![]() ![]() ![]() I picture the leg of a chair pressing onto my foot. ![]() Right leg is concrete all the way to my foot, which, even though it’s in the air, is still screaming as if crushed by some terrible weight. A fist in my mid-back that won’t unclench. Left hip down to the knee still on vague fire. I lie like this, and I do not feel relief. Ever nodding at my various complaints as though they are all part of a grand upward journey that we are taking together, Mark and I. Mark of the dry needles, Mark of the scraping silver tools, his handsome bro face a wall of certainty framed by a crew cut. This is a position that, according to Mark, I can supposedly go into for relief, self-care, a time-out from life. Help the fist behind my knee to go slack so that when I stand up I’ll be able to straighten my leg and not hobble around like Richard III. Lying like this will supposedly help decompress my spine and let the muscles in my right leg unclench. Snow blows onto my face from an open window above me that I’m unable to close. One hand on my heart, the other on my diaphragm. My calves rest on my office chair seat, feet dangling over the edge. I lie here on my back on the roughly carpeted floor with my legs in the air at a right angle from my body. She is asking me to believe her about her pain. She looks withered but desperate, pleading. She looks imploringly at the camera, at me really, for this is a targeted ad based on all of my web searches, based on my keywords, the ones I typed into Google in the days when I was still diagnosing myself. ![]() They are oblivious to her suffering, to the red webs inside of her. Her blond children clamber around her like little jumping demons. Hunched in the front yard of her suburban home. The webs blink on and off like Christmas lights because the nerves are overactive, apparently. A see-through human body appears on my laptop screen showcasing a central nervous system that looks like a network of angry red webs. And then I am shown how deep, I am shown her supposed insides. Her pain is still there, of course, deep, deep inside her. Her face says that clearly her rubbing has done nothing. Now I watch her rub her shoulder where this invisible pain supposedly lives. You can do a lot with makeup and lighting, I have learned. Her bloodless complexion is convincing, though they probably achieved this with makeup and lighting. Her dim eyes attempt to accuse something vague in the distance, a god perhaps. Her brow furrows as though she’s about to take a difficult shit or else have a furious but forgettable orgasm. “Just because my pain is invisible,” she pleads to the camera, “doesn’t mean it isn’t real.” And then she attempts a face of what I presume to be her invisible suffering. I’M LYING ON the floor watching, against my will, a bad actress in a drug commercial tell me about her fake pain. All’s Well is a “fabulous novel” (Mary Karr) about a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain. With prose Margaret Atwood has described as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged…genius,” Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised and cost her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. And now, she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. From the author of Bunny, which Margaret Atwood hails as “genius,” comes a “wild, and exhilarating” (Lauren Groff) novel about a theater professor who is convinced staging Shakespeare’s most maligned play will remedy all that ails her-but at what cost? ![]()
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