December: Ore Agbaje-Williams's The Three of Us/ Mona Awad's Bunny
Fiction Pairs Well with Feminine Rage
When I picked up The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams, it wasn’t because it was placed at the center on the bookstore’s bestsellers booth, but because of the logline printed on the front cover: “What if your two favorite people hated each other with a passion?”
Yikes. I had no choice but to add it to my stack.
I ignored the warnings. I judged a book by its cover. Sue me. One well-thought-out logline and I was chucking my Visa card to the cashier like I was made of money. $17 for less than 200 hundred pages of text.
“It better be good,” I mumbled under my breath.
Later that night, I felt better about my purchase after reading the positive reviews on Goodreads. So, I inducted Ore Agbaje-Williams’s The Three of Us into the Fiction Pairs Well with Feminine Rage lineup the very next day because what better way to dive into the holiday season than with a domestic tale of friends and family who can’t seem to get along?
The Three of Us follows a wife, a husband, and the wife’s best friend over the course of one day. By the end, they’re left to defend their stances over a scathing situation. Betrayal will ensue, and friendships and spousal relationships will falter. A rocky domestic ride indeed, but ‘tis the season I guess!
Mona Awad’s Bunny: Daydreaming is a dangerous game
Higher education is a joke, but sometimes a necessary one
In Mona Awad’s Bunny, we embrace a fun commentary about the mixed opinions of MFA programs. Higher education in general can be laughable. But MFAs in particular get a bad rep for being hoity-toity and not truly helpful to a writer’s career.
Speaking from experience, my MFA workshop classes were this mysterious club that I wasn’t sure I wanted to join. Everyone seemed so proliferous and successful. And I was just a girl with disproportionate dreams. I fully expected them to eat me alive.
This was a misconception. One hour into my first round of discussion I learned perhaps the most important lesson any higher education could teach me: people are as full of sh** as I am.
Workshop as a budding writer is nothing more than a Saturday Night Live skit. All I needed to do was accept the role and start improvising. After one week of discussions, I learned the unspoken honor code that feedback should come in obscure metaphors. It made all of us sound smarter, hid the fact that most feedback was not actually constructive, and gave authors the sense that their work was special even if it was the worst thing ever written. It could assault the page it sat on, but it would be treated as gospel because there was always something positive to highlight, right?
Wrong. Some people didn’t get this happy little memo. These sourpusses were just out for blood—the dream crushers. I quickly learned to keep their words from dampening my happy-go-lucky vibe because they were just insecure…about everything. Just like me! I was just nicer about it.
In Bunny, nothing brought me more joy than its refreshing roast of the strange intricacies of an MFA workshop. But despite all the jokes, I must admit these classes can be a productive sounding board for the early stages of work…just as long as writers remember that voodoo magic won’t generate a bestseller.
Daydreaming for the sake of survival
Higher education can be a necessary step toward what a naive college graduate might deem as their “perfect life.” Then approximately one month into post-graduate bliss, they will come to the life-crushing conclusion that this “perfect life” doesn’t exist. I don’t say this to be nihilistic, but rather to bring the airheaded youth, and myself, back to reality. A higher education can be just as callow as a petty wish on a star. I credit Bunny for teaching me this.
Awad’s novel is an extensive metaphor for the lengths we go to create our perfect life and a cautionary tale of the webs we weave to protect our minds from the reality that our perfect lives don’t exist.
Our main character Samantha is an unreliable narrator. Yes, this was a skillful tactic to raise the stakes and give us the shock factor of “Oh my God! It was all in her head.” But let’s analyze further. Samantha was so desperate for community and success that she created a false reality. Her mind was trying to protect her from her loneliness so her daydreams created something better for the sake of survival.
Don’t we all? Daydreams are nothing more than a positive side effect of our realities. Even if these daydreams are out of reach, our minds want to protect us by making them feel possible. This concept of the “perfect life” is a universal daydream. It doesn’t exist for anyone…but it keeps us going.
Although it saddens me to think many of my daydreams are unattainable unless I run into divine intervention or a break in metaphysics, I take comfort in their ability to keep me alive. So if all I’m doing is surviving and daydreaming about my “perfect life”, I’d say I’m doing alright. I might even say that’s what the “perfect life” is.
Hungry for more? Here are some more Mona Awad recommendations
Mona Awad is a staple on my bookshelf. In short, she makes feminine rage trendy. Reading one of her books is like snorting a line of pink glitter dust. Aesthetically fun on the outside, but highly toxic. It’s a drug I refuse to quit. Other titles by her include Rouge, All’s Well, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl.