, including an MFA of your own. How much of Bunny was a loving spoof, and how much of it is you critiquing the institution?
Probably a bit of both. I obviously have benefited really greatly from [post-secondary writing programs]—I got funding to work on my first book and I got really helpful feedback and I had a community. But it’s a strange space to occupy as a creative person, especially as a writer, because it’s the kind of work that you undertake on your own, and then suddenly you’re sharing your work with other people, who are also sharing their work. It can get weird. I just kind of wanted to lean into that strangeness that can happen when a small group of creative people are being asked to activate their imaginations and are feeling simultaneously very vulnerable because they’re sharing themselves. That seemed like very fraught and kind of potentially dangerous territory.
There were a lot of allusions to mythology, to Alice in Wonderland. What was the importance of calling back to these kinds of narratives specifically, rather than to campus novels?
Because I was writing about artists, I was writing about somebody who lived in their head and and whose imagination was both a blessing and a curse. The book is an exploration of the dangers of living in that imaginative space alone. But also the potential wonder of living in that space. Myth and fairy tales and an Alice in Wonderland kind of narrative all sort of operate with dream logic, with intuitive logic. And that just made more sense to me, given the characters I was exploring.
I wouldn’t call Bunny an escapist novel, but it has a lot of escapist themes. Do you feel that there’s an inherent danger to escapism, or would you say it’s more created by the escapee, as in the case of Samantha?
I think it’s dangerous. I mean, it’s exciting and wonderful. I’ve done it since I was a kid—I love spinning stories about experiences that I had, interactions that I had: making them more magical than they were, making them more horrible than they were, making them more romantic than they were. But of course, there’s a danger in that, because so much of the story that you’re telling yourself is informed by your own fears, your own latent desires, your own biases, your vulnerabilities. It’s beautiful, and it’s exciting. And it’s a consolation, especially for somebody who is as lonely as Samantha is. But it is absolutely dangerous and it is part of what generates a lot of the horror in the book.
Writing is an isolating activity. Do you feel that being a creative exacerbates that loneliness or helps it?
I think [that]’s a question I asked myself often. For me, if I’m going to really commit myself to building a world and writing a novel, I’m gonna have a lot of time alone—I have to just get in there, get into that space and really believe it myself so that I can write it. But that is kind of lonely. There is a lot of sacrifice involved. For Samantha, I think I was interested in playing with that anxiety that I think I might have and other writers too, which is that, if you start hanging out with other writers, particularly if you’re in an MFA program, you’ll start to sound like everybody else. So I wanted to play with that in Bunny because ultimately Samantha’s very guarded, and she sort of keeps herself to herself. And that does get compromised when she is admitted into the Bunny cult. They all start to sound the same, they all share the same voice, and for me that was the scariest part to write—and the most fun—but it was very scary because, you know, she’s lost herself. She’s been accepted by this group, but the sacrifice is of course her own voice.
How important to you is a sense of fun, of play, in writing, especially considering how bad Samantha’s case of writer’s block was?
Oh, it’s so important. To me, it’s the only way through. When I’m personally stuck as a writer, play is what saves me every time, and understanding that I can’t take the world too seriously. And play can be very serious too—it can be very consuming and it requires discipline as well. It’s just that there’s a trust involved with it. It’s interesting, because Sam doesn’t trust herself, and I think that’s part of the reason why she’s so blocked.
The Bunnies are terrifying partially because they’re so invested in this warped adorableness. What for you is the distinction between ‘cute’ and ‘cutesy’?
I’ve always been kind of terrified of the power that cute things have over me. And I’ve always felt that cute things are a little terrifying. For me, the two sort of live side by side, but when it tips more into cutesy and away from cute, that’s when it, I think, becomes more layered and complex and frightening.
I think cute is a kind of monster. It’s like a[n] embodiment of anxiety. You know? I mean, I really, really am seduced by cute things, and I started to really pay attention to that while I was writing Bunny. I started to pay attention to my response to things that are shiny, to things that have sparkles, to things that are anthropomorphic, to modcloth. And if you pay attention, if you are maybe a little bit more dark-minded or a bit more cynical, [cuteness’] power is something that we should question, that we should think about. Because there’s a manipulation in there.
Congrats on the TV optioning! Where would you like to see them take Bunny’s adaptation?
It’s scary for me to think about, to be honest with you, just because I don’t know. Fairy tales are wonderful in part because they are so adaptable, and so I think a lot of the elements of the book will translate really nicely to another medium. And the writer who was on board—I feel like she and I have a shared sensibility about the story. I’ve only read the pilot, and I loved it. I thought it was really good. It was weird. It definitely had all the humor and all of the magic and the Gothic elements that I wanted to preserve. But I’ve kind of decided to let the writer go forward with it and step back and let this be her thing.
What’s the question wish interviewers would ask you?
Maybe music would be fun to talk about. I tend to do playlists for anything that I’m working on, and it’s a really important part of my process. It just helps me live in the world of the story even when I’m not writing.
I did catch a Taylor Swift reference?
Yeah, yeah. Blank Space. She’s right in the middle of my [Bunny] playlist. Strangely, that song, even though it’s very happy, is actually a song that I think about whenever I think about the most violent moment in the book, which is the workshop scene. I was really interested in that juxtaposition, that maybe isn’t so much a juxtaposition, between the sweet and the truly violent and sinister. In some ways it was natural because of fairy tales. Those two components—darkness [and] lightness, horror and wonder—they sit side-by-side so closely in a fairy tale. But whenever I hear that song, I always think about about axes and girls screaming, covered in guts, so you probably have different set of images around it.
Probably, yeah. What’s the rest of the playlist like thematically?
The rest of the playlist is kind of a mix of dreamy stuff like Broadcast and more female-fronted rock like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and PJ Harvey and things like that. I think I put it together like a month after I first started writing the book. Like in 2015, I had my first version of the playlist and I edited it just like I edited the book, kept adding songs, kept taking songs out — no, that doesn’t work. I took it very, very, very seriously, the playlist. Probably maybe too seriously. Music is so immediate, and I love that about it. And I strive for that kind of immediacy in my writing as much as possible. And also, I love songs that are like journeys. When I listen to them, I think about how the story might take that kind of shape.
What’s next for you?
Right now I’m finishing a draft of my new novel. And I’ve been really enjoying it. It’s sort of like a cousin to Bunny in some ways, because there’s a magic component to it, but it’s also kind of a cousin to 13 Ways [Of Looking At A Fat Girl] as well. It’s new territory for me, but it’s very exciting.
Mona Awad is the author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize that won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Colorado Book Award, and an Honorable Mention from the Arab American Book Awards. It was also longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. The recipient of an MFA in Fiction from Brown University and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Denver, she has published work in Time, VICE, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Boston.
Chimedum Ohaegbu attends UBC in pursuit of hummingbirds and a dual degree in English literature and creative writing. Her professional debut in Strange Horizons was longlisted for the Nommo Award for African speculative fiction, and her fondness of bad puns has miraculously not prevented her work from being otherwise published in The /tƐmz/ Review, The Capilano Review, SAD Magazine, and more. Website: chimedum.com. Twitter: @chimedumohaegbu.”