Margo's Got Money Troubles

Single mother Margo can’t keep a waitressing job because childcare is too expensive, but her boobs look great now so she decides to start an OnlyFans. Unfortunately she is very bad at it, so she gets her estranged father Jinx, a retired professional wrestler, to help her build a character and develop a fandom. But it turns out that the rest of her family, and her baby’s family, are not so encouraging.

An absolute banger of a book. I was expecting to love Margo, and I did, and I was expecting the story to be fun and funny and modern, and it is, but the writing is just incredible. It slowly slips from first to third person narration as the story moves along and then snaps back to first in a way that feels so intimate, just like show more Margo’s work. This is a story about taking sex work seriously - not as a tragedy but as a job. But it’s also a story about narrative - the narrative of an adult performer, the narrative of professional wrestling, the narrative we tell about ourselves to other people, the narrative we tell about ourselves to authorities, and the narrative of a book. And it’s really beautiful. show less

You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense. The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people's names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know.

Margo is still a teenager when her English professor gets her pregnant. And in the following weeks, despite everyone telling her not to, she decides to keep the pregnancy. She has an apartment that she shares with three other girls, the man who told her, show more over and over, how much he loves her, her best friend Becca and her mother. And once she has Bodhi, the professor ghosts her, her mother quickly tells her that she will not be helping out, her best friend disappears from her life, two of her roommates move out and she loses her job. Margo does indeed have money troubles, but money is only one of her problems.

They had tried to warn her: her mother, Mark, even Becca. But when they talked about the opportunities she would be missing, she'd thought they meant a four-year college. She hadn't understood thy meant that every single person she met, every new friend, every love interest, every employer, every landlord, would judge her for having made what they all claimed was the "right" choice.

But she's not without resources. First, there's the one roommate who didn't leave, and then there's her father, someone who was largely absent while she was growing up but now, fresh out of rehab, he needs a place to stay and he can pay rent. And he gives her an idea of how she can make money to take care of her and Bodhi. None of it is ideal, but there's a chance this odd family can make it work, or maybe the underlying issues are too serious to paper over with love and effort.

This book surprised me. Thorpe's writing is light and smart and she often goes for the clever wordplay over a more sincere telling. And Margo is a young woman who hides her own feelings with her quick mind and a careless attitude. But as this novel progresses, it doesn't take the easy way, or the expected direction, but chooses to be more real and complex and muddled in ways that make it more than the breezy language indicates. I ended up rooting for Margo to figure out a road between the many obstacles placed in her way. show less

This is one of those lost/weird girl novels that can go really flat or really right, and this one got it so right. It's smart and relatable and handles complex family dynamics and hot button issues really well. Nothing was too over the top or cringe for me which is a high bar to clear.

A cute and funny book that makes you feel warmer and fuzzier the worse the protagonist's life gets.

Margo's got more than money troubles, y'see. First, she's a pregnant teen dropping out of college, then a single mom in her twenties who needs a job, childcare, and maybe a little romance. And, oh yes, parents who aren't so bloody messed up.

So, of course . . . OnlyFans! But that brings it's own set of problems.

Atop this slight domestic dramedy, the author has decided to take a literary lay-up by having the narrator switch between first-, second-, and third-person while layering in some metafiction that caused me to alternate between a conspiratorial closeness with the author and a resentful embarrassment for enjoying the novel at face show more value. Mostly, it seems like something she might have wanted to save for a later, deeper book instead of burning it off in this amusing trifle.

Still, I had fun and was happy to crack the book open every chance I got. show less

This was a fucking delight. This book reminded me that sometimes I do like literary fiction, because this has actual heart in it. In this book, Rufi Thorpe is playing all the same MFA word games as, for example, Rachel Cusk does in her work, but Thorpe is also writing on an emotional level, giving her characters humanity and feeling. Thorpe made me care exactly as much as Cusk didn't. (And by the way, I'm not denigrating MFA word games. I love word games, after all. I just also need some actual good feelings in my reading or what is even the point?)

