The book for this week’s episode took me to places I don’t normally go, namely the world of OnlyFans and pro-wrestling. I live in a bubble and reading fiction helps me break out of that bubble, even if it’s only in my mind. The protagonist in author Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles is the daughter of a Hooters waitress and an ex pro wrestler. Margo gets impregnated by her English professor at junior college, and despite everyone’s advice, including the father, Margo decides to keep the baby. She soon realizes having a baby is both the hardest job she’ll ever do and the best job. When her estranged father Jinx shows up, she says he can move in, but only if he helps with the babysitting. Margo starts an OnlyFans site as an experiment and finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s tips from the world of wrestling.
Now, if you’re thinking this book is too far out for you, think again. Uber-talented TV producer David E. Kelley loved Rufi’s novel and is turning it into an 8-part Apple TV series starring Elle Fanning as Margo, Michelle Feiffer as Margo’s mom, Nick Otterman as Jinx, Thaddea Graham as Margo’s flat-mate Suzie and Nicole Kidman in an undisclosed role. The dream team. p.s. Elle Fanning narrates the Audible.
Below is an edited, abbreviated Q&A with Rufi. You can listen to our entire chat here on Elena Meets the Author, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Rufi, hello. You write about so many serious, often dark issues like unemployment, desperation, infidelity, sex work, shame, pro wrestling, opiate addiction, religious zealotry, white trash, the impossible choices young mothers face. Can you tell us how humor makes difficult topics not just palatable, but even enjoyable?
Comedy is a great way of leavening a work so that you can talk about these dark issues without it becoming too much of a bummer or making you want to set the book down.
But I also think that the times I’ve laughed the hardest in my life have usually been in a hospital or a mortuary, like, there’s nothing like the truly terrible moments in life to give you the giggles. I think that either life strikes you as funny or not. In this story, I don’t know that I was even thinking that it was going to be so dark.
What inspired this story?
It started off with this really, simple thought experiment. I was seeing the movie Wonder Woman with my mom at the movie theatre. We really liked it, but we both agreed we were much more interested in the island of the Amazons than we were in Wonder Woman herself. We didn’t like Wonder Woman.
She was cold and virginal. Why can’t there ever be a female superhero who fucks? And who’s comfortable with sex. Even Black Widow, she’s sexual, but she’s so tortured by it. Why can’t there be a female superhero who is comfortable with her sexuality?
And then I got this weird idea of taking the two ways that our culture’s messed up about women, the Madonna-whore complex, and what if I made a character who was both a Madonna and a whore? Good at both and there being no conflict.
How could I write such a character? I thought I’d never be able to do it. There’s all this cultural stigma against sex work and there’s this tendency to put mothers on such a pedestal and judge them so harshly over things like using formula or what sleep training method they use.
I mean, we castigate women for nothing. So, I was like, how would I ever get a reader to sign on to this character? And then during the pandemic, there were some standup comedians that I followed on Twitter, and as their ability to perform standup evaporated overnight, they were scrambling to figure out how to support themselves and they started OnlyFans accounts.
I was watching them live tweet their experience. And I noticed that the conversations around OnlyFans were a little bit different than conversations around other forms of sex work or sex adjacent work. I think partially because women of our generation, most of us have taken nudes for a partner at some point. So, it’s no longer this idea of you going to a sketchy photographer’s house and putting yourself in danger to take boudoir photographs. It’s like you take a picture of your boobs on the phone all the time, so that’s not the scary part. We’ve all also sold something online, so that’s not really that intimidating.
And suddenly, you’re in charge. You know, there’s no creepy producer who’s making you do things you don’t want to do. You have complete creative control. Then what really is the problem with it? And I thought, oh, this is the paradigm where people would be more willing to have the conversation without it suddenly getting collapsed into black and white.
I listened to an interview where you talked about how during COVID, waitresses were unemployed, men were working from home and Only Fans subscriptions shot up
I think it went from 20 million users to 120 million users in that first year of the quarantine. There’s a large group of people participating in the OnlyFans economy. And it’s one of the things that weirdly makes me hopeful. I know that there’s been a lot of questions whether these young women understand the repercussions? Will it be difficult for them to find employment in the future? And I feel like there’s so many of them (on OnlyFans) at this point that it seems that it’s going to be absurd to not hire someone for a job because they used to have an OnlyFans account. I hope that that’s the way the culture is trending.
Margot’s love interest, JB, asks her, ‘When you fall in love with a book, is it the character or the author you’re falling in love with?’ What do you think?
I think for me as a very lonely, chubby child who fell in love with books, communing with those other minds and feeling a ripple of intelligence behind a story offered me a kind of intimacy that really wasn’t available in other aspects of my life.
Like you never can really know a writer. You feel like you do. You think, ‘Oh, I’ve read every single one of your books.They’re a huge part of my own mental imaginative landscape, but you still don’t know that person. You could, in fact, meet a writer you admire and then discover you don’t like them at all, that they’re a terrible person or they’re mean, or whatever.
There’s all this distance (when you read a book) that enables something truly intimate to happen, experiencing a story or a whole world or a series of people that are all created by one mind. And I think there’s something fundamentally communicative in art that is about connection.
Elena: When people read fiction they’re living in a fantasy world, a bit like Margo’s subscribers.
