I think some people really don’t know what to make of that last scene in the mud,” Mona Awad says of reader reception to her best-selling 2019 novel, Bunny. “I missed the book the minute I turned it in to my publisher back in 2018,” Awad says. Vanity Fair: Something I thought about while reading both these books is how author descriptions of writing fiction can sound like something is going very wrong psychologically. Mona Awad: Yeah, you do really feel in another dimension when you’re writing a book. “I’m not a psychopath, I’m a fiction writer,” is a quote from The Duchess in the new book.