The only reason I'm giving this four stars is that it made me care and feel a little too much; I spent the early part of the book so, so anxious, because I've done the show more bringing-home-a-new-baby thing, and imagining doing it with no partner or plan or support or safety net was truly horrifying. But this was a fantastic, delightful read, despite the emotional toll, mostly because it pays you back for the tension and worry with joy. show less

At times the search for funny, relatable, smart, brilliantly crafted light reading seems like a fool's errand. But then, you find the holy grail and you know the search has been worth it. This book! I laughed out loud while reading many many times. I loved every character and thought the story rolled out perfectly bringing us to an end that was completely unexpected and yet absolutely right.

The story is basically laid out in the blurb. Margo is a very smart and interesting college freshman from the wrong side of the tracks -- she is the illegitimate daughter of a Hooters waitress and a WWE hype man. For reasons unclear, perhaps especially to Margo, she has a brief and not particularly satisfying affair with her married professor who is show more more than twice her age. It peters out (no pun intended) but just after the end of the affair Margo realizes she is pregnant. Against the wishes of the creepy professor she chooses to have the baby (the tone here is VERY pro-choice, not to worry.) When she finds it impossible to access and pay for childcare that works with waitressing she ends up launching a unique and hilarious OnlyFans page. Her first communication on the site caused me to laugh uncontrollably while standing on the Roosevelt Island tram. (I am pretty sure the tourists just thought they were having the NYC crazy person moment, but the operator who sort of knows who I am looked concerned.) That is all I will share. The story is filled with fascinating characters who are quirky and zany while also being completely believable and I loved every one of them at least a little, except Margo's high school best friend. She is awful. This is such a compassionate book. It straight-up killed me with kindness. But also, it is not at all sappy. If you don't laugh when Rick Flair appears as a sort of religious vision I worry you have no sense of humor at all. A complete delight.

One additional note -- I listened to this, and Elle Fanning is a fantastic narrator. She inhabited Margo! show less

It's original, funny, sincere and powerful. The life is messy and it doesn't have a script. Relationships are not easy and the hardest relationship of all is with oneself. We make mistakes and weird decisions out of spite, to prove something, because we are bored or on a whim. And then we need to face the consequences: predictable, unpredictable, scary and wonderful. At the same time we have very little power on the weird decisions of other people around us. This book does an amazing job at portraying all of that.

It also addresses a very important and difficult question: can we and should we normalize sex work? Women have turned to sex work for centuries, millennia, maybe actually since the beginning of times, to provide for their show more children. Does it make them bad mothers?

It also deals with many other problematic issues in the US: addiction and addiction treatment, access to higher education and healthcare, lack of childcare benefits, insane lawyer fees and rent in California. The title is "Margo's Got Money Troubles" but actually she doesn't - it could have been so much worse if she didn't start making good money on her OnlyFans account, which I think is a bit of a fairy-tale scenario. It's a new phenomena - the social media influencers, who are making crazy amounts of money. Many people try, but not many succeed. I didn't completely believe Margo's success story. From the blurbs I read I expected that her pro-wrestler dad would be more involved into creating her OnlyFans persona, but he was mainly a pro-baby-sitter.

I really loved the portrayal of Margo's problematic relationship with her mom Shyanne and her new husband Kenny. They were such wonderful characters and that relationship was so flawed, but you could really see that happening.

It's my first book by Rufi Thorpe, but I'm looking forward to reading more by her. It was interesting how she was switching between first person and third person narration, though the narrator was always Margo, but she was sometimes kind of narrating from outside her body and also from some time in the future. The author was sometimes pinpointing at the switch to a third-person narration and Margo's reasons for it but mostly it happened inconspicuously. I also liked how ideas about narration, writing process and art in general where incorporated in the novel - mostly through Mark and his lectures, but also sometimes through metafiction. show less