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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The latest novel for Mona Awad uses the classic fairytale, Snow White, as inspiration for a darkly fantastical takedown of beauty culture. In Rouge, we meet Belle, a woman who has inherited an obsession with skincare from her good-looking mother. Her routine of cleansing and plumping, and repairing can take hours each day.

When Belle's mother dies mysteriously, Belle heads to California for the funeral and to tie up her mom's loose ends, but when Belle arrives, she begins to wonder if something strange has happened to her mother. All of the mirrors in her home are cracked. The home is in disrepair. The story about how she fell from a cliff-side doesn't make much sense and in the days before her death, her mother seemed to be living in her own little world.

While Belle tries to deal with her mother's massive death, she finds herself drawn to one place she thinks her mother may have been happy. A wellness spa that her mom frequented. The spa offers Belle special treatments that promise to give her an incredible glow to transform her into the best version of herself. At first, these magical treatments seem to work but at what cost? Could the same forces that led to the death of her mother be coming for Belle as well?

Rouge was named one of the 10 best science fiction fantasy books of the year by the Washington Post and it was our November Get Lit with All Of It Book Club selection. We were thrilled to gather in person at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library for a sold-out event with Mona Awad. I began our conversation by asking Mona about a trip to a spa that inspired this novel.

Mona Awad: I was in Calgary. I was already obsessed with YouTube skincare videos, just watching them constantly and just taking note of that. It's like, "Huh, that's interesting that you're completely obsessed with skincare now and watching these videos. What's going on with that?" I was already feeling like there was the potential for a horror novel [laughs] in that. I was also very susceptible. I was thinking, "Yes, I really should get a facial. I have some time. I'm going to just do it." I got it.

I think because I already had a heightened sense that there was just something sinister about my fixation with skincare, that when I had the facial, I realized that there's just so much horror inherent in the experience of being taken into the dark with this person that you don't know, being told to lie down and relax, close your eyes while they shine a bright light on your face, [laughs] and begin scrutinizing it using adjectives, and then trying to sell you products for an hour, which is what she did. [laughter] She hit me at my most vulnerable and then just went in for it. There was just something. I couldn't wait to get out of the spa.

Alison Stewart: Did you feel held captive a little bit?

Mona Awad: Yes, I did. I did. I was excited to be out. I was so excited that I actually left my necklace behind, which ends up becoming something in the book too. There's a bracelet that's important. I left it behind. I didn't know that. I was walking out of the spa, so happy to be out of there, this luxurious experience that I'd paid for, and the sky was red. I still remember that because the sun was setting and then I got a call from the spa. [inaudible 00:03:55] [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: Come back, Mona.

Mona Awad: It was like the underworld calling to tell me that I'd eaten the pomegranates or something. I picked up and they were like, "You left your necklace." I had to go back and get it and I actually didn't want to go back. Also, the hotel itself looked like the shining where the spot was. There was that also [inaudible 00:04:17] [crosstalk].

Alison Stewart: After I read the book, I went back and read the first page of the first chapter, and after reading it, I realized you tell us so much on that first page. There's red jellyfish soaps in the bathroom. The video that she's been watching is How to Save Your Neck. How to Save Your Neck [laughs]. When did you write that first page?

Mona Awad: Oh, man. That first page. I think I wrote the prologue first. Well, the first version of this story was actually a New York Times story called A Blue Sky Like This and it was just about the facial. Then I wrote the prologue and then I think I knew that it had to start with the death of the main character, Belle's mother. I knew it had to begin there.

I love the idea that fixation with the surface might be a symptom of just wanting to avoid really difficult realities that you're dealing with like grief. It just felt like it would be very, very poignant to begin at the funeral with this daughter who instead of being present there, is lost in this video about necks and how to save them, which says so much about her own pain. To be in the bathroom where there's this mirror and there's all these products, just so charged.

Alison Stewart: Why 2016? Why is it set in 2016?

Mona Awad: Well, I did want to avoid the pandemic, even though I have to say there was something of the pandemic in the book just because of the obsession with skincare, I think, was something that was really open to a lot of us who maybe wouldn't have otherwise been interested, just because we were all home alone. Skincare and skincare rituals are things that you engage in by yourself watching YouTube videos. It's all very lonely and isolating. It can be wonderful but it can be very isolating. 2016, when Instagram was around, it had to be when you could get videos on your phone. I just wanted to make sure that the timing was before the pandemic but also in keeping with what was available on social media.

