Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a wholly original book. Superficially, it’s about the unlikely combination of sex work, motherhood and wrestling – its protagonist Margo is 20, has just had a baby after an affair with her married college professor, and has lost her waitressing job, because who’s going to look after her baby? She’s also lost her flatmates, because what kind of twenty-something wants to write essays and party with a newborn in the apartment?
Strapped for cash (Mark, the professor, wants nothing to do with the baby and gives Margo some money in exchange for her never approaching him again), Margo stumbles across the website OnlyFans, the porn subscriber platform, and decides to set up an account.
She’s funny and industrious, as well as hot, and when she starts to make thousands of dollars and have fun, she decides to make a proper go of it. Which is something many people in her life are instantly, cataclysmically unhappy about – Margo’s beautiful, unpredictable mother Shyanne, who raised Margo alone and is herself an ex-Hooters waitress, is currently engaged to puritanical Kenny, who disapproves of everything.
The wrestling bit comes from her historically absent father Jinx, a famous former pro-wrestler (who himself, as it happens, fathered Margo while still married to someone else). He turns up one day to Margo’s apartment, announces he’s getting divorced, moves in and against all the odds becomes a near perfect grandad, bar an inconvenient opiate addiction. He’s good with the baby, he’s non-judgmental about Margo’s OnlyFans efforts (and even helps grow her fan base using his experience of WWE showmanship) and he shows Margo the unconditional love she doesn’t get elsewhere.
This is American author Rufi Thorpe’s fourth novel and it is wild, funny, and perceptive; no wonder an adaptation by Big Little Lies‘s David E Kelley has already been picked up by Apple TV+, and is set to star Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning.
But underneath all the sex and jokes, this is really a story that explores the unique challenges of motherhood, and the broader issues of loneliness, with a careful and ever curious eye. Having a baby instantly separates Margo from her peers. “She could feel the echoey space of no one caring about her or worrying about her or helping her. She might as well have been nursing this baby on an abandoned space station.”
The world of work, the family courts (with whom Margo has a run-in), even friends: all of them claim to be sympathetic to Margo’s situation but actually all are ultimately judgmental about what a real mother should look like.
And yet Margo isn’t the only one who feels alone. Shyanne, Jinx, JB – a “fan” for whom Margo develops romantic feelings – they are all desperate. “People are all so lonely,” Margo ponders. “Even when they do horrible things, it often comes down to that, if only you take the time to understand them.”
Thorpe is so good at taking a microscope to the detail, and then backing up so we see the wider picture too. All of her characters are so human, and even dastardly Mark has a sliver of redemption. She is in total control of her tone too, which is comic without being forced: “It was amazing how depressed you could get and still find things funny.”
One of the surprising joys of this novel is how interesting it is (as a non-subscriber) to learn how OnlyFans works. It’s less a porn site, by this description, and more a place where creative people curate content that sits somewhere between porn, comedy and a girlfriend experience. But it also invites doxing and encourages you to show your “full vagine”. So.
The premise feels well-researched and interesting without forcing us to take sides. Is the ubiquity and ease of this type of sex work a good thing? Margo certainly has fun with it, and it better supports her experience of motherhood than any more traditionally acceptable routes do. But Thorpe doesn’t insist her readers take this view. She allows questions to linger, and along with a playful metafictional parenthesis that strongly suggests that different literary viewpoints offer different perspectives (sometimes Margo is in the third person; sometimes the first), she gives her readers a lot of freedom.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles is about so much more than Margo or money, and yet is also very sharp-eyed about how central real money troubles are. I’ll be thinking – and laughing – about it for a long time to come.
Published by Sceptre on 4 July, £16.99
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