Review - All's Well by Mona Awad

Title: All’s Well*

Author: Mona Awad

Rating: 4.25 stars / 5 stars

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Favorite Quote: “[M]aybe she does have something more grave, more elusive. Maybe she is one of the Nerve Women. Women of the invisible pain. Women alight with blinking red webs. No spider in sight. But the web is there.” Awad, Mona. All’s Well. Marysue Rucci Books/Scribner, 2021, pg. 58.

Review: Having only read one other Awad novel - Bunny - I can confirm that Awad is a master of the weird and unsettling. All’s Well follows protagonist Miranda Fitch, actress turned theater professor, as she tries to manage her chronic pain as well as a quickly deteriorating reign over her theater students who want to perform The Scottish Play instead of All’s Well that Ends Well. And then, three mysterious men meet her at a bar and when she awakens the next morning she not only seems to feel less pain, but also, perhaps, has the power to transfer her pain to the people who most antagonize her. 

So, let’s talk about what’s working. Every once in a while, there is a novel that comes around in which, though fictional, the reader who suffers from the same ailments as the characters connects so viscerally to the struggles of the character that the reader (read me) assumes the author must have some version of the affliction themselves. Awad’s depiction of chronic illness (Miranda’s specifically is chronic pain) is one such moment. As someone with chronic health problems myself, I found myself wondering exactly when Awad had the audacity to reach into my brain and rip out the most personal and unwanted parts of myself. Honestly, rude. 

Her characters, too, are incredibly well developed. Each have their own personalities, their own good habits, and their own bad. Miranda is neither perfect nor perfectly imperfect, and her questionable journey to wellness and the morals it implicates is a journey mired in mystery and unease. And the end is a fever dream - genuinely I feel the need to re-read it because I’m not exactly sure I know where it left Miranda or where it left me as the reader.

So, what’s not working? The biggest flaw of this novel is one that I’ve seen hints of in some of her other works, and that is the elements of fatphobia that exist throughout the novel. There are two specific examples of this - one when she is describing her pain as a man and the other when she is describing one of the men at the bar. In each the descriptions of obesity that are clearly meant to signify the grotesque are unnecessary when she is otherwise so able to describe her pain and the men. And if she’s attempting some sort of commentary other than blatant fatphobia, that commentary is falling flat. 

About that Quote: This quote - in a moment when Miranda is observing another woman at a physical therapy appointment - captures both the experience of chronic pain as well as the experience of being a woman attempting to seek medical care. Is it anxiety? Is it your weight? Many medical professionals sure seem to think so. And so often, women are therefore forced to suffer, their maladies dismissed as modern-day language meant to indicate hysteria.

Have you read All’s Well? Share your thoughts below!