Alison Stewart: The title of the book Rouge can refer to blush makeup, that specific Chanel lipstick which exists. I did go look it up. I put an Instagram poll, what red should I wear today for the event?

Mona Awad: I really love your shoes.

Alison Stewart: [crosstalk] 57% of the people who voted said red shoes. These are for you.

Mona Awad: They're amazing.

Alison Stewart: Why is red a color you wanted to focus on? What is the power of red for a writer creatively?

Mona Awad: Oh, that's interesting. I am wearing red nail polish. I had to have read something. I think it was because I was engaging in a fairytale more than anything and I was engaging with Snow White. Those are actually the colors of fairytale, are black, white, and red but in Snow White in particular, black, white, and red play such a huge role. Red in fairytales is usually a signal of danger. That felt really important but it's also a tool of seduction, of enchantment. It can be both. I really love that about it. It felt very important to highlight it. Then, of course, Sephora Rouge's status, those of you who know, know. laughs] The title is definitely a bit of a wink to that too.

Alison Stewart: Well, the classic story of Snow White is really scary. The not Disney version is super frightening. What inspirations did you find in that original version that we can see in Rouge?

Mona Awad: Well, the grim version of the story is really terrifying. It ends with the Queen being forced to dance to death in these red-hot shoes. That's a scene that was also really made very poetic by Anne Sexton and her version of the story. It's really good. I love that poem. In that scene, and it's in the Anne Sexton poem too, there's room to see that Snow White is actually responsible for the queen dying that way, for her being punished.

There's some ambiguity around Snow White being this helpless heroine. That's always upset me about the story that Snow White is a victim. The Queen is just this wicked woman. The mirror is somehow just this objective signifier of reality. I wanted to make the mirror more instrumental in pitting the mother against the daughter. I wanted to make the mother more human and I wanted to make the girl more culpable and just have a shadow side.

Alison Stewart: When you were at the University of Edinburgh, you wrote a thesis paper about fear. What do you think Belle is most frightened of?

Mona Awad: What do I think she's most frightened of? Well, maybe just what we all are frightened of. I think her fear is very universal and it's just expressing itself in this very particular way with skincare. I think the fear is about losing yourself, just not being able to hang on to a particular idea of who you are and maybe also the people around you, the people that you love, what you love, that you will one day lose those things. The skincare is just this elaborate way of trying to avoid that inevitable reality.

Alison Stewart: Belle's full name is Mirabel. In the beginning of the novel, we learned that in her adult life in Montreal, she prefers to go by Mira, her mother calls her Belle. Once she starts to undergo her beauty transformation, she starts to go by Belle. What is the difference in Belle's or Mira's minds when she's each? Why is she Mira in Montreal and why is she Belle when she starts to undergo the transformation?

Mona Awad: Well, Mira, I liked Mira because it's like a mirror. She's constantly looking in a mirror. Belle is something that without giving too much away, I don't know how many people have read the book. I don't want to give anything away, but she was called Belle as a child. I think that's actually in the opening chapters. The return home to her mother and to California is also having to revisit these painful memories that she's been avoiding. She is inhabiting them, by the end of the book it's no spoiler to say that she's inhabiting them. I think that's what it is.

Alison Stewart: We talked a little bit about skincare, and I did want to share with you, we asked all of our book club members if they had a multi-step skincare routine. Belle and her mom like people were honest, 40% said yes, 60% said no. What is so alluring specifically about skincare?

Mona Awad: I think it's probably different for everyone but I do think there is that promise of magic. It's like play. It's getting to play; products are like potions. They offer this possibility of transformation and that is very fairytale. It's a little bit of magic in your everyday life. I do think that there is also that what makes it more poignant maybe is just that we want to hang onto ourselves, to whatever degree that's possible. Skincare leans into that desire and that fear, and manipulates us just a bit.

Alison Stewart: When Belle comes to her mother's house, I had a moment where I didn't like her very much because she doesn't realize how much trouble her mother's been in. She shows up and the house is falling apart. There's all these different weird people around her mother. She really didn't have a sense of what was going on with her mom. I felt a little judgy after I read it. I did have that feeling.

