by Rufi Thorpe ★★★★☆
Margo is in a tough spot. She's 19, she's a student at Fullerton junior college, and she's just found out she's pregnant with her English professor's child. Her professor, Mark, is married with a family, and he immediately assumes she will have an abortion. When Margo decides to keep the baby, he cuts off all communication with her. After she has baby Bodhi, she has almost no support system in place -- her mother, Shyanne, is low on cash and even lower on emotional intelligence; her friends from high school all went away to college; her college-age roommates can't stand having a crying baby in their shared apartment; and her job as a waitress requires her to work when daycares (which she couldn't afford, anyway) are closed.
As a last resort, she reaches out to her father, a man who was mostly absent when she was growing up. He was a wrestler and a wrestling manager, known as "Jinx", who also happened to have a family when he met Margo's mother. But he'd stayed a part of both of their lives, and while Margo never asked him for anything, she calls him as a last resort. Her plea over voicemail goes unanswered, until he shows up unannounced a few weeks later, fresh out of rehab, and starts to help her get her life in order.
They're watching wrestling (it's all Jinx watches) one day when he comments about one of the female wrestlers, Arabella. The following exchange takes place:
"The one with the bright pink hair. She was with WWE, then her contract got terminated because she'd. . .Well, have you heard of OnlyFans?"
"No, what's that? Is that like Cameo?" Margo knew Jinx made a sizable fraction of his living now from a site where people paid him to record videos wishing their husband happy birthday or whatever.
"Oh, no, not quite. OnlyFans is more . . . it's pornography, essentially. Celebrities or people with large internet followings have unfiltered, X-rated social media accounts, and you can pay whatever amount per month to follow Arabella and see what saucy pics she posts. This is nothing new, pro wrestlers have been making pornography for ages -- good for her and all, I hear she makes quite a bit of money -- but WWE didn't want to be associated with it..."
Margo sat, digesting all this. She and her father had never remotely discussed pornography before. Jinx could be weirdly prudish in conversation. "Like how much money?" she finally asked.
That conversation got the gears turning for Margo, and a potential way out of the tough spot she was in.
In addition to creating a wholly unique plot, author Rufi Thorpe employs a number of interesting techniques to share Margo's story. For starters, she bounces between first and third person narration, with some of the more challenging moments of the book -- those where Margo is ashamed -- told in the third person, and those were she feels most empowered told in the first person. Margo says fairly early in the novel "It's true that writing in the third person helps me. It is so much easier to have sympathy for Margo who existed back then rather than try to explain how and why I did all the things that I did." Thorpe buoys passages like that through classroom interchanges between Professor Mark and the class contrarian, Derek. In addition to debates about which point of view makes for the best narration, they also argue over whether or not characters in a novel are real ("The main character is not a real person." "But in the book, he's a real person." "They are only interesting because they aren't real."). Margo echoes that debate later in the book when she says, "It's almost easier to believe I'm real than to understand what's actually going on. The desperation that could have caused anyone to invent me in the first place. The urgency and need that would requires creating an imaginary space of this size and level of detail. And it really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?"
The inner-novel debates about the realness of characters is doubly interesting because there is an overwhelming authenticity to the characters and their interactions in the novel. Shyanne is beautifully infuriating, with her self-centeredness and inability to put her only child first when Margo is in such desperate need. Margo's unwavering love for her mother despite Shyanne's utter failures as a parent is almost as frustrating. The ability for Jinx and Margo to build a real relationship after twenty years of Jinx's surface-level partial parenting is heartwarming and nicely captured. The most significant arc of course is Margo, and her path from hitting rock bottom to turning around her life, coupled with increased self-confidence and self-worth, makes for a compelling character journey.
There's lots of buzz about this one, and it's already been optioned by Apple for a TV series starring Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman. It's a quick and worthy read, and while I didn't think the quality of the prose or plotting quite matched some of my top novels of the year, there's a lot of good that makes it a solid-4-star book for me.
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