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

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

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

Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a quirky read that I appreciated because it’s not like other books out there. It’s modern with a lot of pop culture references that somehow fit into the life of a single mother without being cringey.

Margo’s got a new baby Bodhi after an affair with her university English professor. College is off the table for now, as is working and money after she was fired for not being able to find/afford child care. Her multiple housemates aren’t happy to have a baby in the apartment and Margo’s mum is trying to stop her conservative boyfriend from finding out about Bodhi. It’s messy, and a sleep deprived Margo does the only thing she thinks she has left – reach out to her father, former pro-wrestler show more and manager Jinx. He arrives and moves in as her housemates move out (with the exception of Suzie, pop culture geek and all-round good person). Margo also decides to try making money on OnlyFans. At first it’s a secret, but when Jinx and Suzie find out, they become more helpful than expected with character analysis and plots for videos. But then things get messy when Margo’s ex wants custody and people assume that OnlyFans means she’s not a good mother. Can she fight her way through this?

Despite all the pop culture references (think Fortnite and TikTok), this is an ageless, straightforward story. Margo’s trying to make it as a single mother without a lot of options. It’s the modern way that she does it and the eccentric group of characters that makes the story so engaging. All the characters are flawed with a multitude of failings, but it’s the way that they work through it that makes the reader warm to (most of) them. The characters are very detailed where they need to be, and for the minor characters we know what’s required to make them memorable (often for the wrong reasons). You can’t help but cheer Margo on – she’s doing the best she can with what she has. Sometimes she’s naïve, sometimes she makes dumb decisions but she’s always honest.

The writing is great – sometimes in the third person, and sometimes in the first but it always works. There’s a little commentary on the points of view of fiction but the major theme is that women doing sex/sex-related work and single mothers are humans too. They aren’t just a body, they have bills to pay and deadlines to meet. They can be great people too, just as those who judge can be awful. Margo finds herself on the receiving end of a lot of negative stereotypes from strangers to those close to her. Some learn their lesson, others have no hope. Overall, it’s a story of growth and courage of one young woman in a modern setting that isn’t always kind to those who go their own way.

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Rufi Thorpe understands all the dilemmas of millennials and translates them well for those of earlier generations. In this one, Margo, 19, becomes pregnant by her married college professor and decides to keep the baby, which she knows is not a smart decision. Drifting aimlessly, she receives a bit of financial support from the professor and some great moral support from her former wrestler father, Jinx, who immediately takes to her son Bodhi but brings a dreadful habit with him as he moves into her apartment as a roommate. Jinx is an outstanding character, who continues to support Margo as she heads into the lucrative world of producing videos as a "cam girl" on OnlyFans, thereby setting herself up to lose custody of Bodhi. The show more resolution is satisfying, and readers who can overcome their moral revulsion from Margo's career choices will enjoy a quick and quirky read. show less