Mona Awad: I think that's okay. She's somebody who is obsessed and I think obsession sometimes can make you less human. Or at least less attuned to your surroundings not thinking outside of yourself, but she is obsessed because she is in pain. That is the humanizing thing that gets revealed.

Alison Stewart: As she starts to go to this spa, is she going to the spa or is she being drawn to the spa?

Mona Awad: Oh, I don't know.

Alison Stewart: How much autonomy does she have about going or being at the spa?

Mona Awad: How much autonomy do we all have when we go and we buy things or we get drawn to places? I don't know. We can say that we have autonomy, but I don't know how much we have. Suggestions, get planted, our phones are spying on us. I think that's part of how I probably got obsessed with skincare to start with. It just started showing up, video started showing up on my feed.

Alison Stewart: Oh my God, I'm so sorry, all of you, your feeds when you go on skincare.

Mona Awad: Overhearing this conversation. I think that is a really interesting question. I do think that there is something very sinister about the kinds of enchantment that the beauty industry tries to create and use to lure people in.

Alison Stewart: They keep telling her she's a perfect candidate at the spa. In the eyes of the spa, what makes someone a perfect candidate?

Mona Awad: I think it would have to be, there's another character in the book named Sylvia. Sylvia is Belle's mother's friend and she's completely not interested in skincare. I think it couldn't be Sylvia could never be a perfect candidate because she just doesn't care. I think you would have to be somebody who has a fraught relationship with your own reflection, which is a lot of people. I think it would be somebody who would think, be convinced, could be convinced that the world of beauty could lead them to have a less fraught relationship with their reflection. I think that's it. I think that's what makes her perfect.

Alison Stewart: I loved going back and realizing what the cover of the book was, that this was a jellyfish, as well as a rose, if you haven't seen it. At the Centerpiece of this spa is this giant tank with which we think is jellyfish. Well, it could, they glow red, they become bigger. One particularly likes Belle and goes towards Belle quite a bit. What was appealing about the jellyfish? I have to imagine you did research into jellyfish.

Mona Awad: I mean, writing is weird. They just showed up. When I was describing the spa initially on the page, they just showed up as a descriptive detail. I became interested in them because they just felt so charged and really truly related but I didn't know yet how related. That is the weird, magic of making things of being creative is that sometimes you stumble upon things and then they end up being, oh my gosh. The most important part of the story is something you stumble into, like Tom Cruise.

Alison Stewart: Oh, we'll go there.

Mona Awad: In the end, I learned that there is actually a jellyfish that is immortal. How perfect is that for a beauty spa, that is promising immortality to have this jellyfish as their emblem?

Alison Stewart: All right, you brought up Tom Cruise. For people who haven't read the book or you're into it, so Belle sees this image in the mirror, and she's convinced it's Tom Cruise talking to her as a young child and later on. Out of all the Bratt pack out of Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, Patrick Swayze, why Tom Cruise? I know you've been asked this a million times. I have a theory, but I want to know why.

Mona Awad: Oh, I want to hear your theory on that.

Alison Stewart: My theory is, and the only reason I think about this is my sister is a dentist and she did some cosmetic dentistry. They used to use Tom Cruise's teeth as an example for certain bicuspid gnarliness before he got braces and then got the Hollywood veneers.

Mona Awad: Oh, wow.

Alison Stewart: I thought because he truly on, we see him now, and he's a very handsome, attractive man with the Hollywood smile but he transformed. That was my theory.

Mona Awad: Interesting. I love that theory. I love Tom Cruise. Also, I think the book is partly set in the '80s. She's a young child with a mother who's obsessed with film, fairytales are part of this kid's DNA. I think there's a really strong relationship between fairytale and film. They're both wish fulfillments, really powerful ones. For somebody who is a kid who's obsessed with beauty and obsessed with movies in the '80s, who might be emblematic of that. Then I also love that there are all these other maybe shadowy connotations that his name might bring up. I also love that his last name is Cruise. The book has so much water imagery.

Alison Stewart: Which is also not his real last name.

Mona Awad: It's not his real last name?

Alison Stewart: No. There, it's another transformation.

Mona Awad: That's right. I love that. Everything about Tom Cruise was perfect. He was an accident like the jellyfish that I just trusted and decided to go with, and then it turned out to make a perfect narrative sense.

