WE LOVE YOU, BUNNY, by Mona Awad
Two decades ago, my creative writing program — the Midwestern one, the so-called Death Star — was a paradise for dudes. Straight guys in my cohort did hard drugs, shot out streetlights with BB guns and crossed literal tracks to visit a strip bar. (I know this because I read scads of poems celebrating these adventures.) Meanwhile, two of our professors openly dated and married female students who could have been their children. The program was a hothouse — maybe a contempt inferno.
At the time, I was reading Denis Johnson’s story collection “Jesus’ Son.” Although set in Iowa and written by an alum of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, it has nothing to do with the program. I mentioned this to a professor who explained that Johnson never came to class. So that was the solution! I resolved to follow suit.
The result of my rebellion was, predictably, nil — save decreased exposure to air-gun sestinas. I graduated and, for better or worse, went on to become a teacher myself, including at an institution that (full disclosure) bears a resemblance to Warren, the fictional Ivy League school featured in Mona Awad’s darkly comic 2019 satire of academic creative writing, “Bunny.”
That book’s new sequel, “We Love You, Bunny,” revives its forebear’s rational, laconic narrator, the M.F.A. scholarship student Samantha Heather Mackey, a.k.a. Sam, a.k.a. Smackie, a.k.a. Cousin Itt — except here she’s no longer doing the telling, seeing as she’s gagged, trussed and being held at ax-point. Awad now addresses the reader from the collective voice of Sam’s kidnappers, the four manic-pixie trust-funders who tortured her protagonist throughout the first book.
In fact, “We Love You, Bunny” begins, quixotically enough, just after the launch of “Bunny” — which is to say, the launch of what must be a fictional version of “Bunny,” a biting and hilarious roman à clef written by Sam, not Mona Awad.
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The post When Your M.F.A. Cohort Is Out for Blood appeared first on New York Times.
