(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Before her life gets massively and royally upended, Margo Millet’s life is not an easy one.
Caught between a narcissistic mother who does love daughter but only on very conditional grounds and an absent ex-pro wrestler father who is loving but only in her life when he can slip away from his married life, Margo has always had to look after herself more than someone her age should.
She know what it is to struggle but even she is broadsided when an ill-considered affair with her slimy, sleazy college professor Mark – to be fair he charms his way under her fearsome defences, a story of power imbalance that leaves no one looking good by the end but especially tars the man who gets the whole sorry state of affairs going – leaves her pregnant and with no real support from the person who got her in that state.
He is very keen not to have anything to do with their baby – he’s a serial adulterer, using his position as a community college professor to take regularly advantage of his students – and it soon becomes clear to Margo in the early pages of Margo’s Got Monet Troubles that she is on absolutely and without a doubt on her own.
Her mother who, after a lifetime of doing it tough finally her hands on a good Christian man named Kenny for whom she’s determined to be super-pious, refuses to help Margo, with help arriving in the form of her housemate Suzie and her recovering addict father who become the village she needs.
That was one of the things Mark had told her, that as far as neuroscience was concerned, free will couldn’t be real. That our brains only invented explanations, justifications for what our body was already getting ready to do. That consciousness was a fabulous illusion. We were inferring our own state of mind the same way we inferred the minds of others: thinking someone is mad when they frown, sad when they cry. We feel the physiological sensation of anger and we think, I’m mad because Tony stole my banana! But we’re just making stuff up, fairy tales to explain the deep dark woods of being alive.
Wonderful though it is to have this community coalesce around her and her son Bodhi whom she keeps mainly she believes that’s what a good person would do, and Margo really wants to be a good person, there’s still the very real issue of how she is going to keep head above water financially.
Having to leave college and with her waitressing job not really a viable option, and not for the reasons you might think, Margo decides to start an OnlyFans account, part of a world of which she has no knowledge and no experience.
But she realises as she flounders in her initial sort-of successful attempts to attract an audience without revealing too much of herself, OnlyFans rests, like any other form of entertainment, on storytelling and that is something her dad Jinx knows all about her after a career in pro-wrestling that saw him not only competing but also coaching others when his back injuries may it too hard to do the wresting itself.
Suzie too, devoted to LARP-ing aka Live Action Role Playing, knows a thing or two about inhabiting a persona and bringing it to life, and so together this most unusual team sets about reinventing OnlyFans for their own purposes.
It doesn’t make them an overnight success, and it causes Margo all kinds of existential stress and ethical wrangling but it’s either this or going under, and in love as she is with her newborn son, she’s not about to let that happen.
At its heart, Margo’s Got Monet Troubles is all about fighting against the world and living life on your terms when it seems everyone (well, almost everyone) and everything is against you.
It’s about staring back at a host of unpalatable choices and demanding that instead of being made to pick from a raft of terrible ideas and dubious options, that you start crafting authentically honest ones of your own.
What begins as an act of desperation soon becomes something quite empowering and unexpectedly creatively fulfilling as Margo comes into her own and discovers that her OnlyFans account, which exposes creative depths she didn’t know she had, could lead to some quite wondrous things indeed.
Like maybe love with a quite wonderful human being.
Not the sort of outcome anyone would expect from OnlyFans which, let’s face it, it pitched to a certain gender-specific demographic who are most definitely not on the hunt for love, true love, but it appears Margo may have struck gold and not just of the financial kind.
But like many things in the beautifully told and emotionally rich storytelling of Margo’s Got Monet Troubles the road to any sort of happy endings, and no, that’s not what Margo delivers to her clients (except indirectly) is not an easy one and Margo will have to deal with all kinds of legal, moral and societal issues before any sort of empowered future is fully and completely hers.
And it was true the idea of this, of being a little woman in their phone, grossed her out. It wasn’t that she was willing to defend OnlyFans as some morally unimpeachable activity. But she was tired of pretending all the Kennys of the world were right. She wasn’t rotten! She wasn’t trash–no human being was trash. Jesus said that. Jesus, who consorted with lepers and prostitutes.
In fact, there’s more than a few moments when you wonder if Margo is going to make it at all.
She’s dealing with employers without heart, a mother who would sooner toss her under a bus than wreck her dubiously valuable marriage, an adulterous ex who can’t seem to make up his mind about what he wants and a world that seems to be dedicated to making sure every bold move Margo makes leads precisely nowhere.
It’s a LOT, and you wonder more than once if it’s all going to prove too much for the book’s naive (at first) but immensely capable, emotionally brave and super savvy protagonist, but as Margo’s Got Monet Troubles progresses with a multiplicity of twists and turns, it soon becomes clear that Margo is a woman who is not going to go under if there’s any way at all she can do it with her respect for herself and others and adherence to a strong moral core intact.
Full of charm and heart alongside some confrontingly dark humanity, Margo’s Got Monet Troubles is a love letter to the power and grit of writing your own story, no matter what the world made want to do to you and say about you, and of standing firm even when events seem to threaten to overwhelm you.
Life isn’t easy, and it’s certainly not easy for Margo, but throughout Margo’s Got Monet Troubles you come to appreciate that no matter the difficulties, there’s a lot of good to be had too, and maybe, just maybe, the good will be enough to counteract the bad and craft a future on terms that are Margo’s and Margo’s alone.