Mona Awad’s We Love You, Bunny Is Self-Critical to a Fault—or Is It?

By AnnaClare Sung

If readers of Mona Awad’s Bunny exist in Wonderland, We Love You, Bunny forces them to gaze through the looking-glass at its mirror-world, bearing a resemblance—just slightly askew. Though still on Warren’s fictional Ivy League campus, the novel unfolds following the release of Bunny. The first novel gave readers a glimpse into MFA student Samantha’s unstable mind, beginning with her singular point of view, then cascading into a first-person plural mode, operated by Samantha and her four ex-besties’ Gestaltian hive consciousness. The sequel shifts perspective—if only slightly—and directs our attention to Coraline, Kyra, Viktoria, and Elsinore, best recognized by their collective nickname: Bunny. Even more detached from reality, the hive-minded, saccharine Bunnies seek vengeance for their unsavoury portrayal in Bunny, written canonically by Samantha herself, rather than the corporeal Awad. We Love You, Bunny begins in Kyra’s attic—the very place where, with a quick seance and explosion, the girls turned real bunnies into swooningly sexy, albeit intellectually uncouth, men—with a physically restrained Samantha, and the Bunnies finally telling her, and the reader, their side of the story. 

What ensues is a narrative wherein everyone is Bunny, yet Bunny is no one. Awad’s sequel displays a speculative creation that forces its characters to confront chaos and the self, and prompts readers to reckon with reality; a ‘Romantasy’ that is critical of its genre, yet lauds authorial agency; and a Frankenstein of form—acutely self-conscious and allusory. From Alice in Wonderland to Hamlet, Brothers’ Grimm, Kafka, Coraline, Heathers, Taylor Swift, Kate Bush, and Chappell Roan, we cannot attribute We Love You, Bunny’s orchestra of references to pastiche alone. Indeed, Awad’s creation astutely comments on women’s place in the contemporary cultural sphere. Aligning the Bunnies with both Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein, she stitches together chapters from the perspectives of each Bunny, and, intermittently, from the experimental manuscript penned by Aerius—their first and most beloved bunny-turned-man creation. Through the Bunnies' stories, Awad provides a haven for the girl who is well-versed in weaponizing her pop cultural proclivities, constructing a persona that teeters between the masses and highbrow. She appeals to everyone and disrupts no one. 

It is in the shifting perspectives of Coraline, Kyra, Viktoria, and Elsinore, though, that the novel regresses. Within We Love You, Bunny, Awad positions herself and her work in the publishing world alongside Bunny, using its significant success and notable features as an anchor from which she cannot quite unmoor. Reframing real critiques of Bunny, and relocating them to the Bunnies’ sequential work of fiction, Awad’s self-awareness emerges as a narrative limitation—all the more interesting given Samantha’s physical duress throughout the novel. Under Awad’s pseudonym, Samantha (the fictional author of Bunny), as well as The Bunnies (the fictional authors of We Love You, Bunny), are “too literary.” Yet, simultaneously, their work is “actually pretty commercial [...] like [they] have wide appeal!” Through compounding allusions, the distinction between author, character, and reader disintegrates as the novel descends into chaos. Using this sort of literary face-blindness, Awad/the Bunnies construct a world that shields each figure from any external criticism. In doing so, though, Awad prevents the Bunnies from evolving beyond surface-level characterization, rendering an otherwise colourful novel monochromatic. 

Ironically, driving much of We Love You, Bunny’s plot is Arieus’s irate desire to “Kill Allen,” the professor whose critiques the Bunnies refuse to accept—a refusal licensed by the fact that, in the novel, the art and artist cannot be separated. Internalizing the Bunnies’ psyches, hearing their thoughts, and acting upon their impulses, Aerieus is his own person in name alone. Allen’s criticisms then become a direct attack on the Bunnies’ selves, yet, sending Aerieus as an anonymous figure to seek their revenge, they are absolved from any further criticism. 

This disorder of self, personal taste, and narrative becomes further disrupted when acknowledging the destructive, patricidal nature of Shelley’s Frankensteinian monster, and the similarly motivated Aerius. Of course, Awad protects herself from authorial demise in the chapters from Aerius’ perspective; beginning his anthropoid life under the Bunnies’ constant revision and refinement, Aerius eventually gains his own narrative voice, writing his desires into existence. Modelled after a ubiquitously recognized Hollywood actor, but obscure in almost every other way, Aerius, in typical Bunny fashion, is initially both someone and no one. 

Awad’s Aerius-centred chapters, however, are the novel’s most compelling and seem to flex a new, exciting narrative muscle of hers. As Aerius’ first-person narrative unfolds, he retaliates, transcending beyond facelessness as he forces recognition. It’s rare to read from the perspective of creation, rather than creator, and that is perhaps what makes Aerius’ chapters so rewarding. Forging a relationship with Jonah, a poetry student whom readers first met in Bunny, through his flirtatious interactions with Samantha, Aerius carves out a space where he’s known as an individual. Through her representation of Aerius, Awad adds dimension and idiosyncracy to her world of self-imposed homogeneity. 

If not for Awad’s unsuccessful attempt to convincingly depict the Bunnies’ perspective, then for her surprising portrayal of their creation Aerieus—and her unrelenting integration of literary and pop cultural references—We Love You, Bunny will resonate with readers who enjoyed its precursor, though, as it is with sequels, likely a little less. True, Awad’s self-awareness is a crutch that at times stunts the potential of her novel, but it is also an attribute that solicits extensive dissection and one that female readers cannot help but hate to relate to. Is that not worth commending all the same? 

Edited by Marcello Corbanese and Isabella McBride.