Coming Home: A Guest Post by Mona Awad

Creepy, kooky and crackling with energy, We Love You, Bunny is the long-awaited return to the world of the sickeningly sweet (and maniacally maddening) clique — and this time, the Bunnies are taking center stage. Read on for an exclusive essay from Mona Awad on writing We Love You, Bunny.

When I first finished writing Bunny back in the spring of 2018, I was terribly sad. Being in the world of this book was truly one of the greatest creative experiences of my life. Perhaps because it was the first time that I really ventured into the surreal in a novel. It felt risky to write it because it was so different from any idea I’d had before. It felt crazy. It felt wild. Writing it was like being in an extended dream, at times frightening, at times utterly joyous. Waking from that dream to find that I had a novel in my hands was unreal. I was happy to have done it (there were many times when I doubted that I would ever finish it) but handing it over was painful. I immediately longed to return to it. When I moved on to write two other novels, All’s Well and Rouge, I learned that this sadness was actually a part of the experience of letting go of any novel. I immerse myself very deeply in these worlds and the result is that leaving them comes at a great cost for me. There’s always a period of grief, a period of emptiness, before the new world comes. The difference with Bunny, however, is that it never left me. The longing to return persisted. Even after I’d written Rouge, I’d continue to look for bunnies on my walks. I’d continue to dream of my fictional New England, of that Ivy league campus, of those fascist girls. I found myself missing the Bunnies especially. Their smut salons. Their monstrous creations. Their hot pink hive mind.

In Bunny, the Bunnies are a bit of a mystery. We only see them through the veil of Samantha’s perspective, an outsider’s eyes. They’re a fully formed cult. Villains. A pastel monolith. Girl Frankensteins playing God. A dangerous game with rabbits that goes too far. But who were they really? There was a story there, with those girls, that I realized I’d never told. How did they become Bunnies? And where would they be now, after their game was over? Both questions—What is the story of them coming together? What is the story of them falling apart?—began to haunt me. I found myself thinking of the Bunnies more and more, thinking like them. When I went dress shopping, I found myself reaching for dresses they might buy. Once I went into a dress shop and I tried on a foresty dress patterned with deer. I looked at myself in the mirror and I saw Cupcake. I imagined myself walking to campus in her clicking blue shoes on that first day of school, a razor in my pocket. Finding the others. Discovering our strange powers. Meeting our first rabbit in the rose garden. Making our first man together, a most happy accident.

And what would he be like?

As I was dreaming of these questions, readers had begun to find Bunny online. Readers who expanded the world of the novel with their own brilliant creations, their own fan art, their own incredibly moving tributes. It was these readers who gave me the permission I needed to follow my heart and return to that world myself.

And so dear readers, I dedicate We Love You, Bunny to you. Thank you for letting me come home.

Xoxo

Mona