On embracing enthusiasm and taking big risks

With the release of your latest book, MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES, your work went from being a more literary-upmarket style of fiction to more upmarket-commercial fiction. Was that an intentional shift you made as you were writing MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES, or did your publisher make those calls?

I certainly was not trying to write a more commercial book. The part of me that gets the ideas for books is unfortunately unable to learn worldly wisdom like that. I was kind of aware that it was a better log line than my other books. It’s kind of hard to describe what the other books are. It’s just like they don’t have a strong pitch, and I was aware that OnlyFans was timely or culturally relevant in some way, but I think that it really was kind of a surprise, honestly, to both me and to my publisher, that MARGO did so well. And I think that it was in part just because of the TV show and all of that happening, I think that Hollywood immediately was like, “OnlyFans? This is culturally relevant!” And I think we thought that the book was going to be too weird or too left of center to have a broad appeal. I was more involved in how this one was going to be marketed and I wasn’t really thinking about upmarket or low market.

All I was thinking about was trying to communicate. I wanted to communicate two things with the cover. I wanted it to be clear that some dark stuff was going to happen, but that overall, the book was going to be really fun.

A lot of times sex work is used as a flagellating-women plot: you’re there to watch a woman get punished, and then you get whatever pleasure you get out of that, I guess. I wanted it to be clear that it wasn’t going to be that kind of book. I wanted it to be clear that it was going to be weird, and I had long thought about MARGO as kind of a superhero, so I was the one pushing for an illustrated, comic-booky style because I felt like that would get across that it’s going to be fun and that she’s going to be kind of a superhero character who goes on these adventures.

You mentioned that you felt like MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES had a stronger log line than your previous books. Has that influenced your writing today? Do you want to have that piece kind of secured when you’re working on a project?

Well, unfortunately, like I said, it’s more that I will work harder trying to figure out what the log line could possibly be. But the project is kind of the project. You just don’t have that much choice over what you get obsessed with. Then it’s more like, how could I make somebody else understand what I’m talking about fastest?

I think I am much more patient at this point in my career with just understanding that nobody is going to understand how to position a book better than me, and also nobody is going to care as much. And so it behooves me to spend some time thinking about how to communicate about what kind of book this is and who it would appeal to.

I was very keenly aware of this after THE GIRLS FROM CORONA DEL MAR: the hardcover design had this beautiful black-and-white photograph. And I loved the photograph, and I loved the cover, but also I kind of knew that I wouldn’t necessarily go pick that book up in a bookshop because I’m usually looking for things that are a little bit more offbeat or weird looking than that. And then I saw in a bunch of the reviews for that book, which were from a lot of women being really upset that there’s a lot of the F word in it. I was like, “Oh, it’s like we tricked them into thinking this is going to be some sort of nice seaside girlhood memoir.” Since then, I think that I have gotten more confident in my own judgments in terms of how you communicate to a reader what this book is going to be.

It seems like your audience has grown a lot since MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES came out last year. Do you have any advice for writers about how to handle audience growth?

Oh, I don’t know. I mean, RuPaul said a beautiful thing, which is that all novels are beacons. And I think that it is counterintuitive at first that you find your widest audiences by being most idiosyncratically, passionately yourself. But I think that that’s true. I think that that’s the magic of it: it’s like when you figure out, “Oh, what I can contribute is my own warty, imperfect experience of reality. This little shit hill that is myself is what I’ve got, so I’m just going to work it.” And then you find out that the more you relax into being yourself instead of being who you think people want you to be, that’s when you start to appeal to more people, because you’re being authentic finally, and you’re not just peddling some heavily edited version of yourself.

It is scary to be perceived by a lot of people. It’s scary. I hated the emphasis on social media in the 2010s. It was very much seen as, like, “You’ve got to be on Twitter,” and I was so bad at all of it. I just am a fiercely private little weirdo. I’m not good at taking my personality and making it a product, and I just found it so nerve wracking to try and have these glib little conversations in this public way. And now I just try to not think about it at all. If I’m going to post something, I try and pretend that I’m only posting it for my friends.

If people don’t like me, I feel like that’s maybe a sacred right. I feel like I personally reserve the right to hate books that are even very good books. And honestly, a book that’s capable of pissing me off has really already achieved something magnificent. It’s better than being a book that you can’t remember what it was about a year later. I’ve just tried to let go of trying to control or cultivate how people think about me. And it turns out that it is safe. It’s okay for some people to not like you. You can’t write a book that’s going to please everybody. It’s okay to get some bad reviews. It’s okay. It’s even okay to write a book that’s not very good. You’ve got to try anyway.

It’s interesting hearing what you were just saying about not being a fan of sharing your life online, because I think you have one of the most creative marketing practices I’ve ever seen.

Really?

I mean, you have the most fun author website ever: I watched an interview you did with Emma Straub, and she said the exact same thing, and I was like, “thank God other people are noticing Rufi’s website.” And you made this hilarious video during the pandemic where you put on a wig and interviewed yourself about your novel THE KNOCKOUT QUEEN. I think a lot of writers get really intimidated by the idea of marketing their books, but you seem to lean into it in a way that’s, as you’re describing, extremely authentic.

I kind of came from this position of always feeling like an underdog. In grad school, a professor I idolized and worshiped took me aside and was like, “You’re never going to be a writer. You don’t have what it takes. Let’s brainstorm some other careers for you. You’re just not talented enough.” And I cried. I went home and cried, and then I was like, well, am I going to really literally give up my life’s dream because this lady told me? I thought: if God came down and God said, “Okay, you get to be a novelist, but you’re going to be the very worst one that’s ever lived in the history of literature, would you still want to do it?” I was like, yes. I still want to. More than anything, I want that.

