I’m lying on the floor watching, against my will, a bad actress in a drug commercial tell me about her fake pain.
I’m sure it’s a surprise to nobody that I was once a theatre kid. Always will be to some extent. Even though I haven’t laid my hand on a script for at least two years now, some part of me still longs to be back, running rehearsals, repeating scenes again and again, having my weekly breakdown in the tech booth.
Under my tutelage, we have never done a Shakespeare play. That is neither a brag nor regret; Shakespeare wasn’t something I felt that my cast could pull off with as limited rehearsal time as we had. We already struggled to get lines down as is, we didn't need five whole acts to understand our shortcomings.
But in Mona Awad’s All’s Well, there is no room for these kind of considerations, there is only do. After her own career came to a tragic end when she fell off a stage mid-performance, Miranda Fitch’s closest link to the stage is a job as an assistant professor in a college’s Theatre Studies department. But mutiny brews when Fitch chooses All’s Well That Ends Well as their play for the year, rather than the more popular MacBeth. And all this is made worse by her lingering injury that leaves her with severe chronic pain in her back and hip that no doctor—accreditated or otherwise—can find a cure for. That is until Fitch meets three mysterious benefactors who promise they can take away her pain as long as she puts on a good show.
I was sold the moment I was recommended this book because of its theatre storyline. (Naturally, I’m biased.) I’ve been looking for the spiritual successor to If We Were Villains for the longest time now, but All’s Well is more like A Certain Hunger or Gone Girl.
And just like those two novels, this book is wild. I genuinely got a little afraid the more I read, but it was the kind of fear where it made it impossible to set this book down. I read All’s Well in two separate bouts: the first time, I only got through maybe about 150-ish pages, but when I picked it up again, I just couldn’t put it down. I remember trying to stop at 200 page mark because I wanted to pace myself, and then immediately finishing the rest of the novel because I was so desperate to know what was going to happen next.
It was me racing through the book that actually made me think I got confused on the ending due to its ambiguity — and here is where some people might be turned off. Towards the end, the novel definitely gets more abstract, mirroring how Fitch is losing touch with reality, and the final scenes are incredibly worthy of annotation and group discussions á la literature class. I actually had to go back and re-read the last few chapters just to make sure I didn’t miss any details. I’ve come to my own conclusion about what the ending means but I would love to hear yours in the replies if you’ve read this book before.
I did foresee we weren’t going to get a very concrete kind of ending considering the plays that the novel enters around. While you don’t need to have seen MacBeth or All’s Well That End's Well to understand the book, All’s Well’s cryptic ending—and complex main character—is definitely a meta nod to its name sake and its difficult subject matter.
Even so, I cannot deny even in Fitch’s worst moments, I was on her side. I wouldn’t necessarily consider Fitch herself to be morally grey but at times she was donning such a saturated pair of rose-tinted glasses, it was hard to believe she didn’t know what was happening around her. And yet, that is exactly what I adored about this book. I wanted to inject its contents straight into someone else’s brain so we could dissect the story into little tiny pieces and really understand it.
So if you are a petty, vindictive person (as am I), if you love theatre in all of its messiness, if you just want to read about a woman wrecking havoc on those around her, add All’s Well to your TBR right now. You will love it.
Rating: 4.5/5
All’s Well by Mona Awad was released in 2021 and published by Simon & Schuster.
Ha! I'm recommending All's Well in my newsletter tomorrow. Great minds...