a book written for hot girls who love bunny by mona awad but also midsommar by ari aster but also ottessa moshfegh’s more blunt works (slumming, eileen, etc.) ‘mona’ is hallucinogenic, captivating, thrumming. the epnymous character makes each beat of this quick read sound bold and loud. we discover the repression of her trauma just as the surrealist conclusion hits you in the face. i loved this, i wish it was longer, other than that, perhaps a writer i need to delve into more?

This book is hilarious, profound, and honest. I think Mona is one of my favorite literary creations since I-don't-even-know-who. The reason for that is simple: I relate to Mona, and I am super solipsistic. Joking! Kind of. I felt for Mona, especially as she clutched that ridiculous vape, constantly pulling poison into her lungs. She's not a nice character, but a messy one. The story begins with her cross-drugged on caffeine and Valium in a crowded airport, and only gets more stressful from there. She masturbates in saunas, seduces other writers, and is constantly high. Her trauma festers within her. She'd prefer to be in a plane crash that write a subpar second novel. She's judgmental and evasive and I love her so much. I also loved the secondary characters who populated this novel, most of them oddball writers from all over the globe. There's a strong question of identity politics in this novel: what it means to be a minority, what it means to represent a country. The writers in this book sometimes become subsumed by their identities to the detriment of their craft. But there's also joy in identity. Mona finds joy in being Latina (though some of the joy does come from being viewed as "exotic", not from her identity itself per se). There's a difference between branding yourself as something and being something, and even if you brand yourself as what you are, you are still engaged in an act of branding.

This novel also gets at what it means to be a writer, providing a few different explanations, including: "'[W]e write to try and get rid of the hate-colored glasses that make the world so stark and supposedly legible.... Maybe instead we just want to follow the snake back to its lair. Maybe we write to get down that hole, and figure out what's there, and come up with new words for it . . . Most people go through life trying to avoid that dark energy, and the mind trains itself to escape" (155). (This jives with Mona's experience avoiding the trauma that happened to her shortly before the conference.) Writers have to go down the dark holes, have to find new words to describe ancient human ideas.

At the end of the book, the writers are judged and found wanting. They are the intellectual elite, and they're not worth saving. They're a conflagration of vanities and performances. "Mona considered the death of art, the death of history, the death of the novel: fatalities that had progressed in succession since before the turn of the twentieth century. What would be all the result if all those deaths could have had some sort of geological impact? If ideas produce physical force, the virulence of this inexplicable being could derive from all those deaths colliding against each other" (172). The writers in Mona are the detritus of literary history, the tail ends of the collapsing human race.

Yeah. It's kind of a depressing book. But it also has some really wonderful things to say about friendship, too. I'm not joking. Anyway, I loved it.

Oh, I will say, though...it's the nature of satire that characters will verge into caricatures. That 100% happens here. It's a weak point to the book. I also do think that the ending is also a weak point, as it doesn't exactly gel with the rest of the book, which honestly could have used a moment of grace to end on. It feels way more like a slog this way.

Literally the craziest book I’ve ever read in my life