Topline:
LAist’s Antonia Cereijido talked with the author of "Margo’s Got Money Troubles" Rufi Thorpe about how the novel challenges ideas about motherhood, sex work and empowerment — and why she decided to set the book in Fullerton.
Why now? Margo’s Got Money Troubles came out in 2024 but the popularity of the novel surged through the summer of 2025, after it was announced that Apple TV+ would be adapting the book into a series starring Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, Nick Offerman, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
The context: Rufi Thorpe is the author of four novels including Margo’s Got Money Troubles and The Knockout Queen, which was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction. She grew up in Southern California and many of her books take place in the area.
Read on … for excerpts and video from the interview.
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’s Margo’s 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 — starring Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, Nick Offerman, and Michelle Pfeiffer — is set to air next year.
LAist’s Antonia Cereijido sat down with the author to talk about motherhood, sex work, and bringing Fullerton to the mainstream.
Author Rufi Thorpe dishes on ‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles’
Can a good mother be a sex worker?
Margo’s 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.
“I just had this idea of taking the two ways that society is messed up about women — like this Madonna/whore complex thing,” Thorpe explains. “And what if I made a character who was both an excellent mother, morally good, and also an extremely good sex worker?”
Entering the world of OnlyFans
Thorpe didn’t 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.
“I was like, if I ever was gonna do it, OnlyFans would be the way,” Thorpe said. “I 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.”
OnlyFans saw a 75 percent spike in new users and creator registrations in the spring of 2020. Thorpe realized that a paradigm shift was happening in the world of sex work — the online platform was making it more accessible for creators — and she wanted to explore what that could mean for a young mom trying to empower herself and make money.
“I 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,” Thorpe said. “Which is not to say that some girls aren’t being taken advantage of or forced to make content with shady managers — all that still exists — but in general, you have the power to decide exactly what you do, how you're gonna present yourself.”
Research process
Thorpe found researching the world of OnlyFans to be more complicated.
“At first I was like, ‘Oh, I'll just DM them on Instagram.’ Guess how many people are trying to DM them on Instagram? They're not reading their DMs.”
She ended up making an OnlyFans account to write to creators she thought were small enough that they were probably still reading their mail.
“And I would send a $50 tip and I would say, ‘I'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?’ 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.”
Setting the book in Fullerton
While the book takes place in the online world of OnlyFans, it’s set in the real world northern Orange County suburbs of Fullerton.
”It's a very cute city, just so many dentists and tax preparation offices … just so many,” Thorpe said.
Thorpe said she grew up going to her mother’s friend’s home in Fullerton and always found the city to be endearing, so she chose it as a backdrop as an “authorly gift” to her main character Margo, who goes through so many challenges over the course of the novel.
“It 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!”
