In anticipation of reading We Love You, Bunny, Mona Awad’s recently-released sequel to Bunny, I revisited the original. I recalled that it was batshit crazy, hilarious, and brilliant, but I couldn’t remember the details of the plot. Unable to find my copy, I listened to the audiobook, and, apart from a valiant but perplexing effort to emulate the Lion’s Scottish accent, it’s very nicely read by Sophie Amoss. With my memory refreshed, I am so excited to get into the new book, but I’m disciplining myself to articulate some of my thoughts on the first one before I do. At the moment they feel disordered, and tangled up with bits and pieces of pain and regret and anxiety, so I’ll draw them out as much as I can, and see if I can make them make some sense. Take the sting out. Understand, not avoid.
Bunny was published shortly after I completed a PhD in the English department of one of the Ivies, so I was well-primed to recognise its setting. Warren University is fictional, but seems to be pretty closely modelled on Brown, where Awad did her MFA. I’ve never been to Providence, but I did visit New Haven back when I was considering going to Yale, and Warren reminded me powerfully of that experience. I recall the whole place making me feel disorientated, almost seasick. People raved about the beauty of Yale’s campus but to me it felt like a spooky, surreal, monstrous Oxbridge-ish fever dream, a bastion of privilege turned up to 11 against the backdrop of a deprived town that was all too often dismissed as a dark punchline. The town-gown divide was a yawning abyss. I felt like I was going crazy, seeing things other people weren’t.
I bring this up because my second reading of Bunny reminded me that the surrealism and horror of the plot directly reflects the surrealism and horror of contemporary American life. One of those horrors is social inequality. Another is the treatment of animals in the food industry, and the contrast between that and the way we’re socialised to adore our pets. Both horrors are things we’re trained to unsee, in order to participate placidly in day-to-day life. When our unseeing falters, we’re left screaming into the void, desperately alone, wondering how much of reality can actually be trusted.
Which brings me back to Bunny, and its protagonist, Samantha Mackey. Spoilers ahead for the plot of the whole novel. Samantha, as far as I can tell, is unusually gifted at literally transforming animals into human beings. The Bunnies, a group of fellow MFA students who have figured out how to do this with rabbits, spot Samantha with her swan-bestie Ava. In a scene reminiscent of the early parts of The Craft, they decide to recruit her and make use of her talents. What follows is a truly hilarious satire on academia, creative writing, and literary criticism, in which character creation is made literal with a fairytale-style magic that isn’t explained—it’s just there. I felt that this was well enough managed that I didn’t need to question it, though if you dig around in reviews online you’ll find plenty of people reading the novel for evidence that Samantha is on hallucinogens, or is schizophrenic. I think Awad gives the reader enough evidence scattered through the novel to support such a theory, though I didn’t personally need to scramble around for one. I trusted the world of fairytale horror Awad created.
But Samantha doesn’t. She actually doesn’t know that she made Ava, it seems—she’s a savant in this kind of magic, with a natural talent that the Bunnies probably envy. They’ve created a whole ritual around making what they call hybrids, drafts, or darlings (as in, kill your), so of course they must collect Samantha and induct her into their circle. At the end they try to convince her that she’s imagined everything, leaving her bereft and confused, doubting her sanity, wondering which version of reality can be trusted. I felt similar, walking under that bizarre hulking bridge of the Yale art gallery and along the high street, where Harkness Tower loomed threateningly ahead. I tried to summon the sense of magic, the thrill of being welcomed into that world, but I couldn’t. I didn’t trust it. In retrospect, I see that I was right not to.
When I wrote about Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I drew attention to that novel’s sensitivity to the way humanity hungers, cruelly, for soft things. The example Vuong comes back to is the hideous cruelty of crated veal, but he also takes aim at a predatory literary industry fuelled by writers’ pain. I was reminded of this in my reread of Bunny, and I was much more disturbed by the cruelty in the book than before. When I read it for the first time I was cohabiting with a committed carnivore, and trying hard to curb my own sensitivity about animal cruelty. In that way and in many others, I was forcing myself to live a life of torturous dissonance. But reading it now from a vegan perspective I was so intrigued by all the references to meat and animal products which fuel and clothe the Bunnies. Samantha observes that their holiday sweaters are made from “a wool so soft I can see the lamb being shaved”; she frequently notices the cashmere and leather in their outfits, and in the cutesy restaurant where all the food is miniature, she considers the tiny birds whose wings are pulled off to make mini ‘chicken’ wings.
I’ll pause now to say that this is in no way a didactic novel, an issues novel. This could not be further from the truth. I have no idea whether Awad is even vegetarian. You could argue that the references to animal use are strictly comedic, or are simply pointing to the fact that we all must endorse some kind of dissonance and unexamined cruelty to function in Western society. When Samantha’s male hybrid cooks rabbit in four different ways, the scene is more cannibalistic fairytale (as in the Italian version of Little Red Riding Hood) than critique of meat eating. And perhaps the highlighting of animal suffering in this novel exists more to critique the culture of cuteness, the absurdity of our infantile contemporary discourse on cute animals to which I, as a devoted dog lover, am certainly guilty of contributing. Perhaps there’s a cute aggression component, as well, an acknowledgement of the disturbing proximity of violence to the squealing appreciation of that which is impossibly precious and adorable. There’s definitely much more to say here, but I’ll save it for when I finish the next book and review both more fully.
The title quotation for this post is delivered by one of the hybrids towards the end of Bunny. It made me laugh, but it’s also strangely haunting. It makes me think of my experience in New Haven, and my subsequent years as a PhD student. Samantha gives a beautiful monologue about her imagination as a child, “a great girl-shaped forest”, and the absolute magic she experienced back then. It connected deeply with me as I’ve had so many experiences of trying and mostly failing to recapture that magic, to remember when the mind was so powerful and to shake off all the exhaustion and loneliness and pain that seem to make it inacccessible. One of those experiences was at the beginning of my PhD, at that nuanced labyrinth of an American campus and an American academic training. Both made big promises which they couldn’t keep; dark academia books which recognise this and don’t romanticise their settings are always oddly and sadly comforting to me.
“Tap the wound” is the imperative Ursula, Bunny’s creative writing professor, delivers to her students. It’s chilling, because it evokes the tapping of maple trees in order to extract syrup—it insists upon a connection between syrup and blood, between sweetness and wounding. I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about my own expectations of writers to articulate their pain, and about the pressure on creative people generally to draw from their worst times, to reveal these in exchange for profit and plaudits. If your income stream pours out of your open wounds, why would you ever heal? It’s a complicated, popular, problematic view of creativity, and I do think that Awad is exposing it as damaging in Bunny. I’ll be fascinated to find out whether this is interrogated further in the sequel.
