LIVE! #71
29 June 2025
Agenda
- Why We're Here
- Literary Forensics
- - What do I bring?
- - What do I feel?
- - What do I notice?
- - What do I study?
- Next Month's Reading & Study
Why We're Here
We Writers want to improve our craft
by Reading like a Writer
through Literary Forensics
we learn from each other
Roundtable Rules
Always refer back to the book
We practice active listening & serendipity
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but not every conclusion
Always refer back to the book
Meet today's author: Rufi Thorpe
- Born in Dallas, Texas, Thorpe moved to California at the age of six with her single mother in 1991. She spent her formative years in the beachside community of Corona del Mar, and described herself as a "very lonely, chubby child who fell in love with books."
- Her mother was an actress with a master’s degree in theatre, so Thorpe says it's easy for her to think in the first person when she writes. She needs to get into character.
- Following high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, she studied philosophy and literature at Eugene Lang College in New York, and in 2009 she received her MFA at the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. During this time, she wrote two novels that she later deemed unsatisfactory.
- She is the author of five published novels, The Girls from Corona Del Mar, Dear Fang, With Love, The Knockout Queen, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, and Margo.
- Thorpe lives in California with her husband and two sons.
"Talent is not real. I was never the most talented of any cohort that I was in, and I feel like that really helped me succeed because when I faced adversity, I was never surprised or put off. You know, I didn’t sign up to be a novelist hoping I would be some literary luminary, I just loved books so much I was willing to be the worst one. Just do the work and be unafraid. The page is the only part of it that’s real and anyone is allowed to go there. That is literature’s great virtue. You don’t have to audition, you don’t have to get hired, you don’t need thirty other people, you don’t need special expensive equipment, it’s just you and the page, and you show up and try.”
—Rufi Thorpe
What do I feel?
What in the book elicited that feeling?
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but every conclusion should be questioned
We practice serendipity
- nothing is too crazy
Always refer back to the book
What do I notice?
- • Language and Grammar
- • Context
- • Point of view
- • Voice
- • Character development
- • Horizontal structure
- • Pacing
- • Layering of themes
- • Overall effect
Writing Margo
- Watching the movie Wonder Woman with her mother, and finding that they were both more interested in the island of the Amazons than we were in Wonder Woman herself, Thorpe created a thought experiment:
- Instead of Wonder Woman, who they found cold and virginal, why can’t there be a female superhero who is comfortable with her sexuality?
- Wanting to write about the two ways that our culture’s messed up about women: the Madonna-whore complex, Thorpe decided to make a character who was both Madonna and whore; good at both without conflict.
- Also, during COVID lockdown, Thorpe got into watching professional wrestling, and saw that standup comedians she followed were starting OnlyFans accounts.
- Her initial idea was to present Margo in full flower, but during her first act writing-researching phase she wrote more and more backstory, all the way back to her getting pregnant.
- Research included reading wrestling memoirs (her family now dresses up as wrestlers for Halloween) and creating an OnlyFans account and paying content creators for their time to discuss process.
- She wanted readers to like feel like Margo kicked ass at the end. She wanted readers to feel like their life was their own and they got to do with it what they wanted. And that they could be like Margo and build any kind of life that they wanted according to their rules. And they don’t have to please anybody. She wanted it to have that feeling of violent hopefulness.
Stats & Background
- Marketing: Coming of Age Fiction, Family Life Fiction, Literary Fiction, Dark Humor, Romance Literary Fiction, Humorous Fiction & Satire, Humorous Fiction
- Genre: Present-Day Realistic Long-Form Archplot
- Print Pages: 304; Word count: 106,204
Reading Grade: 7th; Avg. wds/sent.: 11.85
Lexical Density: 46.70; Flesch Reading Ease: 78.46 - POV: Margo; Person: 1st, 2nd, 3rd; Tense: Past
- Publish date: June 11, 2024
- Publisher: William Morrow, HarperCollins
- Audio book length: (10 hours, 21 mins)
- Narrator: Elle Fanning
- Miniseries: A24 production, David E. Kelley adaptation airing in 2026 on AppleTV+, starring Elle Fanning, Nick Offerman, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Greg Kinnear, Marcia Gay Harden
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- Margo (Elle Fanning)
January 2026
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