I think that we have a really strong drive towards the fantastical. We are naturally drawn to it and also suspicious of the part of ourselves that likes it.
And so, in some ways, I think this book is a a defence of lying. You know, it’s not all bad. Don’t get too worried about lying. Sometimes lying is good.
Margo is selling a fantasy, and she’s aware of what her fans think about her. She thinks that they are treating her like a little Tamagotchi, like a little tiny woman that lives in their phone and they can send her dollars and then she’ll do what they say.
There is a way in which fiction is wish fulfilment. To keep reading, you have to prefer the book to real life. You watch a Shakespeare play and you’re escaping. There is a way in which a novel is always a fantasy in the same way that whatever a sex worker is portraying is a fantasy in the same way that even the kinds of physiques that wrestlers are showing you, the kind of strength…I mean, you don’t do a backflip in the middle of a real fight. But it’s this fantasy of what if fighting were beautiful.
Can you talk about the research you did for this book?
Sure, so there were two main arms of the research. One is the wrestling research, and one is the OnlyFans research. I’m going to talk about the wrestling first, because I’m sure people are more interested in the OnlyFans, so then we can end on the exciting OnlyFans research.
Regarding the wrestling research, I didn’t even know wrestling was going to be part of this book. I just happened to get obsessed with pro wrestling at the same time (as I was writing the novel). And I remember walking the dogs with my mom and I was telling her how wrestling has this rich literary tradition where almost every wrestler of note has one, if not multiple, published memoirs.
And she (said), if only there was some way that you could work this into your book so I wouldn’t have to hear about it quite so much.
And so, I thought, I don’t want Margo to become a wrestler, but what about her dad? It would give us a way of understanding people making a living by taking risks with their body. I felt like the parallels to sex work were close enough.
For wrestling research, I did a ton of reading, a ton of listening to podcasts, a ton of watching summaries of matches in the 90’s.
And then for OnlyFans I really wanted to get it right. I’m very spoiled as a fiction writer because most people want to talk about their jobs. But this was not the case with OnlyFans. Everyone was sliding into their DMs. OnlyFans models don’t have emails posted anywhere. They don’t have a webpage. They’re trying to not let people have access to them because they’re scary people out there who want to kill them. And certainly, they’re getting way too many DMs to personally monitor that on a platform like Instagram or Twitter.
So, I made an OnlyFans account, and I would send a message with a $50 tip saying I’m a novelist, I promise, an actual real one. Here’s my name and names of books I’ve written. I’m writing a novel that has a character who is doing an OnlyFans account. I really want to portray sex work as work and not have it be exploitative. I really want to get the details right.
I would love to hear about your experience. I’m willing to pay you this much per question blah blah blah. And even with financial incentives, it was not like people were lining up to talk to me about this. There was a lot of hesitancy. Any question that veered towards the personal, they’d be like, I don’t feel comfortable talking about that. Super private, super guarded. And that was kind of an education in and of itself, in terms of understanding just how bombarded they are with people trying to get at them. People trying to get under the facade and pry off their mask and get something from them.
I did ultimately find a couple of models who were willing to answer questions more in depth. I wanted to keep the book focused on that early period of starting an account, because I really wasn’t sure what happens to you psychologically if you do this work for years.
I think it wears on you in really specific, unique ways, and I did not have somebody who was willing to take me into that level of confidence where I felt like I could understand and do it any justice.
I got lucky and wound up finding an OnlyFans model who had once also worked in publishing and was willing to do a full manuscript read. And that was insanely valuable.
I read that you grew up with a single mother, not really knowing your own father. How much did you draw on personal experience for this book?
My mom has a really different personality than (Margo’s mother) Cheyenne and a really different life background. My mother was an actress and she has a master’s degree in theatre, and she has a whole different vibe.
But there is a dynamic between a single mom and an only child, where you’re kind of buddies. And you go on little adventures together. Me and my mom did a lot of road trips, and we had a lot of little rituals that our idiosyncratic household made together.
Like the same way in the book that they did foot peels on Thanksgiving. And now Margo’s thinking about Kenny (Cheyenne’s boyfriend) joining the family and Margo’s thinking what’s going to happen to all our weird little just me and mom rituals?
I think that I didn’t understand how much my own mother loved me until I had children. I don’t think you can really conceive of how encompassing a mother’s love is until you have your own babies and then you’re like, oh, she would have died for me. Like, it wasn’t just that she made me sandwiches. She would have beaten a dog to death with a shovel to save me.
You understand how much labor it takes to raise a child. How many hours of wiping the butts, and the snots, and making the food and how tiring it was and how lonely it probably was for her.
So, I did a lot of thinking along those lines about my own mother when I had children. I tried to give Margo a lens, understanding her mom anew through having her own child.
What prevailing message would you like readers to take away from this book?
I’m always a little bit suspicious of messages, and I do try to not have one. The one thing I knew I wanted the reader to feel was what I had in mind with movies like Legally Blonde.
I wanted them to feel like she kicked ass at the end. I wanted readers to feel like their life was their own and they got to do with it what they wanted. And that they could be like Margo and build any kind of life that they wanted according to their rules. And they don’t have to please anybody. I wanted it to have that feeling of violent hopefulness,
Well, mission accomplished. Thank you so much. That’s all my questions.
Thank you very much, Elena.
November, 2024
