Book review: Before it was even published, Rufi Thorpe’s fourth novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles was snapped up by Apple TV – outbidding Netflix – to be made into a series starring Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman. Producer David E Kelley – Big Little Lies, The Undoing – will be involved. From this, you may guess that the book concerns beautiful young people, is moderately racy, tips its hat at weighty issues and moves along at a good clip. The book is also genuinely funny, sometimes as funny as Rebecca K Reilly’s brilliant Greta & Valdin, and in a similar way.
The book begins with 20-year-old Margo Millet’s baby shower, hosted by the owner of the restaurant where she waitresses. The absent father is her married former English professor. The affair had been brief and unsatisfactory and both the professor and Shyanne, Margo’s screamingly unmaternal mother, had been “hysterical” for Margo to have an abortion.
Partly to show she won’t be bossed around, partly from some vague desire to “do the right thing”, Margo goes ahead and has baby Bodhi.
Almost immediately, Margo is fired from her waitressing job and two of her flatmates leave because of Bodhi’s screaming. She is left unemployed and sharing a four-bedroom flat with Suzie, who had once sold blood plasma “so she could buy contact lenses that made her look like a cat”. Broke, Margo hunts for a stroller in the smelly selection of charity shops, convinced that buying one will make baby Bodhi “grow up to spit from truck windows and laugh at racist jokes”.
She hadn’t thought this through.
Enter Jinx, Margo’s father. A former champion WWE wrestler, Jinx is fresh out of rehab and offers to move in to help with the rent. Margo agrees; she rarely saw him during her childhood but she’s won over by his instant infatuation with Bodhi.
Jinx mentions in passing a wrestling friend who makes loads of money through OnlyFans – an X-rated social media platform where subscribers pay a monthly fee to see the “saucy pics” she posts.
Margo is intrigued. “Beauty is like free money,” Shyanne has always told her. It doesn’t seem an enormous leap from this sentiment to Margo deciding to set up her own OnlyFans account. Jinx, horrified at what he’s started, eventually comes around, rationalising that it’s just like wrestling: using your body for money. Flatmate Suzie, who is into Larping – live-action role playing – supplies costumes.
Margo befriends two other OnlyFans performers and they start creating content using scripts that Margo finds she has an unexpected talent for writing.
The money starts rolling in. But a series of setbacks follows. Margo has to face the wrath of her mother – recently engaged to an evangelical preacher – when she finds out about OnlyFans. Worse, she has to fight a custody claim filed by the professor when he finds out, while dealing with Jinx falling off the wagon spectacularly.
The book has fun playing with ideas about what is real and what is fake and whether the difference between the two is as meaningful as people think. It can get surprisingly profound. “All things that are genuinely interesting aren’t quite real,” the professor had told Margo’s English class, and one of the most important and moving relationships Margo has is between her fictitious OnlyFans character and a sweet and innocent – “only curious” – subscriber known as JB.
Some of the supporting characters feel a bit undercooked, and your enjoyment of the book may depend on your tolerance for “dick pic” discussion, but Margo is a convincing 20-year-old and this is a pleasingly odd coming-of-age tale.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe (Sceptre, $37.99) is out now.
