Novelist Mona Awad on Her Dark Impulses: “No Boys Were Axed in the Making of This Book”

Ithink some people really don’t know what to make of that last scene in the mud,” Mona Awad says of reader reception to her best-selling 2019 novel, Bunny . We’re all grown-ups here, so I don’t need to explain that in this conversation about her follow-up, We Love You, Bunny , out Tuesday from Marysue Rucci Books, there are going to be some light spoilers about what came first. “What the book is suggesting, but also doesn’t determine, is that maybe in the end she’ll always choose the life of the imagination, because she is an artist.”

The “she” in question is that first novel’s narrator, Sam, the fifth wheel in an East Coast MFA fiction cohort whose creations are surprisingly alive. As in, her sadistically chirpy writing compatriots turn rabbits into boys. They refer to themse