For most writers of literary fiction, a screening of Wonder Woman would be an unlikely place to find inspiration. But for Rufi Thorpe, that trip to the movies with her mom in 2017 is one she won’t forget. “It was amazing,“ she recalls over Zoom from the sunlit, pink bedroom of her Southern California home. “I loved the idea of a hidden island where women were in charge of saving humanity.”
But she was also left wondering why female superheroes have to be so virginal. Considering this question led her to write her fourth novel, Margo’s Got Money Troubles (Morrow, June), an exhilarating and hilarious feminist romp in which a down-on-her-luck single mother finds liberation and financial security by creating a social media account for which she strikes suggestive poses and rates men’s dick pics for money.
The novel—which has been optioned for television by production company A24, has an announced first printing of 100,000 copies, and received a positive review from PW—looks set to build on the critical reception of Thorpe’s previous work. Her debut novel, The Girls from Corona Del Mar, was longlisted for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. She followed that up with Dear Fang, with Love and The Knockout Queen, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, an honor, Thorpe says, that “meant everything in terms of the seriousness with which I took myself and my willingness to keep investing in this as a career.”
Thorpe was born in Dallas and grew up not knowing her father; she and her single mother moved to California in 1991 when she was six. She describes her childhood self as “probably really annoying” and “fat and a total ham.” But she was always a reader and wrote poetry before attending the California State Summer School for the Arts. “It was there I started writing fiction,” she says, “though it was mainly to impress a girl I had a crush on because her boyfriend wrote fiction and I wanted her to think I was cool like he was.”
After studying literature and creative writing at the New School, she enrolled in the University of Virginia’s MFA program. While in grad school, she completed two novels—“neither of which was very good,” she says—and then moved back to California and continued to write while waiting tables and teaching. When she was 26, she wrote The Girls from Corona Del Mar. “I wrote a crazy, absolutely unprofessional letter confessing my undying admiration to my first agent,” she says, “and she actually took me out of the slush pile and sold Girls from Corona Del Mar to Knopf.”
When it came to writing Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Covid-19 played a not insignificant role. While Thorpe, her husband, and their two kids were hunkered down during the pandemic, the author began exploring what she calls “the obsessive veneration of motherhood and the ways in which mothers are expected to become practically superhuman, without failings, flaws, or even personal needs.”
This coincided with her interest in the exploding popularity of and pushback against OnlyFans, a subscription website heavily used by sex workers. According to a 2021 Financial Times article, before Covid, OnlyFans had less than 20 million users. After 12 months of lockdowns, that number grew to more than 120 million, with many recently out-of-work mothers leveraging the site to pay bills by selling explicit photos and videos of themselves. Thorpe reached out to some of these women and found them to be pragmatic, determined, and fiercely protective of personal boundaries.
They also bear a striking similarity to Margo, who struggles to take charge of her own destiny while dealing with unemployment, a dwindling bank account, and the appearance on her doorstep of her estranged father, Jinx, a World Wrestling Entertainment legend struggling to overcome opioid addiction. The two strike a deal: Jinx will take care of Margo’s infant son, Bodhi, in exchange for a place to live. Soon Margo is making money on OnlyFans and drawing upon her father’s experience in the WWE to help her videos to go viral.
If a novel with this much professional wrestling in it seems at odds with its feminist author, Thorpe can only agree: “It’s weird. I was raised in this all-female world. It was me, my mom, and then my grandmother. There was no pro wrestling in our household. But then I married a man and had two boys. Especially during the pandemic, all my boys wanted to do was wrestle on the trampoline and watch WWE. At first, I was like ‘Oh, this is such a drag.’ ” But her husband was also a fan, and she soon became a convert with an appreciation for what she calls the “pageantry and the athleticism” of the sport.
“For a fiction writer,” she says, “it was like discovering a pot of gold—I couldn’t get enough.” Thorpe went down the WWE rabbit hole, devouring wrestlers’ memoirs and watching YouTube channels devoted to Monday Night Raw. And while she still wasn’t sure how she’d work wrestling into her novel, she “felt there was this really important connection between the sex work and the pro wrestling, and that bringing that out would enable me to challenge some of the unexamined prejudices we have about sex work.”
As it happens, the novel’s effervescent plot is a perfect match with its author, who, in conversation, is an animated, exuberant talker. Interviewing Thorpe feels a lot like a girls’ night out; her hand gestures and sunny smile convey passion and humor. Still, she has a serious side, particularly when discussing her work as a teacher. She has taught writing at the college level, at Catapult, and recently joined the teaching staff of author Mary Adkins’s novel writing program, the Book Incubator.
“Teaching offers one of those really spiritually succinct tasks where you’re like, ‘Oh, your job is to be helpful to this person!’ ” she says. “So much of our writing lives is lonely. You’re writing these books alone, and there’s a freedom and splendor to that. But there’s also a desire to reconnect, to be part of a community. And teaching offers the added bonus of encouraging you to think abstractly and nerdily about things like plot, structure, and point of view.”
Sounding very much like a perceptive writing teacher, Thorpe also notes that there is pleasure to be found in exploring equivocal topics in her work. “It’s in the gray areas where I can be the most intellectually honest without being didactic or propagandizing the story,” she says. “I can simply show what I see.”
Leigh Haber ran Oprah’s Book Club for 10 years. She now owns and operates her own editorial and consulting business.
