Mona Awad on All's Well

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2021

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In her new novel, "All’s Well," author Mona Awad combines elements of Shakespeare's "All’s Well That Ends Well" and "Macbeth" and the 1999 movie "Election" to tell the story of Miranda Fitch, a theater professor with a mutinous cast of actors and excruciating chronic pain. What do those plays have in common, and how did Awad weave them together to create her darkly funny new book? She is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Mona Awad is the author of three novels. "13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl," published by Penguin in 2016, won the Amazon Best First Novel Award. Her 2019 novel, "Bunny," was a finalist for a GoodReads Choice Award for Best Horror. Her novel "All’s Well" was published by Simon & Schuster and Penguin Canada in August 2021. Awad has taught creative writing at Brown University, the University of Denver, Framingham State University, Tufts and in the MFA program at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published August 31, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Lord, How We Lose Our Pains!,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a transcript of every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Paul Luke at Voice Trax-West in Studio City, California.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Your pain is yours. That is, until you give it away to someone else.
0:11.5	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:17.0	I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.
0:20.0	Novelist Mona Awad has written a new book that's all about pain,
0:25.4	physical pain, and the psychic pain that it can cause.
0:29.9	As you might expect, the book is dark, but it can also be laugh-out-loud funny.
0:36.3	It follows Miranda Fitch, a professor in the English department of a small college who is
0:41.7	determined to stage a student production of All's Well That Ends Well with a group of performers
0:48.2	who'd really rather be putting on Macbeth.
0:51.3	Miranda is the one who's in pain. That is, until she meets three weird men in a bar
0:57.8	near campus who offer her what seems like a means to topple the power structure that's been
1:03.6	holding Miranda in check. Mona's novel, entitled All's Well, has been called a dark and insane gem.
1:12.9	So we invited Mona Awad to join us from her home in Boston to talk about it.
1:18.0	We call this podcast, Lord, How We Lose Our Pains.
1:23.3	Mona Awad is interviewed by Barbara Bogave.
1:26.5	Right away, even before I open your book, practically, your title is all's well.
1:33.4	But am I supposed to make some connection to The Tempest because the protagonist's name is Miranda?
1:39.7	Yeah, I think I was just kind of playing around with her boss, Miranda's boss in the book, The Dean,
1:46.4	has this relationship to The Tempest because he played the monster. He played Caliban.
1:52.1	So I love the idea that Miranda, our protagonist, is having this relationship with Caliban.
1:59.1	And of course, Caliban is in charge of her fate.
2:02.8	So I guess there's a little bit of a wink to the tempest there, but no, it's mainly
	...

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