I’m so moved by that. Wow.

I always was just like, “I’m just scrappily fighting to get to be the worst novelist ever.”

But I do think that the way that I took the tasks that felt the most alien and commercial, like social media, the way that I could figure out how to do it was to make it something I was interested in doing. To make a funny little video or, oh, I have to make an author website? How do I make it something that I like and think is fun? That’s been my approach for a decade. It didn’t seem like it was working at all, so I’m glad if now it appears to be paying dividends.

Across your fiction, I find that you place such an emphasis on setting really high stakes for your characters. Where does the writing process seem to get the most involved for you? Is it plot or character or something else?

I think that plot is the thing that I am weakest at and therefore have spent the most time trying to figure out. It was the first thing I found most baffling about fiction.

So I entirely became a fiction writer to impress a girl. I was kind of in love with my best friend, and she was dating a guy who was a fiction writer. And at that time, we were both poets, but so to not compete with her but then compete instead for her attentions with him, I switched to fiction writing, and I found it really baffling how you had to make things up. I kept trying to get people to describe to me how you do it. I was like, “So then you what? You close your eyes?” It was trying to describe to someone how to fall asleep or something.

And then similarly, I found all instructions relating to story to be absolutely unfollowable. I was like, “Beginning, middle, end: who can tell which one is which thing?” And Aristotle doesn’t help. Every single definition he offers is a tautology.

I literally read a bunch of books on screenwriting before I wrote THE KNOCKOUT QUEEN and kind of figured out how to make things like a crisis or a midpoint happen. And then I think I took a lot of that and started to feel like I had a little bit more control with MARGO so that I was able to figure out where the story started and started there.

You have four novels out. From a craft perspective, what do you think clicked for you between your first two books and your more recent two?

My second novel had sold, like, five copies. I was very aware that my editor really loved me and believed in me and would probably buy another book, but that if that book also did poorly, then I might not get to go on publishing. I was aware of wanting to swing for the fences: if this is the last thing that I get to say with the big world microphone, I’m like, give it to me. I’m going to say something good.

I’ve always kind of believed that there’s really no reason why we can’t use the toolkits from both high literature and from what we consider commercial fiction. I don’t know why you can’t have a plot and have compelling deep themes and philosophical questions. I really wanted THE KNOCKOUT QUEEN to have both of those layers and for it to be really propulsive. It also takes an incredible amount of processor speed simply to render people talking, let alone control what they’re talking about and write it in a pretty way with nice sentences. Your own awareness gets so stretched thin. It’s almost like you’re pulling something up out of a dark place, and you don’t even know what it is yet, and you’re just trying not to break it on its way out of you.

I got better at multitasking with each book that went along, where I was able to be in control of more of the process, able to be conscious of more of the process. Whereas I think in the beginning, you’re like, “I don’t know how I did it, but I did it. I got it out, but it’s this weird shape, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

I’m sure everyone’s been asking you about your interest in wrestling since MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES came out. The protagonist’s father is a professional wrestler. Can you share some wisdom about weaving an obsession into your work, particularly a pop culture obsession, without letting the minutiae completely take over and bog the story down?

You have to show people how high the ceiling is. I think you have to let yourself write it with all your enthusiasm, as though you’re writing to your friend who totally gets you and understands every weird joke, because you’re not going to be able to take the risks if you’re in a kind of defensive crouch. You’re not going to be able to really share the joy.

With MARGO specifically, the book was too long. It was almost 160,000 words at one point, and it published at 93,000 words, so fully 65,000 words were cut out of that book, and some of it was wrestling details. There were just maybe too many anecdotes. I think I just fell in love with those characters and I was willing to watch them go grocery shopping.

I want to ask you about a recurring theme I’m noticing across your books. You write about heroin addiction in quite a few of your novels, including MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES. That book taught me a lot about methadone and the stigmas and misunderstanding that surround it as a treatment. What keeps you returning to this specific addiction in your work?

It’s complicated. Obviously I have a personal relationship to addiction, specifically to opiate addiction. For me personally, I learned a lot of lessons about moral culpability, and a lot of the toolkit that I was given by a generalized worldview in the nineties, or whatever, was just not very useful for trying to actually dig yourself out of those particular holes or understand other people.

In my family, there was a lot of alcohol addiction. I had a lot of friends struggle with drug addiction. I struggled with drug addiction, and a lot of my work is centered around these questions of, what do you do when someone you love does something bad? What do you do with the part of yourself that did something bad? How do we metabolize harm and evil? Is there such a thing as evil? Are bad people bad? Are some bad people good? Is there such a thing as people who are all good, or does every good person just a bad person who’s trying really hard? I think it’s one of my central preoccupations for a number of reasons. I also just think it’s partially the opiate epidemic and the way that Oxycontin played out. I got to watch that unfurl throughout my twenties, and so it just feels very close at hand.

I got the most beautiful letter from the director of a methadone clinic, who was like, “I cried when I read MARGO because I never see methadone portrayed positively ever. I believe in what I do. I know I’m saving people’s lives, but most people look down on what I do and don’t think it’s really helping people.” It never occurred to me in a million years that someone working at a methadone clinic or directing a methadone clinic would read that book and feel moved by it. That’s sort of going back to the idea of a novel is a beacon: if you write about things as you see them, it’s going to resonate with other people who are also seeing the same little pieces of the puzzle that you’re seeing.