All's Well

Product Information

This was... oh boy... I’m so overwhelmed right now... I don’t know what words will be appropriate to express my feelings about this reading experience... The main character Miranda is a college theater director. In her younger years, she was a performer on stage, but after an accident left her seeking help for her "invisible pain" the doctors doubted and thought she was a delusional pain pill popper she left the stage to teach it. I felt guilty for laughing at someone else's misfortune, but this was well-developed humor and insight into her mind and thought process. Some of it was disturbing and desperate, but most of the time I was laughing out loud. She’s teaching Shakespeare as her life turns into a Shakespearean tragedy: an actress who’s dying to perform but a traffic accident already sealed her faith so she resents the young actresses-her own students who already replaced her. The play they work on All’s Well that Ends Well. An ironic name for her unresolved issues, incessant suffering, delusional mind trips. BOGAEV: Well, me too in reading it. And that is just so hard for women to pull off, being both the hero and the villain of the story. Historically, the Madonna and the whore. It’s a very complicated balancing act. Awad’s drawing on her own experiences here, in the aftermath of disastrous hip surgery. Her novel’s a convincing, blistering critique of women’s treatment by a male-dominated, medical industry - frequently infantilised, often disbelieved. Numerous, bleakly comic scenes depicting Miranda’s appointments with so-called health professionals will, I suspect, be all too familiar to many women readers. But despite the sense of verisimilitude, Awad jettisons conventional realist approaches, instead she offers up a near-mythic piece, replete with magical twists, bizarre reversals and moments of surreal fantasy. Miranda’s story’s interwoven with material from Shakespeare’s plays, from All’s Well That Ends Well to Macbeth, The Tempest and Hamlet, playing with their themes of dangerous desires, madness and witchcraft. There are some minor flaws, including occasional issues with pacing, but overall I thought this was a gripping, bravura performance, complex, intelligent, delightfully sinister.

So if you loved 🐰 ...well this isn't Bunny..🐰but I think you will love it...if you didn't love Bunny...🐰well I think you will like this...BOGAEV: Let’s—you know, love is war. Let’s literally have both of these characters go to war and see what happens. Mona Awad's latest novel All's Well explores personal pain, suffering and self-doubt set to Shakespeare We Do Adjust Our Reality for Other People: An Interview with Mona Awad". Electric Literature. 2016-03-02 . Retrieved 2018-02-20.

I really wanted to explore what that’s like for someone. Pain just sort of shaping your day; shaping what’s possible for you in the world, and how small your world becomes. And then, of course, dreaming about what would happen if my pain were suddenly taken away. What would that feel like? Another favourite of the year! Mona Awad had me entranced with this one! If this isn’t the most deliciously dark read ever, I don’t know what is. But pain can move Miss Fitch. It can switch. Easy, easily. Do you know how easy? From house to house. From body to body. You can pass it along. You can give it away, piece by piece.’ I picture the leg of a chair pressing onto my foot. A chair being sat on by a very fat man. The fat man is a sadist. He is smiling at me. His smile says, ‘I shall sit here forever, here with you on the third floor of this dubious college where you are dubiously employed. Theater studies, aka one of two sad concrete rooms in the English department, your office, I presume. Rather shabby.’”AWAD: I think there’s something to it. I think we do transfer pain in our everyday lives. You know, whenever we share something with someone, we are in a sense, you know, sharing our pain with them. And I’m interested in that. Ethically, what does that do to that person who internalizes the pain? I, sort of, wanted to literalize it. I wondered what would happen if you could really transfer the pain.