All's Well

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AWAD: Oh yeah. I have been that person, and that’s part of the reason why I wrote this book. I had chronic hip pain for years and ended up having to have surgery. Didn’t really solve the problem of my pain. Then, as a result of being unstable on my legs after the surgery, I ended up herniating discs. Neurological symptoms down my legs and a really awful time. I mean, I couldn’t close a window. Miranda can’t close a window in her office. I couldn’t close a window in my apartment. AWAD: I think for me, it’s pretty intuitive and organic. The materials that inspired me already had those components in them so it was easy to do. Because there is the very real setting of the school and the school theater in that production, then there’s also the very real setting of the physical therapist’s office. To kind of veer away once I’d introduced the world of Macbeth, that just felt like a very natural progression for this story.

I thought I should be empathizing with Miranda, but found her both sad, unfortunate, and not at all likable. She is employed as a theatre director at a university. She is determined to force her students to perform 'All's Well That Ends Well' for the annual stage production, going against her casts' wishes to put on the Scottish play (Macbeth) instead. "All's Well' reminds her of her early, painless days as a promising actress until an accident left her in excruciating pain. She can barely stumble in to work, her mind fuzzy from pain and overuse of painkillers. She resents her theatre students for their youth, beauty, high spirits, good health, and their voiced dislike of the play. She has become overly dependant on an assortment of painkillers, chiropractors, physiotherapists, acupuncturists, with no favourable results. She also will mix in booze with her medications. Doctors tend to ignore or disbelieve complaints, especially from women. She has alienated most friends and lost her husband due to her misery. Her acquaintances barely tolerate her disability and suffering, and her job is in jeopardy. From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Michael Witmore, the Folger’s director. Novelist Mona Awad has written a new book that’s all about pain: physical pain and the psychic pain it can cause. As you might expect, the book is dark, but it can also be laugh-out-loud funny. I laughed so hard at this dark satirical novel. Mona Awad is just what I needed after so many serious books. The quirky humor she delivers held my attention throughout. Miranda is a college theater director. She loves her job and she has determined that they are going to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well. 🎭 The problem is nobody wants to do the play except Miranda...

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When it got closer to the end, it changed. I couldn't tell what was real. I couldn't tell where Miranda was in time, space, what was happening to her? Was she dreaming? Hallucinating? And it never revealed itself, at least not in my opinion. So, I got to the end and felt like I didn't have a conclusion. She earned an MFA in fiction from Brown University and an MScR in English from the University of Edinburgh where her dissertation was on fear in the fairy tale.She completed a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English literature at the University of Denver. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing program at Syracuse University. So with Miranda, I was interested in exploring living with this kind of condition, which is invisible to the outside eye. Nobody could see that I was in pain, but it affects so many aspects of everyday life and your relationships and vital aspects of your life, like your career, your romantic life, your friendships, everything." Guadagnino, Kate (20 April 2023). "Margaret Atwood and Mona Awad on Writing Outside the Lines". T: The New York Times Style Magazine . Retrieved 8 May 2023.

Then another voice follows. Decisive. Brisk. But there is love in there somewhere, or so I tell myself.Amidst all the many receptions and rewritings of Shakespeare plays, this is one of the most creative I've read as Awad takes inspiration from the problematic All's Well That Ends Well, mashes it up with Macbeth in particular with a smattering of other allusions including, importantly, Doctor Faustus but allows her own confection to take flight in an unashamedly modern and feminist direction. Miranda Fitch is a Theater Professor at a small New England college. Due to chronic pain stemming from the accident that ended her once promising acting career, Miranda isn't currently in a good spot emotionally. Miranda Fitch is a domineering theatre professor whose acting days were cut short by injury. Determined to put on a production of All's Well that Ends Well – the very play that she was injured in – despite her students' insistence on performing Macbeth, Miranda attracts the attention of three shadowy, Shakespearean-witch-esque men that grant her the ability to transfer her pain to others. But in true Shakespearean witch fashion, supernatural gifts are not always what they seem. The farther Miranda pushes with the production, the more that euphoria and madness bleed together. AWAD: Yeah, it’s very true. That’s part of the reason why I think I ended up deciding that Miranda would be a former actress, is because of that very thing: that difficulty in communicating. In a similar fashion to Bunny, All's Well present its readers with an increasingly surreal narrative. From the start, Miranda's voice is characterised by a note of hysteria, and as the story's events unfold, her narration becomes increasingly frenzied. She's paranoid and obsessive, one could even say unhinged. Yet, even after she's crossed, leapt over even, the line I found myself still rooting for Miranda. I loved that detail about her 'asides' being overheard by others.

So Miranda’s relationship to acting, I think, makes that ambiguity even more fraught for her. It was very exciting when I, kind of, I knew, “Yes she’s going to be an actress, and it’s going to be hard for her to even believe herself about her pain.” BOGAEV: Then in theater—at a certain point in theater there was the fear, the belief, that you literally transmitted things through your eyes while you’re on stage to the audience.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.’” 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. 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.

BOGAEV: Well, we’ve been talking about some of the realist parts of your novel, but your book takes a turn away realism pretty early on. Miranda goes to a bar and she mixes pain medication with booze. She kind of goes off into what, at first seems like a tipsy reverie, but it soon morphs into this encounter with three mysterious men who seem to know all about her, and they speak like the weird sisters or witches in Macbeth. Why did you want a supernatural element in this story, besides your thoughts on Macbeth? I mean—and do you even think of what you did as a supernatural element? AWAD: No. Not at all. I couldn’t stand Helen. In fact, I was the only person in my class—I was doing a PhD in English and creative writing and I was taking a Shakespeare class and we were reading All’s Well—I was the only person in my class who couldn’t stand Helen. I thought she was so conniving. I thought she was just so insistent on this affection from this man who was awful and I thought, “Wow.”Strange... extraordinary...frustrating...blurry... illusionary...disturbing...sad...delirious...wild...different ...original...exhausting...dark...depressing ...weird...complex...conflicted... BOGAEV: Brianna of the burnished hair. Brianna of the B minus mind. I really like this passage, but imagine if I were one of your students I might be really worried. You know, “Is that what you really think of me?”