Novelist Mona Awad on Her Dark Impulses: “No Boys Were Axed in the Making of This Book”

I think some people really don’t know what to make of that last scene in the mud,” Mona Awad says of reader reception to her best-selling 2019 novel, Bunny. We’re all grown-ups here, so I don’t need to explain that in this conversation about her follow-up, We Love You, Bunny, out Tuesday from Marysue Rucci Books, there are going to be some light spoilers about what came first. “What the book is suggesting, but also doesn’t determine, is that maybe in the end she’ll always choose the life of the imagination, because she is an artist.”

The “she” in question is that first novel’s narrator, Sam, the fifth wheel in an East Coast MFA fiction cohort whose creations are surprisingly alive. As in, her sadistically chirpy writing compatriots turn rabbits into boys. They refer to themselves as Bunnies and these creations variously as Drafts (the specimens aren’t particularly polished: “Your hair is so hairy,” they once offered on a group date, “Love your whatever”) or Darlings—which, as all writers know, must be killed. Psyches are plumbed. Blood is spilled. After its release the novel developed a devoted online following nearly as generative as the Bunnies themselves: Awad’s readers have created illustrations and prints inspired by the book, a song called “Mona” by the Massachusetts-based band the Greys, a sculpture of a bunny boy being axed. Margaret Atwood became a fan.

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“I missed the book the minute I turned it in to my publisher back in 2018,” Awad says. (We share a publisher.) “I continued to dream about it, continued to long to return. I was imagining if Sam did in fact write a novel called Bunny—I think that’s what Bunny is, it’s her thesis—if she wrote it, what would the Bunnies have to say about that? How would they respond?” Thus, We Love You, Bunny picks up with Sam kidnapped by her former workshopmates while on a book tour stop, bound and gagged, the better to receive their feedback on all the details she missed.

“Oh, don’t worry, Samantha, I’m not going to decapitate you,” one of the cohort tells her, an axe to her neck. “I’m just making you feel the metaphor, is all. Bringing you into the visceral experience of it, shall we say. Making you smell the room, remember when our writing teachers would say that? I want to smell the room. Do you smell it now, Samantha? It smells, thanks to you, of stale blood and dead dreams.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Vanity Fair: Something I thought about while reading both these books is how author descriptions of writing fiction can sound like something is going very wrong psychologically. In most cases one hopes not to hear voices in one’s head, but as a fiction writer, that’s what you rely on.

Mona Awad: Yeah, you do really feel in another dimension when you’re writing a book. Half your heart, maybe even all of your heart, is in another world. That can make me feel a little crazy. I definitely wanted to tap into that. It’s something that blows up in Bunny, because [readers] do wonder if Sam is mentally ill. She’s created these beings. They’re her friends. But the Bunnies are totally psychotic about it. “I’m not a psychopath, I’m a fiction writer,” is a quote from The Duchess in the new book.

You need T-shirts with that phrase.

I know, right? There’s something about being in your head for an extended period of time, of following your dark impulses down the road as far as they can go. That can make you feel really like you’ve lost the plot. But for fiction writers, that’s where the magic is.

There are such varying reader theories on the first book, and what’s going on by the end, and how literally one should be taking the more fantastical and horror elements. Were you conscious of those readings?

I’m aware of the Reddit threads. I am aware that some people think Sam is schizophrenic, and that’s a reading that’s available in the story. I like the idea of playing with that tension of, is it really happening, or is it in her head? All fiction writers, because we project and we use our imaginations, we’re always worried about that. But I think it’s an anxiety that everybody has. Everybody’s always worried, “Is this really happening or am I imagining it?” That’s the seed of all horror.

So I’m aware of it, but I didn’t look too closely, because I didn’t want it to color my own relationship with the characters and my own sense of how they’re motivated. And to be honest with you, I like keeping the motivations open. I hate deciding and determining meaning. That’s up to the reader. That’s what the Reddit threads are for.

All authors have a book-reading horror story, but I think Samantha’s, of being kidnapped by four of the people she wrote about and being held at axe-point, maybe takes the cake. Has anyone in your life ever confronted you about seeing themselves in your fiction?

I mean, no. But I guess as a writer, it’s something that you’re always up against to a degree. My work is very fantastic. Obviously no boys were axed in the making of this book. But I do draw from my own experiences in the world. All’s Well was drawn from my experiences with chronic pain. Rouge does draw from my own childhood in Montreal, and my own real obsession with beauty and skin products. That’s real. And for Bunny, I did go to an MFA program. I am a teacher, now, in an MFA program. And I did think when I was a creative writing student, the fodder for horror is just beyond. It is such rich terrain for horror.

What in particular made you feel that way about the MFA?

It’s a cloistered environment where you are being asked to share your work at a very vulnerable stage in your writing career—the beginning—with strangers that you have to become intimate with very quickly. You don’t know them, they don’t know you. You all want the same thing. And you’re alone. You’re outside of your typical environment. You’re in a new place. You have to perform, you’re being evaluated. For any writer who has any ambition and who has any vulnerability at all, which we all do, it’s just a recipe for mental and emotional catastrophe.

