Hi, this is Libby Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology,

which you should run out and buy called Moms Don't Have Time to, a quarantine anthology.

All proceeds of that book go to COVID-19 vaccine research.

And I'm the editor-in-chief of M don't have time to write a new publication on Medium.

And we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there.

And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens and my website is Zibi-Owens.com.

Okay, now back to this amazing podcast.

Mona Awad is the author of All's Well, a novel. Mona is the author of also of 13 ways of looking at a fat girl, a finalist

for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize, and winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award.

And she also wrote Bunny, named a Best book of 2019 by Time, Vogue,

and the New York Public Library, a finalist for the New England Book Award, and is currently

in development as an AMC series written by Megan Mostin Brown. She has published work in the New York

Times Magazine, Time, Vice, Electric Literature, McSweeney's, and elsewhere.

Welcome, Mona. Thank you so much for coming on Mom's Don't have time to read books to discuss all as well. Thank you so much for having me, it's an honor. Oh, oh. You have such a great cover, by the way. Were you so happy with this? Tell me the story. Yeah, I was so happy with it. I was really freaked out by it, and I thought that that was good. But it's like, it's still playful, you know? I love all the colors. But I think they wanted to do something where, you know, the image embodied both theater, which the book was on, and then the, you know, the story of this woman's pain. So the pills are what make up the mask. It's so cool. Yeah, I almost didn't notice at first when I first got it. And then I was like, oh my gosh, those were pills. Anyway, yeah, it's very, it's very cool. Well, I guess on that note, I should have started with this, but could you tell listeners what your book is about? And also, what inspired you to write this? I know it's your third novel, why this one, why this topic, and like, why now?

Anyway, that should take us for a while.

Well, so I think basically I'll start

with just talking a little bit about the book.

So it's about a theater professor at a New England college.

Her name is Miranda Fitch, and she is suffering from chronic pain that no one believes she has.

And then she is just hell-bent on staging the student production of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well.

But the students are muteness, and they want Macbeth.

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