Bunny by Mona Awad

I didn’t know what to expect coming into this novel. I love going into a book like that. I’d never read anything by Awad before and, aside from knowing it was set on a campus, had no idea what the plot was. This openness is both terrifying and exhilarating. You could get fifty pages in and want to run for the door, or you could never want to put it down.

Bunny falls firmly into the latter of those two categories. It’s biting and insightful and taught. It satirizes MFA programs while thrusting you into a science fiction/horror story while never losing sight of the coming-of-age novel that it is at its heart.

Some people may quibble with the idea of this novel being a coming-of-age story. The characters are in graduate school, attending some fictional, prestigious New England university. You know the kind – afternoon soirees with wine and witty banter where their Trust fund students bemoan their privilege all set under some pristine white tent. These are adults, aren’t they? Young people in their early to mid twenties, the finest minds of their generation, ready to burst forth into the world.

Only they aren’t. I can’t speak for everyone, and I certainly never attended a university like that – I never attended graduate school in any capacity – but I wasn’t anywhere near a fully formed adult in my mid-twenties. Sometimes I wonder if I’m even an adult now, in my early thirties. I keep waiting for it to come, for the day to arrive, when I realize, “Yes, I am now an adult.” I suppose it doesn’t work like that.

Anyway, my point is that Samantha, and the other characters in Bunny, are coming of age. They resemble high schoolers (think Heathers or Mean Girls) more than adults. Their friendships are still on unsure footing. They’re jealous and petty and insecure. They don’t know who they are or who they’re meant to be.

Samantha, our narrator, is particularly self-conscious of her position in this program. There’s a clique of girls – the Bunnies – who are insular and vapid but still represent a form of power in her program. She’s in every class with them and listens as they compliment each other’s boring, derivative writing. They’re rich, they’re polished, they’re confusingly popular in the way that people in high school are popular, and as much as Samantha outwardly rejects them, she secretly longs to be accepted by them.

This need for acceptance, naturally, comes from a place of insecurity.

I can’t personally relate to being in an elite MFA program, but I can understand her insecurity. I never studied creative writing, never took a class where we edited each other’s work, never got to bask in the glow and recoil in the shame of those kinds of settings. On days when I’m feeling good, my writing is flowing, and I get good news about something, I think this is a blessing. I assume that many MFA programs can create groupthink, and their graduates can come out all writing similarly. I think that I’m lucky to have avoided that (not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt that would’ve accompanied it).

But there are other days when I get those polite, form rejection letters from agents or magazines, where I wonder what I missed. Where the insecurities that live in all of us make themselves known in my head and consume my thoughts. Am I even a good writer? Do I have any discernable talent? What did I fail to learn in those rooms, and how did it hamper my writing? What doors would’ve been opened if I’d attended an MFA program?

I no longer fixate on these thoughts as much now that I’ve had some moderate success, but these questions kept me up at night for a long time. And these questions are the same ones that haunt Samantha. She is, of course, attending this program, a part of the very system that I often feel outside of, but the insecurities are the same. Is she good enough? Is her writing up to the level of this program? Does she belong here?

It's insecurities like these that make us do stupid things. They make us take for granted true friends and question our self-worth. They erode who we are and leave us pliable to malevolent forces. I think, in many ways, that’s what this novel is about. The way a need to fit in and find acceptance can be corrosive.

The Bunnies represent many things in this novel – traditional femininity, wealth and status, MFA groupthink. Samantha claims to reject those things, but only until she’s brought into their inner sanctum. From there, the novel takes off. While remaining grounded, it veers into science fiction, horror, and even thriller elements. It’s funny and sad and even heartwarming at times.

I was particularly taken by the way Awad satirizes the kind of vacuous commentary that can be so rife at universities. I may not have attended an MFA program, but English undergraduates can be full of these kinds of comments on writing. The vague statements on form or structure, mixed with a heavy dose of millennial political correctness, is a wonderful concoction that the author has created.

But Awad doesn’t stop there. She’s aware that the narrator of her novel is one of these students who’s learning to write and is likely to fall prey to so many of these tropes. So, she includes some of them in the novel. I’m not saying the book is poorly written, bland, or timid, far from it. It’s the opposite of all those things. But it does take some aspects of graduate student writing – a tendency for over-description and purple prose, for example – and inject them into this novel. She uses this technique sparingly but to great effect. It’s a masterful touch from a brilliant writer.

There’s a lot more to say about this novel, but I won’t exhaust it here. Read this book. It’s excellent, and Awad is a burgeoning literary talent.