Keep up with LAist.<\/p>\n
If you’re enjoying this article, you’ll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less. <\/p>\n
Now that Fall is around the corner, we can look back and crown the winners of summer 2025. The toy of the summer was arguably the Labubu. The movie? Maybe K-Pop Demon Hunters. How about a book? One strong contender was Rufi Thorpe\u2019s Margo\u2019s Got Money Troubles, a book about a 19-year-old single mom who lives in the north Orange County city of Fullerton and turns to OnlyFans to make ends meet. The book was bought by Apple TV+ and the series \u2014 starring Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, Nick Offerman, and Michelle Pfeiffer \u2014 is set to air next year.<\/p>\n
LAist\u2019s Antonia Cereijido sat down with the author to talk about motherhood, sex work, and bringing Fullerton to the mainstream.<\/p>\n
Author Rufi Thorpe dishes on \u2018Margo\u2019s Got Money Troubles\u2019<\/p>\n
Can a good mother be a sex worker?<\/p>\n
Margo\u2019s Got Money Troubles follows a freshman who drops out of college after an affair with her English professor leads to an unexpected pregnancy. To make money, she turns to OnlyFans, a content subscription site used popularly for porn.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just had this idea of taking the two ways that society is messed up about women \u2014 like \u200athis Madonna\/whore complex thing,\u201d Thorpe explains. \u201cAnd what if I made a character who was both an excellent mother, morally good, and also an extremely good sex worker?\u201d<\/p>\n
Entering the world of OnlyFans<\/p>\n
Thorpe didn\u2019t know how to explore the questions she was asking about motherhood and sex work through a novel until the pandemic broke out and she saw an explosion of popularity of OnlyFans.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was like, if I ever was gonna do it, OnlyFans would be the way,\u201d Thorpe said. \u201cI realized that OnlyFans was getting so much less cultural stigma and pushback than other forms of sex work, I think, in part because it was all digital. I mean, for our generation, everyone’s taken nudes for a partner.\u201d<\/p>\n
OnlyFans saw a 75 percent spike in new users and creator registrations in the spring of 2020. \u200aThorpe realized that a paradigm shift was happening in the world of sex work \u2014 the online platform was making it more accessible for creators \u2014 and she wanted to explore what that could mean for a young mom trying to empower herself and make money.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt like OnlyFans was a really positive development in the sense that you’re putting the means of production in the hands of the artists,\u201d Thorpe said. \u201cWhich is not to say that some girls aren\u2019t being taken advantage of or forced to make content with shady managers \u2014 all that still exists \u2014 but in general, you have the power to decide exactly what you do, how you’re gonna present yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Research process<\/p>\n
Thorpe found researching the world of OnlyFans to be more complicated.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first I was like, \u2018Oh, I’ll just DM them on Instagram.\u2019 Guess how many people are trying to DM them on Instagram? They’re not reading their DMs.\u201d<\/p>\n
She ended up making an OnlyFans account to write to creators she thought were small enough that they were probably still reading their mail. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I would send a $50 tip and I would say, \u2018I’m a novelist. I’m writing this book. I really care about getting this right and I can’t get it right without doing the research. Will you please help me?\u2019 It was a lot easier to get people to talk about technical details, like how the back end of the system worked or what most men use as their user profile names. It was a lot harder to get people to talk about even emotional questions that I considered pretty open-ended. [OF sex workers] just were very clear that that was their personal life and their personal life was not for sale. You have to have extraordinary boundaries to do sex work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Setting the book in Fullerton<\/p>\n
While the book takes place in the online world of OnlyFans, it\u2019s set in the real world northern Orange County suburbs of Fullerton.<\/p>\n
\u200a\u201dIt’s a very cute city, just so many dentists and tax preparation offices \u2026 just so many,\u201d Thorpe said.<\/p>\n
Thorpe said she grew up going to her mother\u2019s friend\u2019s home in Fullerton and always found the city to be endearing, so she chose it as a backdrop as an \u201cauthorly gift\u201d to her main character Margo, who goes through so many challenges over the course of the novel.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was gonna be terrifying and hard,” Thorpe said. “[Margo] wasn’t gonna know if she was gonna get through it, but she was gonna do it in Fullerton, dammit!\u201d<\/p>\n
Watch the full interview below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Keep up with LAist. If you’re enjoying this article, you’ll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[11787,412,146,85,46,11786,11788],"class_list":{"0":"post-10911","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-appletv","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-margos-got-money-troubles","14":"tag-summer-reading"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}