Once again, comedy and tragedy come together successfully to create a complex character.

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Vancouver Writers Festival

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When: October 19, 7:30 pm

Where: Granville Island Stage

Information and tickets: Writersfest.bc.ca

Montreal native Mona’s Awad’s latest novel Everything’s okay it’s a reminder that comedy and tragedy love to hang out.

The star of this dark gem is Miranda, a talented actor whose theatrical career was cut short by a horrible accident. Now a theater director at a small university, we know her as a chronic pain and a dose of disappointment has left her lying on her office floor smoking.

“The snow from the open window that I can’t close because I can’t bend over keeps falling on my face. I let it fall. I close my eyes. I smoke. I learned to smoke with my eyes closed, that’s something.

“I feel the wind on my face. I think I’m dying. Death at 37 ‘. “

Ladies and gentlemen know Miranda, she is a disaster.

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Right now, Miranda is trying to muster the strength and desire to stand up and rehearse for her department’s production of Shakespeare’s Everything That Ends Well.

Motivation is further undermined by the fact that the cast and a department assistant / snitch are not interested in getting into one of Shakespeare’s so-called troubled plays. They don’t want tragicomedy, they want the pure tragedy of Macbeth.

Battles will soon take place in the real world, the magical world, and the world inside Miranda’s head.

“I say it’s a supernatural dark comedy about Shakespeare and female pain and revenge,” Awad said by phone from Boston recently. “I say it is a comedy because I think ultimately it is a comedy. Because it is excerpted from All’s Well, it is a troubled comedy, and because it plays as Macbeth, it has elements of great tragedy. All comedies, if they are good comedies, have those shady places, right?

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“When you meet Miranda, she’s in a low place and that’s where the comedy often starts, but she’s going through it,” added Awad, who will be in town for the upcoming Vancouver Writers Fest (VWF) events that It will take place from October 14 to 28.

At the center of Miranda’s darkness is her chronic pain. This is something Awad knows a lot about, as a hip injury in 2013 left her for many years unable to perform the simplest tasks in life. Years of treatments and debilitating pain later, he happily reports that things are more manageable.

“I always feel that fiction, the realm of the fantastic, will allow me to tell the emotional truth of a lived experience much more than just documenting the facts,” said Awad.

In the case of All’s Well, emotional truth is an all too familiar theme that others don’t take women’s chronic pain seriously. Awad said he saw it again and again on the faces of the women he sat with in the waiting rooms of medical professionals.

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“I’m going through so much pain and I’m just being fired and how isolating can it feel and how unfair can it feel and how can you not force yourself to start dreaming of not just relief but revenge?” said Awad, who teaches the MFA program at Syracuse University in New York. “You can start to acquire this darker edge and I was really interested in exploring that. That kind of moment where you go from wanting to connect to wanting someone to feel what you’re feeling so they can understand and also so they can suffer. “

And they suffer what they do in this novel.

Awad, whose first two novels, 13 Ways to Look at a Fat Girl and Bunny, were a huge success, is one of 115 authors participating in the live / virtual hybrid WVF.

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Awad will be here in person at the Waterfront Theater for the Oct. 21 8pm event: The Spectacular Complexity of Womanhood. Joining her for discussion and Q&A are authors Rachel Yoder (Nightbitch) and Zoe Whittall (The Best Kind of People).

“What struck me when reading these books was how relevant the intensity and drives of the female leads were,” said VWF Director Leslie Hurtig when asked about the Complexity of Femininity event that she moderates. “These books are about women who have been taken to extremes and then transformed into new, sometimes scandalous, versions of themselves. There’s something very identifiable about that. “

On October 23 (8pm Performance Works), Awad is also part of the author-packed Literary Cabaret.

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“I am very happy to come there. I love festivals. It is an opportunity to connect with readers. It’s an opportunity to meet other writers, ”Awad said. “By the time I go to festivals, I no longer see the book as mine. Is not. It belongs to the readers. It belongs to other people. It is an opportunity to see it through other people’s eyes, not my own. That’s what’s so exciting. “

When asked how she perceives the spectacular complexity of femininity, Awad takes a beat and then offers insight into a powerful writer from on and off the page.

“Margaret Atwood said this in an interview decades ago, she’s said it so many times, she says that women are people,” Awad said before adding, “Anyone can be a villain. Everyone can be unpleasant if we enter their consciousness and occupy that space with them moment by moment when they are going through something difficult, when they are going through a conflict, which is most of the characters in the course of a story. “

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It is in this conflict that Awad meets humanity, finds the character.

“I want to give them their humanity and that means not shy away from those darkest moments,” Awad said.

One writer who definitely plunged into the troubled waters of humanity was the OG of fiction, William Shakespeare. It was her vast canon that became a life raft for Awad as the stress of chronic pain was sinking her.

“I was a graduate student and I was teaching and I was taking a Shakespeare class and I completely fell in love with these plays,” Awad said. “There were a couple of things about Shakespeare at the time that hit me. One was the change of fortune that seemed possible in the arc of a Shakespearean story. One could be very, very low and then suddenly magically rise. I found it very exciting at the time because I was so relaxed. So I loved the way the works made me dream of possibilities. “

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The other classic Shakespearean move that made a huge impression on Awad and all these years later helped inform Miranda was Shakespeare’s ability to deliver downright amazing baddies.

“Shakespeare has some of the best villains. They are so polarizing and complicated and they manipulate the audience in ways that I find really exciting. So I wanted to play that kind of character that could attract the sympathy of the readers but also challenge the reader with his villainous parts, “said Awad.

As for future characters with villainous streaks, Awad is currently working on a new novel that focuses on a cult of beauty. As for what exactly a cult of beauty is, Awad says “we’ll just have to wait and see.”

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