The Apple TV+ adaptation lands April 15th. You have time. Read it first.
Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles is one of those books that sounds like it should be stressful and ends up being a genuine pleasure. Margo is nineteen, newly a mother, broke, and on the verge of eviction. Her professor, the father of her baby, has paid her off and disappeared. Her mother, the person she would have counted on, refuses to help. She is completely on her own, and somehow Thorpe makes all of it funny. Not funny in a way that softens the reality, but funny in the way that real people are funny when they’re white-knuckling their way through a crisis. The humour earns your trust, and then the book does something harder with it.
What Margo lands on, out of desperation and curiosity more than anything else, is OnlyFans. Her estranged father Jinx, a former pro wrestler who turns up on her doorstep around the same time her problems compound, mentions offhand that a wrestler he knows earns serious money from it. Margo takes note. What follows is one of the more honest portrayals of sex work in recent fiction. Thorpe doesn’t moralize. She doesn’t use the platform as a cautionary tale or a punchline. She shows Margo approaching it with the same practicality she applies to everything else: figuring out the mechanics, building a persona, treating it like the work that it is. The stigma is there. People are supportive and people are judgemental, often the ones you’d least expect on either side. The book holds all of that without collapsing into a tidy lesson about it.
The more surprising thread, and the one that stayed with me, is about family. Margo’s mother withdraws when Margo’s choices don’t align with what she can accept. And in that absence, something else forms. Her roommate Suzie holds steady. Jinx, who Margo barely knew before this, moves in and turns out to be one of the warmest and most unexpectedly wonderful characters I’ve read in a while. The family Margo ends up with is not the one she was born into or the one she would have predicted. It’s the one that showed up. There’s something deeply true in how Thorpe renders that, and it’s handled without sentimentality. You feel it precisely because she doesn’t push it.
If you liked:
- Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
- The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett
- Fleabag (the series)