I also hate groups. I’m actually quite phobic of groups. I really like bonding with people one-on-one. When I’m in a group, I feel like I can’t authentically bond with anyone. I always feel at sea. Being in an MFA program, you’re with a group all the time. It’s very, very easy to feel at sea and just feel like, “Oh my fucking god.”

In your new book, the people who have been written about get agency in a new way. One of the creations even gets to tell his story. What were you exploring with that?

When we write a story about someone and we occupy one perspective, we’re not getting the full story. I loved the idea of undermining or subverting the story I had written before by presenting this narrative of the Bunnies. The Bunnies have an agenda. They want to prove that they are real artists. And each one has a competing agenda. They are real artists—as a group, yes, that’s one aim that they want to accomplish in this telling of their story, but they also each have an individual desire to make a claim of authorship. And then I thought, Let’s undermine that narrative by presenting the story from the perspective of the creation.

The book is modeled after Frankenstein. I felt that it was important to share the creation’s experience of being created by these terribly controlling, anxious, possessive creators. He has his own life. And I really do think that creation has its own life that we have to be mindful of as makers.

What were other movies or books that became influences for I Love You, Bunny?

There were a couple of texts that became really important for the writing of the creation. I had COVID when I started writing the Bunny Boy’s voice. I was in a dreamy state. And my reason faculties were just gone. I was able to tap into this voice without too much second-guessing. The voice was drawn from a few different sources in my head. For the Bunnies, Jane Eyre is a holy text. And so the Bunny Boy says, “Dear Reader,” a lot, and has kind of a Romantic sensibility. That’s drawn from Jane Eyre’s narration of her own story—and also A Clockwork Orange, which I listened to just before I started writing, because the main character is dangerous, but there’s a playfulness to the way in which the story is narrated. He obviously has his own way of seeing the world that skewers the language in all these different ways. That felt important to include as well: that playful, dangerous energy. And then children’s literature like The Wind in the Willows and Watership Down. I wanted to have that classic children’s feel to it. Because he’s an innocent.

Both Bunny and your 2023 novel Rouge have been optioned for screen (by J.J. Abrams’s Bad Robot Productions and Fremantle and Sinestra, respectively). At what stage of the process are those projects?

Bunny is in a good place. There’s an actor who’s been attached and there’s a director attached. I can’t reveal any details, but it’s very exciting. There’s a script. And then Rouge, there’s a script and a director.

How involved are you?

I’m pretty involved in Bunny. I’ve had a lot of creative conversations with production. It’s similar in Rouge. I mean, it’s going to be different. The interiority—you can’t really show that on the screen. So that’s always the challenge.

In times of large-scale political, social unrest—which probably one could argue we are always in, but are certainly experiencing now—there’s often this rise in questioning the “point” of art. Recently I’ve been noticing more authors almost apologizing for talking about their books, sometimes even for writing their books. What do you think about that?

I do think about it a lot. I really do. Bunny has been very, very successful in Ukraine, and particularly this year. The reasons that Ukrainian readers have shared with me is—I’m paraphrasing here—that it’s an anti-fascist, antiestablishment book about the importance of standing your own ground and being yourself. And that’s what Bunny is really about in the end. I think that We Love You, Bunny is similar.

But beyond that, I’ve been really struggling this year, and one of the things that has always helped me get through any kind of struggle is art. It doesn’t actually take me out of the world; it keeps me there, but it allows me to survive it. I was rereading the novels of Marcy Dermansky this summer because I was depressed.

I just reread Bad Marie.

It’s my favorite one! I was so depressed this summer, and I reread Bad Marie. And, I mean, Bad Marie is not about the moment, but Bad Marie allowed me to stay in the moment and to have some joy and move through the day. That’s what art gives us, I think.

Are there movies or music that are similarly feeding you right now?

The music that got me through writing We Love You, Bunny—which was such a joyous experience, truly I miss it so much—was Kate Bush. All the albums, but for sure Hounds of Love was really important. And some tracks on The Dreaming and Lionheart. She’s wild. She’s totally wild. She’s bold. She embraces her strangeness. She can be really dreamy. And her work uses a lot of masks. She doesn’t always write lyrics about her own life. It’s like she’s imagining another life. She’s such a fiction writer. But at the center of Kate Bush’s experiments, there’s this really authentic heart and voice. That’s kind of what I’m trying to do in my fiction. It usually comes from a real place inside of me, but I use the surreal to amplify and mirror that place.

I’m going to hear “Wuthering Heights” as the outro to this book now.

Exactly. And I love Drag Race. Drag Race is another hugely important part of my creative life. When I started watching it on TV it literally changed the color of my dreams. And I also love that relationship, how drag kind of takes something internal and externalizes it in a really playful and irreverent way, but it’s still exploring. Fundamentally, it’s an expression of authenticity.

Do you think you might revisit the Bunnies again?

I think I might. There’s one more story that I uncovered in the writing of We Love You, Bunny. Which is kind of what happened in Bunny too. There was a story underneath the story that I was very interested in and started dreaming about. Then I ended up writing this book. And the same thing happened with We Love You, Bunny where I saw that there was a story underneath this story that excited me—a perspective that excited me. So I may revisit it. We’ll see.

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