About a third of the way through Rufi Thorpe’s fourth novel, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a character describes professional wrestlers as “a bunch of boys from the middle of nowhere…screaming, ‘Look at me! Love me! Look at the insane and beautiful things I can do with my body!’ ”
Thorpe has a unique understanding of the intersection between physical spectacle and intimate longing. Her fiction is simultaneously bawdy, visceral, and moving. Her debut, The Girls from Corona del Mar, opens as the narrator smashes her pinkie toe with a hammer to create an excuse for missing a high school softball game after an abortion. The Knockout Queen, published in 2020, is splattered with blood, sweat, come, and vomit.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles centers on a 20-year-old single mother, the titular character, who is trying to figure out how to support herself and her newborn. Margo was raised by a mother, Shyanne, whose prettiness has never brought her the companionship she desires; her professional-wrestler father, meanwhile, has only rarely been in the picture. When he reappears, fresh out of rehab and in the middle of a divorce, Margo still calls him by his stage name: Jinx.
Margo is a high school graduate with a year of college under her belt; the baby’s father was one of her professors. She quickly learns that, given the unpredictability of a baby’s schedule, waiting tables is untenable. Jinx mentions the website OnlyFans, and soon Margo is posting nudes while realizing that sex work may actually be less degrading than other service-industry alternatives. Success in the field, however, requires a certain level of savvy in creating persona and story. This is where her father’s expertise comes in.
He and his daughter become roommates, and he teaches her how to build a character and create a story for that character. The parallels between wrestling and OnlyFans are clear: both rely on artifice but also require authenticity in the form of a physical commitment from the performer. A mask can come off at the end of a video, but the residue of injuries and orgasms lingers even after everyone goes home.
There is also a third strand at work here. This is Margo’s narration—or Thorpe’s crafting of it—which is explicitly interested in how performing the self in the ring and online rhymes with performing the self on the page, in the writing of a book.
All of this makes Margo’s Got Money Troubles a perspectival fun-house mirror, as the character tries on different ways of approaching her audience. The book opens with a paragraph narrated in the second person, as if the reader is engaged in a role-playing game or reading a choose-your-own-adventure. “You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense,” Thorpe begins.
“Goodness knows you’ve fallen in love with books that didn’t grab you in the first paragraph,” she continues. “But that doesn’t stop you from wishing they would, from wishing they would come right up to you in the dark of your mind and kiss you on the throat.”
From there, the novel alternates unpredictably between first and third person. Margo is a character; Margo is the narrator; Margo is narrating herself as a character. As Margo’s English professor (and baby daddy) declares at one point, “I like the swagger. I like the bravado when the author says, ‘Hey, look at how fake this is, now I’m gonna make you forget all about it.’ ”
That conceit—a book about the performance of writing a book—could bog down the narrative, making everything too meta and self-serious. But Thorpe’s writing is too endearing to fall into that trap. Margo becomes an OnlyFans creator called HungryGhost who teams up with two other creators, WangMangler and Succulent Rose, to make videos that feature her as a naked alien who eats pens and plants light bulbs. She engages in an epistolary romance via OnlyFans’ in-app messaging with a fan who quickly becomes a more complicated figure in her life.
And, of course, she encounters obstacles and challenges that cause her to grow. This is a novel, after all, and Thorpe isn’t interested in breaking the rules—only in twisting and bending them, then painting them in glitter so they sparkle. There are moments that strain credulity, but that’s fine. This isn’t supposed to be a work of sober realism. This is a show, and Thorpe is committed to giving it her all.
Most importantly, she never forgets what’s at the heart of her performance: not just look at me, but also love me. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is deeply felt and wildly tender. Its characters are flawed and funny, and the novel itself reaches out toward its readers, hungry to be understood. The result is a book that is both a kiss on the throat and a punch in the teeth: vital, bracing, violent, alive.•
Zan Romanoff is the author of three novels: Look, Grace and the Fever, and A Song to Take the World Apart. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
