Mona Awad’s new novel, All’s Well, is shaped by her own experience of chronic pain – as well as Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well and Macbeth, and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.Canadian novelist Mona Awad has lived with pain for years. A hip problem necessitated surgery – the surgery was not successful, and the subsequent recovery was long and difficult.
And yet she must make a living. She lies her way into her teaching job and drags herself through the motions dressed in her cardigan sweater, pockets loaded down with painkillers.– over the objections of her students; the kids want to domay be one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, but it is the show in which Miranda found stardom. She forces it down the students’ throats., an immersive take onstaged in a New York warehouse.
Awad also employs otherworldly elements to take the novel into the realm of the fantastical – which, like in theatre, calls on the audience/reader to suspend disbelief.