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Mona Awad on Bunny
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Two ideas that were always one bookThe novel began as two separate projects that Awad was running in parallel without realizing they belonged together. One was rooted in fairy tale; the other grew from her time as a student at Brown University, which she later fictionalized as Warren University. Only when she finished the MFA did the connection become clear.
Initially I’d imagined a teenage girl gang of Snow Whites, told from the perspective of an outsider. I realized it was so much like high school. And creative writers live in their heads, where it’s all about the world of the imagination, so there’s permission in the MFA concept to bring in the magical.
The abstract idea needed a physical trigger before Awad would let herself commit to it. She was a PhD student at the University of Denver, mid-novel on something else entirely, when an animal on campus settled the question.
It was seeing a bunny on my campus in Denver... that gave me permission to write ‘Bunny.’ I saw it and I was like, that’s a sign. I’m just going to abandon this novel that I’m working on and switch to this seemingly crazy idea cooking in the back of my head. [paraphrased from audio]
The magic in the book is not decoration layered over a realist MFA satire. Awad built it to do specific argumentative work: to make literal the vocabulary writers already use about their own process, and to treat that vocabulary as genuinely dangerous.
I always knew, from the very beginning. Because I was drawing, in part, from fairy tales. And there were things about the creative process that I wanted to literalize: the idea of darlings, and killing your darlings, and the very, very complicated and often violent relationship that creators can have with their creations. The fear and the wonder and all the emotions around it—there’s just so many. It’s so ripe.
How she wrote it
Three months, one dress review, and a rabbit bridegroomThe speed of the first draft was anomalous for Awad. Her debut, ‘13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl,’ took six years to complete. With ‘Bunny,’ the subject matter apparently demanded a different pace: she got the idea and moved.
Bunny, when I got the idea, I just kind of went with it, and I finished a first draft in three months. The story did unfold pretty organically for me, which was, given the subject matter, probably a little surprising to hear.
To nail the Bunnies’ aesthetic precisely, the kitten-print dresses and the saccharine self-presentation, Awad went to an unexpected archive: the customer review sections of ModCloth, a retro-feminine clothing retailer. What she found there was less fashion writing than confessional.
In the comments, people reveal the things that they hate, but they’re trying to accept that they still love the dress, and they don’t want to part with it. There are such interesting little monologues that reveal so much about the very layered conflicts that people have with their clothes.
The transformation logic the Bunnies use in their off-campus workshops draws from a specific fairy tale variant that most readers will not recognize. Awad went past the canonical Beauty and the Beast to a much stranger relative of it.
There are a million variations of Beauty and the Beast, and there’s actually one called The Hare’s Bride, about a beast groom who’s a rabbit.
Midway through the project, Awad’s confidence collapsed entirely. The question she put to herself at that point became the only writing advice she says she ever needed, and it came not from a mentor or a craft book but from her own cross-examination.
The writing advice I gave myself when I was working on Bunny, and it wasn’t so much advice as a question asked at a crucial moment, a moment when I thought I would quit. It was to counter my own negative self-talk which is that no one would want to fucking read this insane book, let alone represent or publish it. And then I just asked myself, okay fine, if that’s true, do you still want to write it, even if it stays in the dark? Answer: yes. Yes, I do.
The book was published in 2019 by Viking and went on to generate the Reddit debates, the cult following, and the sequel she never planned.
The personal thread
Enchanted by the thing she’s dissectingAwad arrived at Brown as an outsider to the New England Ivy League world in a very specific way: as a Canadian encountering it for the first time as an adult. That combination of attraction and unfamiliarity runs directly into Samantha’s position in the novel.
As a Canadian, [it] was very mysterious. I was kind of enchanted.
The hyperfemininity Awad satirizes in the Bunnies is not a mode she observes from a clinical distance. She has been consistent across interviews in placing herself inside the enchantment she is also interrogating.
The Bunnies are so hyper-feminine. There’s always been to me something kind of horrific about that. It’s a monster that I’ll never be able to resist.
On what the book is wrestling with
Loneliness that rewrites realityThe question of whether the novel’s events are supernatural or psychological is one Awad refuses to resolve, and she makes that refusal on principle. She knows the reading communities that have formed around exactly this debate.
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... I hate deciding and determining meaning. That’s up to the reader. That’s what the Reddit threads are for.
Underneath the horror machinery, Awad had a specific psychological claim she wanted to test: that exclusion does not just wound a person but actively distorts what they perceive.
Loneliness is at the core of this book, and I was very interested in how loneliness activates our imagination and informs our perceptions.
The novel’s occult framing is not purely atmospheric. Awad draws a structural parallel between elite academic institutions and cult initiation, and argues that writing programs push this parallel furthest of all.
I think that the occult and academia are inherently connected. The elitism around certain academic institutions and programs has an occult quality. They’re hard to get into, there are rites of passage, there’s the promise that by going through the program, you’ll gain knowledge that’s not accessible on the outside. And that occultism is especially true in writing programs because a lot of writers talk about their creative process in kind of mystical terms.
What she wants us to sit with
Power and constraint, held at the same timeAwad is deliberate about what the hyperfeminine world of the Bunnies is meant to do. It is not a target she is shooting at from outside. She wants readers to feel both the genuine pull of that world and the cost of living inside it.
I’m interested in engaging the hyperfeminine in some way and presenting it as both a place of power and possibility and beauty, and truly freedom, but also a place of constraint and misogyny... The Bunnies, they are very hyperfeminine, and it’s a struggle. That’s what we see behind the curtain.
The mode Awad chose, fantasy layered over a recognizable social world, is not evasion for her but the opposite. She describes it as the condition under which she can say things she could not say directly.
It’s like wearing a mask to a party. You can just be yourself a bit more. There’s something about fantasy that, for me anyway, really does allow for more truth telling.
What the mask allows, in ‘Bunny,’ is a novel that is simultaneously a satire of MFA groupthink, a fairy tale about creation and destruction, and a study of what isolation does to perception: three registers held together by the choice never to resolve which one is real.