Mona Awad was\u00a0trying on a\u00a0forest-green, deer-patterned dress when she realised that the psychotically twee characters from her\u00a02019 novel, Bunny, had burrowed back into her psyche.<\/p>\n
\u201cI looked in the mirror and thought:\u00a0This isn\u2019t a dress for me, this\u00a0is\u00a0a dress for Cupcake,\u201d she says, referencing one of the antagonists from her breakout book. \u201cI\u00a0started thinking about her, and the other bunnies,\u201d says the Canadian author, \u201cand I was like: I\u00a0have to go back.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the uninitiated, Bunny is a surreal, hallucinogenic novel set on a prestigious creative writing master of fine arts (MFA) programme. Narrated by Samantha, an acerbic writer of dark\u00a0fiction, it centres on a clique of\u00a0saccharine students whose corny obsessions \u2013 internet hair-braiding tutorials, vintage typewriters, tiny baked goods \u2013 belie their true demonic natures. Behind the scenes, the bunnies are magically creating hunky man-bunny hybrids they call \u201cdrafts\u201d. These darlings eventually have to be killed \u2013 literally, with axes.<\/p>\n
A satire about creativity and class, Bunny was chosen as a best book of the year by Time and Vogue, and hailed as \u201cgenius\u201d by Margaret Atwood (Atwood later named Awad her \u201cliterary heir apparent\u201d in a magazine feature). It became a bestseller in 2021, selling more than a million copies worldwide, after being embraced by fans of weird girl lit and so-called femgore<\/a> on Booktok; in 2023 it was optioned for film by Bad Robot.<\/p>\n Awad has published two subsequent novels: 2021\u2019s All\u2019s Well, a trippy tale about a theatre professor who finds an unconventional cure for chronic pain, and 2023\u2019s Rouge, about a grieving woman who is drawn into a skincare cult. All the while, the buzz around Bunny has never faded. Its most ardent fans frequently send Awad tributes via Instagram DMs. A band, the Greys, wrote a Bunny-inspired song<\/a>; one reader was inked with the line \u2018Unsmiling, but soul\u00a0happy\u2019, and Awad mentions \u201can incredible tattoo of a decapitated bunny that I love\u201d. The reaction, she says, has been \u201cunreal. I\u2019m so moved by it.\u201d<\/p>\n This month Awad, 47, goes back down the rabbit hole with We Love You, Bunny, a follow-up novel voiced by the bunnies themselves, and one of their hybrid creations, Aerius. Expanding the Bunnyverse was a risk. \u201cI knew that readers who did connect with Bunny had a very strong relationship with the text that had nothing to do with me,\u201d Awad says. \u201cI was afraid of meddling with that.\u201d At the same time, it felt \u201cinevitable\u201d that she would return one day, in part because writing the book was such a transformative experience. It was her first foray into surrealism and\u00a0fantasy; her 2016 debut, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, was realist. Bunny was \u201cwhere I first discovered a way of telling stories that was exciting to me\u201d.<\/p>\n Awad is in San Diego, California, when we speak over Zoom. She looks like a glamorous goth in a black dress, her hair a dark curtain occasionally falling over one eye. This is not her own house but a place she found a few years ago when searching for a writing retreat: she spends the rest of the year between upstate New York, where she\u00a0is an assistant professor on the creative writing programme at Syracuse University, and Boston, where her partner lives. But having had a \u201cparticularly vivid and exciting\u201d experience writing Rouge at the house in La Jolla, she keeps coming back. \u201cI\u00a0think I became superstitious.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n There is something about making art that\u2019s beautiful, but\u00a0that\u2019s also violent<\/p>\n The mystery of the creative process is a subject Awad mines with gleeful irreverence in We Love You, Bunny. She was interested in exploring \u201cthe ethics around creation\u201d, she says, particularly when writing from Aerius\u2019s perspective, in chapters that make playful reference to Frankenstein, Jane Eyre and the Velveteen Rabbit. \u201cThe bunnies are writers \u2013 and they\u2019re psychotic,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re grabby, they\u2019re greedy. There is something about making art that\u2019s beautiful, but\u00a0it\u2019s also a bit of a violence. I was interested in capturing that hunger that we have to make. What\u2019s that about? And what\u2019s the cost of that?