Alison Stewart: His people are very concerned with his image, and they're very concerned with how he's presented in the world. Have you been contacted by Tom Cruise's people because he's all over this book?

Mona Awad: No, because first of all, it's not Tom Cruise.

Alison Stewart: It's Seth?

Mona Awad: Yes, it's Seth. It is a child's fantasy that this entity in the mirror is taking advantage of, and assuming the shape of in order to manipulate her.

Alison Stewart: Seth, the name, is it he?

Mona Awad: I chose Seth in part because there is an Egyptian God of chaos. I just thought the mirror to me in the fairytale, Snow White is an agent of chaos, ultimately, because he, it's usually a he, it's usually a masculine character, brings in shadows, violence, envy, all of this stuff that disrupts the mother-daughter relationship.

Alison Stewart: We'll have more of my conversation with our November Get Lit with All Of It author, Mona Awad, after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. We continue my conversation with author Mona Awad. Her novel Rouge was our November Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. We had a packed house for our sold-out event with Mona, and as usual, our audience had a lot of great questions for her. We'll get to those in just a minute but first, here's more of my conversation with Mona Awad.

Belle's mother is White and her father's Egyptian. That's your family makeup as well.

Mona Awad: Yes.

Alison Stewart: When her mother comments on her darker skin being positive, especially when it comes to aging but there's definitely this emphasis in this transformation about lightening skin. There's this inner dialogue where she says, "In my skin, there's a whiteness, isn't there? I whispered brightness. I mean to say not whiteness. I told myself. I'll call it a brightness." What did you want to examine about colorism?

Mona Awad: Well, it's just so all over the place in the beauty world. I wanted this book to call attention to it. It's also, it's a huge part of Snow White, which is a fairy tale about beauty that so many of us read when we're young and really informs our ideas of what beauty is and it used to be. There are so many different variants of Snow White from all over the world where she is not White. She is known as the Beautiful Maiden. That's the title of the story. Even in The Groom Snow White, there's some ambiguity about the whiteness. It's not literal.

It becomes literal in the Disney film where we actually have the line, "Skin white as snow," and then there's no other way to read Snow White's beauty. She must be white. Whiteness and beauty are equated. The question, who is the fairest of them all? There's only one way to also hear and read that. It felt really important to inhabit a fairytale about beauty through the eyes of somebody who is not White and how that might feel, especially when that fairytale is so important to them.

Alison Stewart: As Belle gets deeper and deeper into this spa culture, we'll call it, her language starts to leave her but there are these really interesting Freudian slips like the word serving becomes severing and lovely, becomes lonely and wonderful becomes woeful. How did you decide when you wanted to deploy these language slips?

Mona Awad: It was instinct. I really just had to inhabit her consciousness and follow her in the moment. Just probably the most exciting thing to me about writing is just entering into another character's body, mind and just following them in the world, and seeing how they would see the world. I just knew the words that would reveal her true state. She's somebody who is completely fixated on the outside at the expense of the inside, and as a result of these treatments, they're getting scrambled. All of this inside deep stuff is surfacing, and it's piercing through her armor.

Alison Stewart: We learned that Belle did a really horrible thing to her mother as a kid. In her memory, it's framed like this mysterious figure, this Tom Cruise/Seth person tricked her into doing it. In your mind, did Belle really want to hurt her mom? Did she know what she was doing in some way?

Mona Awad: It just depends on how you want to read the story. If you want to read it literally, then she was manipulated by outside forces. If you want to read it metaphorically, then it was always her, it was always her own reflection. It's available on Snow White too. The queen in the mirror, that relationship, who is that mirror? Is it her or is it an outside force telling her?

I liked to leave it open. I think that ambiguity is important. It's part of the reason I think we return to the fairy tale is because there is that fundamental mystery. We don't really know who is at the root of the evil, of the darkness in the story. I think similarly, it's a mix. It's neither one nor the other. It probably is both.

Alison Stewart: There was this movement a few years back in 2017 to get rid of the term anti-aging because really, what's your choice?

Mona Awad: Yes, that's right.

