Book Club

5 takeaways from Book Club’s author talk with Mona Awad

The "Bunny" author joined Boston.com to discuss her newest gothic horror book, "Rouge."

Author Mona Awad joined Boston.com's Book Club to discuss her new book, "Rouge."

January 29, 2024

For as long as Mona Awad has been a writer — which is to say, for as long she can remember — she’s been drawn to gothic fairy tales. Where some might see darkness, Awad sees humor and an impressive level of self-awareness.

“I think what I like about it is that it acknowledges the reality of melancholy. It acknowledges its power. It acknowledges its beauty, actually,” she said. “What it also does that I love, it doesn’t just acknowledge its power and embrace it as a thing that you feel, but it also kind of winks a little bit at it. It’s self aware.”

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Awad’s new novel, “Rouge,” is a modern-day gothic fairy tale that winks at the horror and absurdity of the modern beauty industry. In it, protagonist Belle falls into the trappings of La Maison de Méduse, a “lavish, culty” spa her mother frequented before her death. The loss of her mother and her growing obsession with holding onto her own beauty, forces Belle down an intense and devastating path.

“This character is attending to the surface because she doesn’t want to face something that’s going on deeper inside,” she said.

As with many of her other works, “Rouge” centers its story on a character struggling with loneliness, a feeling the writer said she believes more people can relate to than not. Awad said she tends to “gravitate towards characters who are lonely and who can’t give expression to that loneliness.”

Awad, a self-proclaimed lover of fairy tales, took lessons from her favorites like “Snow White” and “The Little Mermaid” to write a story about the “shadow side of the transformation.”

The best-selling author of “Bunny,” “All’s Well,” and “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl,” joined Boston.com’s Book Club to discuss her latest novel with Wendy Dodson, founder of Hummingbird Books.

The two discussed Awad’s writing inspiration, how whiteness informs cultural beauty ideals, why humor is an essential element of horror, and more. Read on for takeaways from their discussion or watch the video below and sign up for more Book Club updates.

The author’s own addiction to skincare videos inspired this horror story.

Before Awad got the idea for “Rouge,” she found herself going down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos from various beauty influencers. She found herself collecting products and developing multi-step routines as part of her beauty regime, which eventually led to her doing some reflection on her relationship to the beauty industry. Once she realized that “Rouge” was going to focus so heavily on beauty, it was clear that the heart of the story was going to be about death.

“I think what’s underneath the pursuit of beauty is the desire to stay alive and the desire to look in the mirror and know yourself,” Awad said. “But, of course, the desire to stay alive is born from the knowledge that you’re going to die. So really, I knew pretty early on that this was going to be a book about death because I think every book about beauty is a book about death.”

The fairy tale elements of “Rouge” draw from and critique Disney’s “Snow White.”

The novel was also heavily inspired by “Snow White,” a classic fairy tale about beauty and death. She was particularly interested in deconstructing the message Disney’s version of the fairy tale sends about whiteness and white beauty ideals. Older versions of the fairy tale, including the Brothers Grimm, referred to Snow White’s purity or the fairness of her character. It was Disney’s version that first mentioned the color of her skin.

“It’s a story about beauty and in that story, beauty is equated with whiteness,” Awad said. “It’s Disney who gives us her skin was white as snow. And so the question, ‘Who is the fairest of them all’ becomes, literally, who is the fairest of all?”

The protagonist in “Rouge” is mixed and has insecurities around the features she inherited from her non-white, Egyptian father. Awad is also biracial and said the equation of beauty with whiteness impacted her a lot as a child.

“It felt really important to sort of approach the world of beauty and approach the telling of this Snow White story through the eyes of somebody who has a more conflicted relationship with whiteness,” the author shared.

Awad loves writing stories about transformation.

Awad’s characters often transform, figuratively and literally, throughout her stories. That element of her writing is born out of her love for fiction and fairy tales, in particular. She said she loves reading because fiction gives you the “potential to expand your consciousness, expand your horizons.”

She wrote a bestseller on women’s sex lives. Then her own fell apart.

But transformations also come with their downsides, which is true in Awad’s novels and in many fairy tales. In her favorite, “The Little Mermaid,” the cost of Ariel’s transformation to a human is the loss of her voice. In “Rouge,” Awad’s protagonist has a similar desire for change but faces real costs in the pursuit of it.

“Fairy tales are all about transformations. They’re wish fulfillments, really,” she said. “Wish fulfillment for people who have nothing, who are powerless, to suddenly have riches or suddenly be beautiful, suddenly have power where they had no power…But there’s always a cost…And that’s the thing about fairy tales that I really appreciate.”

Spending time in academia has influenced how Awad writes about power.

Awad is no stranger to the world of academia, both as a student and instructor. She has a master’s in literature, an MFA, and a doctorate in creative writing. She has taught creative writing at Brown University, Framingham State, Tufts, UMass Amherst, and is currently a professor at Syracuse University. Unsurprisingly, many of her characters are also students and teachers.

“Campuses are so strange. They have their own worlds and languages and they’re so insular and clique-y and so culty,” she said. Once she became an instructor, she had a different level of understanding of the power dynamics at play.

“The students seem like they don’t have power but they actually have more power than they realize. And teachers appear to have power but they actually have a lot less power than they appear to. That is so interesting to me,” Awad said.

Humor is a big element of the author’s horror stories.

Even though there are a lot of dark moments in “Rouge,” the book has equal amounts of humor. For Awad, this was necessary to do the story justice.

“Humor [is] like a wider perspective. The minute you open up that lens, something that was initially just like so high stakes and such an awful feeling inside, can become funny. And so when I find that moment, when I find that humor, I know I’ve found the bigger truth of the moment,” she said, adding that there’s an inherent humor in the ridiculousness of the beauty industry.

“There’s something horrific about the beauty industry. I think there’s so much rich terrain for horror in the beauty industry, which is why the book has elements of horror in it. But the minute you even begin to think that, it’s funny, too. The idea that there’s horror in beauty is funny, right? So I knew there had to be humor there just to do justice to beauty and its horror.”