\u201d Aerius is \u201cdisgusted by writers and all of their typing and scribbling and trying to take down the moon. Sometimes, I feel that way too!\u201d she says, laughing.<\/p>\n Awad was born in Montreal. She describes herself as \u201ca very shy kid\u201d who frequently felt like an outsider. For example, her mother, who was French Canadian and Catholic, raised her to speak English, which left her feeling \u201cestranged\u201d from the language spoken by the maternal half of her family, even\u00a0though it was her mother tongue. \u201cAnd the same thing happened with religion,\u201d she says. Her father is Egyptian and Muslim; her parents decided that she would not take on either of their religions, which left her feeling marginalised at her strict Catholic school. Also, being half Egyptian, growing up in Montreal \u201cI always felt not quite welcome, not quite at home. It was never direct. It\u00a0was just kind of a feeling,\u201d she says. Later, she struggled to adjust when she moved from Quebec to English-speaking Ontario. School was sometimes tough. \u201cI dropped out a few times, and I even dropped out of college once,\u201d she says, but she always loved to\u00a0read. She was an only child whose parents worked in hotels. \u201cMy mother and father both always had to work Christmas and New Year\u2019s. So usually, they would get access to a room, and that\u2019s where I would be, reading.\u201d<\/p>\n At college, Awad wrote a poem about body image in a creative writing class. Though her professor praised it effusively, she ended up dropping out. \u201cI got so scared of failing that I just kind of stopped trying for quite a while, didn\u2019t come back to [writing] seriously until my late 20s or early 30s.\u201d Instead, she worked as a magazine editorial assistant in Montreal; wrote a spoof food column as Veronica Tartley, a\u00a0writer with \u201ca number of eating disorders, whose reviews are all filtered through her neuroses\u201d; and studied a lot, including completing a masters in English at the University of Edinburgh, where she wrote her thesis on fairytales. It was during her MFA at Brown University \u2013 which inspired the similarly cloistered environment of Warren University in Bunny \u2013 then during a PhD at Denver, that she finally found a way to turn that early poem into a novel.<\/p>\n Awad\u2019s influences include Oscar Wilde, Jean Rhys and Atwood, particularly her \u201cearly, stranger gothic novels\u201d \u2013 Lady Oracle, The Edible Woman, Surfacing, The Robber Bride \u2013 which she loved as a teenager. Her favourite aspect of Atwood\u2019s work, she says, is its \u201cwryness. There is always a sense of humour about it. No\u00a0matter how deep she goes.\u201d Awad describes herself as \u201ca\u00a0very dark-minded soul, and humour is definitely a way to survive\u201d. Atwood\u2019s endorsement has, of course, been major: the pair co-hosted a Zoom event for the release of Bunny in\u00a0paperback and met in person at a photoshoot in 2023 at which the novelist advised Awad \u201cto say \u2018fuck it\u2019 more, which I think is good advice for everyone\u201d.<\/p>\n It feels relevant to the preoccupations of We Love You, Bunny that Awad and author Paul Tremblay are currently jointly suing Open AI for \u201cingesting<\/a>\u201d their books, though Awad says she cannot talk about the case. She will say that she worries about AI\u00a0\u201call the time\u201d; that she cares passionately about the \u201cvery human endeavour\u201d of getting a voice down on the page. She is in the midst of creating another such voice as we speak. \u201cI am working on a novel, and it is a monster,\u201d she says \u2013 a term which one hopes and imagines, in Awad\u2019s world, carries a twisted double meaning.<\/p>\n