Alison Stewart: The editor of Allure, Michelle Lee, who was terrific, wrote in her editor's letter, "This issue is long-awaited, utterly necessary celebration of growing into your own skin. Wrinkles and all. No one's suggesting giving up retinol but changing the way we think about aging starts with changing the way we talk about aging. With that in mind, and starting with this issue, we are making a resolution to stop using the term anti-aging. Whether we know it or not, we're subtly reinforcing the message that aging is a condition we need to battle. Think anti-anxiety meds, antivirus software or antifungal spray."

Why do people in the world you created in this book fear aging and in your study of fear, why do people fear aging outside of the obvious?

Mona Awad: Like the fear of death?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Mona Awad: I think that's what it is. I think it is too, and this is something that the book explores and that I talked about a little bit earlier, but I think it has more to do with just the desire to hang on to yourself. Not lose yourself and your skin, your face is such an emblem of who you think you are. To lose it, to see it falling away, changing is very, very hard. I don't think it's a vain thing. I think it is a more existential thing at its core.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some questions from the audience. Oh, right here?

Speaker 3: This is just a very general question, but I'm sure just curious about what attracted you to writing and the word, and if you could say something about your process, because there's a lot of loneliness in doing that. Thank you.

Mona Awad: Thank you. I don't know. I was a pretty shy kid who had a lot of feelings about things, and when I started writing, I felt like, "Oh, I can finally say the things. This is where it's safe to say things. It was incredibly exhilarating for me. It felt like my true self was finding expression. I was finding my voice, not vocally with people, but on the page, I had it. I enjoyed it so, so much.

I was very afraid of it for a long time, that finding that really scared me. I was afraid that I would lose it. If I kept going, I would discover that in fact, I couldn't do this thing. I actually stopped and started for a very long time. It really wasn't until later on, in my 30s actually, that I started taking it really very seriously again because I just missed it so much. In the end, missing it is what brought me back.

Alison Stewart: You wrote this book fairly quickly.

Mona Awad: Yes, I did.

Alison Stewart: Tell people a little about your time schedule. It's really amazing.

Mona Awad: I wrote it in five weeks, the first draft.

Speaker 4: Oh, my god.

Mona Awad: Which I know sounds like--

Alison Stewart: [crosstalk] gassed from the audience.

Mona Awad: Remember that I was addicted to skincare for like a while. I was writing All's Well, which was my third book. I was watching videos. I was on tour for my second book Bunny, actually, at the time. I was watching these videos and it was lighting up my brain, and I was definitely thinking, "Yes, there's a novel here for sure." When I had the facial, I was like, "Aha, I definitely know how there's going to be a facial in this book."

I think I was thinking about it, starting to write here and there. I went to Provincetown for a weekend and I plotted it out a little bit, maybe the first third of it. Which I like to do. I've done that with every book. Then I went and I took those first pages, and I just wrote, and I was just lucky. I guess it just came out because it had a real energy to it. I didn't really have to plot it beyond that first third, it just started making narrative sense. It really gathered narrative momentum.

Alison Stewart: We have a couple more from the audience.

Speaker 4: I think that not just in this book, but in a lot of your other books, there's so much body ogre, and something really pretty peeling away to something. It's all about viscera. Do you think there's something about fairy tales, particularly, that lend itself well to body ogre?

Mona Awad: Oh, yes. Thank you for the question. There's a ton of body ogre and fairy tales. They're really violent. Often, the transformations are violent. I teach a class in fairy tale. That's actually what I was doing this morning in Syracuse. I was teaching my fairy tale class. We just read, The Frog King. In that story, the princess throws the frog against the wall. She's so pissed that he's in her bedroom. That's how he turns into a prince.

There's just a ton of it. I love that because you can read it metaphorically, and I do think a lot of the transformations that we go through, the emotional ones, the psychological ones, the physical ones, they are actually really intense and frightening. I think fairy tales externalize those. That's probably why.

Alison Stewart: Before we wrap up, is there anything that you haven't gotten-- I know you've been on book tour for this quite a bit. Is there anything you haven't gotten to say about Rouge that you've really wanted to?

Mona Awad: I've may have said this before, but I think certainly it's a critique about beauty, but it's not just about that. I think it is more really about just how, when we focus on the surface sometimes, we really do neglect the depths, but the depths will inevitably rise up. I think it's really about grief, and it's about love.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with author, Mona Awad. Her new novel Rouge was our November Get Lit with All Of It Book Club selection.

 

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