Margo's Got Money Troubles
As the child of a former Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.
Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with childcare. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?
Rufi Thorpe’s work has always held up an unflinching mirror to reality. With Margo's Got Money Troubles, Thorpe combines warm humor with raw emotion that feels like a scream in the face of our chronically online late stage capitalist society. It’s a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off.
In conversation with Christi Clancy.
Rufi Thorpe
Rufi Thorpe is the author of The Knockout Queen, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award; Dear Fang, with Love; and The Girls from Corona del Mar, which was long-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. A native of California, she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.
Christina Clancy
Christina Clancy is the author of The Second Home, Shoulder Season, and The Snowbirds (winter, 2025), St. Martin's Press. The Second Home was selected by independent booksellers as an Indie Next and Indie's Introduce pick, and has been optioned by Sony TriStar for a limited series starring Nicolaj Coster-Waldau from Game of Thrones. Her novels have been featured on Good Morning America, Buzzfeed, CNN, the New York Post, and elsewhere. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Sun Magazine, The Washington Post, Hobart, Glimmer Train Stories and the Minnesota Review. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.