Margo's Got Money Troubles
Margo's Got Money Troubles
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Rufi Thorpe on Margo's Got Money Troubles
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A question born in a movie theaterThe character of Margo began not with a plot idea but with an irritation. Thorpe left a 2017 screening of Wonder Woman frustrated by how even the most powerful female characters in mainstream culture had to earn their heroism by being cold, sexless, or punished for desire. The question she walked out with set the whole novel in motion.
Why can’t there ever be a female superhero who fucks? And who’s comfortable with sex. Even Black Widow, she’s sexual, but she’s so tortured by it. Why can’t there be a female superhero who is comfortable with her sexuality? And then I got this weird idea of taking the two ways that our culture’s messed up about women, the Madonna-whore complex, and what if I made a character who was both a Madonna and a whore?
The question from that screening had already been circling for years before the book existed. The problem was structural: the cultural forces she wanted to fuse, saintly motherhood on one side and the stigma around sex work on the other, seemed designed to make that fusion impossible to write.
For years, I dreamed of writing a sex-worker mother character, taking the Madonna/Whore complex and attempting to fuse them into one figure. But it seemed impossible for so long because the cultural stigma against sex work is so strong, and the pedestal we put mothers on is so vertiginously high.
OnlyFans, which exploded during the first year of the pandemic as comedians and performers lost their incomes overnight, gave her the opening. The public conversation around it was noticeably less moralized than talk about other forms of sex work, and she recognized the moment.
Thorpe grew up the only child of a single mother and later became one herself at 26, genuinely shocked by how little the American system accommodated new parents. She gave Margo that same shock at the novel’s start, but the emotional engine ran deeper than plot setup. Having her own children had rewritten her understanding of her own past.
I think that I didn’t understand how much my own mother loved me until I had children. I don’t think you can really conceive of how encompassing a mother’s love is until you have your own babies and then you’re like, oh, she would have died for me. Like, it wasn’t just that she made me sandwiches. She would have beaten a dog to death with a shovel to save me.
How she wrote it
A wrestler who wasn’t supposed to be thereJinx, Margo’s ex-professional-wrestler father, was not in the original plan for the novel. Thorpe fell into professional wrestling during the pandemic because her husband and sons were watching WWE constantly. She read wrestler memoirs back to back and started recounting the stories on daily dog walks with her mother, until her mother pointed out it was a shame the material had nowhere to go. Thorpe resisted, then wrote one scene with a character who was Margo’s father. The match between pro wrestling and OnlyFans, two worlds that both require a constructed persona and the body as spectacle, snapped into place.
The moment that first scene that I wrote with him — I was like, oh, here’s the book, the book is going to be about this relationship. [paraphrased from audio]
Researching how Margo’s OnlyFans operation would actually work required getting past a professional wall. Sex workers maintain careful privacy practices: no public contact emails, personas that are not designed to be penetrated by journalists or novelists. Thorpe eventually opened her own account, identified creators whose subscriber counts were small enough that they might read a message personally, and sent a $50 tip with a careful explanation of her project and her intentions.
In a weird way, their reticence was an education in itself.
The questions that did get answered were the operational ones: marketing, back-end logistics, how an account grows. The personal and emotional questions were met with silence, which told her something specific about the professional boundary Margo would maintain with her subscribers.
Those conversations also changed a plot point Thorpe had considered settled. In an earlier draft, when Margo develops real feelings for a subscriber called JB, she returns his money as a romantic gesture. The sex workers she consulted rejected the logic immediately and unanimously.
Pretty universally, sex workers were like, no. That’s implying it was wrong to take the money. She earned that money. She did a good job, she created the fantasy. That is an admission of fault that is not right. And I was like okay, you are correct, and I hadn’t thought about it.
Thorpe had also heard the craft-workshop belief that money is too external a force to drive a character’s choices, that internal psychology should do that work. She wrote directly against it, and her disagreement came from lived observation rather than theory.
I feel like it’s written by somebody that’s never struggled with money, because if you’re going to write it about how people actually live their lives, then money is a really important part of it. I mean, how many people do I know that have wound up not getting divorced because they cannot afford to live apart from each other? Every decision that everybody makes is actually about money, in my experience!
The manuscript at one stage ran close to 160,000 words, nearly double the published length. Much of what came out was wrestling minutiae and TikTok content: Thorpe had written out Margo’s viral campaign week by week, script by script, to understand how it would unfold, but readers told her they did not need to read descriptions of TikToks. She agreed and cut them. What she kept, when it came to morally complicated material, followed a consistent aesthetic principle she’d articulated about earlier work.
It’s in the gray areas where I can be the most intellectually honest without being didactic or propagandizing the story. I can simply show what I see.
The personal thread
What becoming a mother made visibleWhen the book was still in early development, Thorpe was contending with the gap between how American culture talks about children and how it actually treats the people who raise them. She had been two days out of major abdominal surgery and expected to drive herself to a postpartum checkup, and that practical impossibility lodged in her. She gave Margo a version of that bewilderment in the novel’s opening chapters.
I was just shocked by how impossible it was to have a baby. Like, how is anyone else doing this? [paraphrased from audio]
That personal shock later found its political frame. The book’s account of Margo navigating new motherhood without money, infrastructure, or a reliable partner is not incidental to its argument. Thorpe is specific about what the gap between rhetoric and policy actually reveals.
We obsessively venerate family in this country and the idea of the nuclear family and children... and yet we’re not really even interested in giving women maternity leave or safe and affordable childcare... it just becomes more and more clear that it’s not actually about prioritizing those children or holding them sacred. It’s just actually about controlling women. [paraphrased from audio]
On what the book is wrestling with
Stigmas the author didn’t know she hadBefore she started writing, Thorpe assumed she came to the material without prejudice. The process of actually building Margo’s OnlyFans practice scene by scene, and deciding what Margo should feel about it, forced a different reckoning.
I thought that I was a very liberal person who had no stigmas against sex work, but in the writing of it, I had to really take apart every single stigma that I did have and all the things that I hadn’t thought about yet, and I just hadn’t examined. [paraphrased from audio]
Part of what Thorpe was working against was a well-worn narrative template. Sex work appears frequently in literary fiction, but almost always as a mechanism for punishment, a way to show a woman’s degradation or downfall. She wanted readers to know from the start that the book had a different design.
A lot of times sex work is used as a flagellating-women plot: you’re there to watch a woman get punished, and then you get whatever pleasure you get out of that, I guess. I wanted it to be clear that it wasn’t going to be that kind of book.
What she wants us to sit with
The mechanics of wanting something and taking itThorpe is wary of novels that deliver a message, and she has said so plainly in several interviews. The effect she was after was not a lesson but a feeling, something the reader would carry in the body rather than note in the margin.
I hope readers will feel radically empowered by Margo. I hope they feel like their life is theirs and theirs alone, and that every single second of it is a wild gift that no one can take from them.
That empowerment, in Thorpe’s telling, is less about inspiration than about sequence: the specific steps a person takes to move from not-knowing to knowing, from passive to active. The novel traces those steps through Margo’s particular circumstances, and Thorpe wanted the sequence itself to be legible.
I wanted to write about the mechanics of female empowerment, and how you become confident enough to know what you want, explain it to people, ask for what you want, ignore people who are telling you you’re not allowed to have what you want, fight for what you want. [paraphrased from audio]