“There is a desperation to a novel that is unsettling. The world so painstakingly re-created in miniature; this tiny diorama made of words. Why go to all this trouble, to create me, to seduce you, to enumerate so many different breakfast cereals? To make the cunning tiny apartment, the itsy-bitsy Jinx? It’s like going to meet your new boyfriend’s family for the first time and discovering they are all paid actors. It’s almost easier to believe I’m real than to understand what’s actually going on. The desperation that could have caused anyone to invent me in the first place. The urgency and need that would require creating an imaginary space of this size and level of detail.
And it really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?”
One of my favorite books of the year. I don’t know how I’m going to write a review of it. (As I sit here trying to write a review because I stupidly picked this for CBR BINGO.)
All right it’s been several hours, so we’re gonna do what I always do when I can’t make feelings into thoughts into words into sentences. BULLET POINTS!
- Margo has no money, a baby, and is twenty years old. The baby has ruined her life. She has negative money, can’t emphasize enough.
- The baby’s dad was Margo’s English professor.
- Margo’s mother is a former-Hooter’s waitress and her father is an ex-professional wrestler.
- Margo has decided to do OnlyFans because the way some of the women she has found in her research cna be creative and express themselves while making a lot of money.
- Margo’s dad moves in with her and their relationship is MY FAVORITE. It’s so heartwarming, because he’s the only family she has that has helped her and taken an interest in Bodhi (her baby) and because she was the result of an affair herself, she never got to know him before this, so watching them learn to love each other up close is so great.
- Jinx (her dad) helps her with her OnlyFans by using the terms and ideas behind professional wrestling to help make her a success.
- This is in a lot of ways a coming of age story, but it’s one steeped in the current day, with concerns about social media, sex work (neither of which mean the same things to the same generations), drug use, and how hard it is to succeed let alone stay afloat if you aren’t born into a family that has money.
- It’s fucking funny.
- The arc of the book is watching Margo come into her own, learn who she is as an adult, and overcome the objections of people who think her unfit to parent her own child.
- I love all the characters 😭😭😭 even Mark the shitbag baby daddy, who it turns out is a really good father
- Except lies I really hate Shyanne (Margo’s mother) and her new husband.
- Seriously I really fucking loved this book everyone should read it.
CBR BINGO 2024: Smash (I have chosen “Disasterpiece” as my portmanteau. It is a combo of disaster and masterpiece, because Margo embodies both concepts, but also because this book is a masterpiece about a disaster of a human being.)
