ALL'S WELL

A chronically ill theater professor upends her life when she stages Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.

After a freak accident, Miranda Fitch—who was a dazzling, up-and-coming stage actress—loses her acting career, her marriage, and her formerly pain-free life. Working at a university’s “once flourishing, now decrepit Theater Studies program,” Miranda is spiraling out of control. Her days pass in a flurry of pills, doctor appointments, and dissociative conversations; she struggles to manage her chronic pain and to make others believe the extent of her suffering: “On vague fire in various places, all over, all over. Burning too with humiliation and rage.” Awad is particularly deft in describing the hellish nature of pain and the ways those living with chronic pain are often misled, dismissed, or derided. During a particularly tumultuous appointment with one of her doctors, Miranda says she knows what he thinks of her: “One of those patients. One of those sad cartoon brains who wants to live under a smudgy sky of her own making.” For the student production, Miranda wants to stage the “problem play” that took everything from her: Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. But her students—her lively, limber, and treacherous students—want to put on Macbeth, and it looks like they will get their way until Miranda meets three strange men in a bar. In exchange for “a good show,” the men offer her what she’s always wanted: no more pain. Once Miranda realizes how to transpose her pain to others, her luck begins to change—or does it? As her physical aching dissipates, almost everything else in her life becomes more vibrant. However, when no longer tethered to her pain, Miranda becomes unmoored from reality in increasingly dangerous and deranged ways. Imbued with magic and Shakespearean themes, the novel swings wildly between tragedy and comedy and reality and unreality. Although the novel sometimes struggles under the weight of its own surreality, Awad artfully and acutely explores suffering, artistry, and the limitations of empathy.

A strange, dramatic novel where all’s well, or not well, or perhaps both.