The cover and title of Margo’s Money Problems don’t convey the impact that Ruffy Thorpe’s new novel will have on readers. There’s a reason Apple TV optioned it as a series starring Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning even before it was published: It’s an entirely original novel.
Summary: At 19, Margo gets pregnant by her community college professor, gives birth to his child, drops out of school, and discovers OnlyFans, where she exposes herself for money, rates the NSFW photos subscribers send her, and gives every subscriber a Pokémon doppelganger. But wait, there’s more! Her father, Jinx, is a famous pro wrestler, now retired, who actually introduces her to OnlyFans and helps her grow her following using many of the same techniques that made him a star in the ring.
Meanwhile, Margo’s mother, Cheyenne, who also gave birth to Margo at a young age and now spends a great deal of time altering her appearance to attract men who will provide for her, begs Margo to stop selling images of her body for money, because “no one will marry you anymore.”
If that wasn’t strange enough, Thorpe also makes the book’s narrative a bit odd: Margo is the constant narrator, but he frequently switches from third to first person, because “it’s so much easier to sympathize with Margo at the time than it is to explain how and why I did everything I did.”
This is a book that will grab your attention and keep you hooked. Who wouldn’t want to hear the end of a story that begins with a baby shower complete with a giant penis-shaped cake? Packed with laughs, this book is also packed with sharp insights about celebrity, social media, and what it means to be successful in the modern world.
Despite her questionable life choices, Margo is a character readers will want to root for, and the love story at the heart of the novel, between Margo and one of her OnlyFans friends, seems incredibly compelling in the internet age.
It would be unfair to spoil the book’s final two sentences, and I would curse any reader who jumps at them now, but Thorpe strikes a poetic and profound note in the way he ends this remarkable story.
