August 4, 2021

Mona Awad

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes acclaimed novelist MONA AWAD—author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl and Bunny—for a discussion of her latest novel, All's Well. She will be joined in conversation by LAURA ZIGMAN, author of the novels Animal Husbandry and Separation Anxiety.

Details

Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.

With prose Margaret Atwood has described as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged . . . genius,” Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All’s Well is the story of a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.

About Author(s)

Mona Awad is the author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and Bunny, named a Best Book of 2019 by TimeVogue, and The New York Public Library, a finalist for the New England Book Award, and currently in development as an AMC series written by Megan Mostyn-Brown. She has published work in the New York Times MagazineTimeVICEElectric LiteratureMcSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She begins teaching fiction fall 2020 in the MFA program at Syracuse. Awad currently lives in Boston.

Laura Zigman is the author of 5 novels, including Separation AnxietyAnimal Husbandry (which was made into the movie Someone Like You, starring Hugh Jackman and Ashley Judd), Dating Big BirdHer, and Piece of Work. She has ghostwritten/collaborated on several works of non-fiction, including Eddie Izzard's New York Times bestseller, Believe Me; been a contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, son, and deeply human Sheltie.