A Conversation with Nicole Flattery
“I’m for every single artist getting to call their work their own.”
- Nicole Flattery
The Irish writer’s debut novel Nothing Special, out this week from Bloomsbury, is set in 1960s New York City and tells an unusual coming-of-age story about a dropout who takes a job transcribing tapes for Andy Warhol’s experimental new novel.
Mae has left school –– and what she feels are her embarrassing origins –– to seek out experiences that will rid her of the feeling that she’s doomed to be nobody. When she finds herself in Warhol’s studio, wearing a shoplifted shirt and longing for a chance to prove herself, the cool girls running the place will offer her a typewriter, a stack of tapes, and a window into another way of being.
Staff Picks asked author Nicole Flattery about her compelling page-turner: its one-of-a-kind narrator, Mae; its immersive and deeply researched milieu; its prescient resonance with current events. Our interview reveals her many artistic influences (like the film Taxi Driver, which helps her write about what’s “just outside the frame”), her sophisticated understanding of cultural history, and her deep respect for the labor of artmaking — plus, her pick for who should play Mae in a film adaptation.
Nothing Special will be available everywhere books are sold on July 11.
****
Staff Picks: Were Warhol and his friends the original influencers, in the commodified sense? I’m thinking of when Mae starts to see boys around town acting and dressing like Ondine; you had a great line: “You didn’t actually have to be a maniac, you could just wear the clothes.”
Nicole Flattery: I think the conception of fame as we now understand it didn’t exist back then. Warhol did invent it by taking these nobodies and making them somebodies. What I meant by that line is that people in the Factory, the Superstars, often led very risky and debauched lives, but they’ve been neutered in our memories. They’ve been reduced to their style, in many ways: a pair of leggings, eyeliner, a leather jacket. I’m not sure they are influencers as we understand them now, because they didn’t really try and sell us stuff which seems to be the objective of the majority of modern influencers.
SP: Mae’s worship of the subjects on the tapes she’s transcribing — it could be cringe, in the way wannabe/social climber types are often depicted as tragic, but in your novel, she isn’t cringey. I wondered if that was because you didn’t get too specific about the stuff she’s hearing on the tapes, or doing at parties. The most intimate discussion of blow jobs happens with her mother! Why did you choose to keep the dirty details just off-camera?
NF: I think this is just the way I’ve always written! I’m naturally very evasive (both in life and on the page). I started by writing short stories, where what you withhold is as important as what you give away, and that has influenced my writing style a huge amount. I tried to avoid the cringe and I hope I did. I sort of think of my style as a camera, I’m often looking just outside the frame. There’s that famous shot in Taxi Driver, where Travis Bickle is on the phone and it moves away from him and pans down the hallway. I think my instinct is to pull away. As a reader, I don’t want to be told everything. I actually find it irritating; leave some room for the mystery. I don’t want my hand held.
SP: How much of your experience of being a writer informed Mae’s relationship to her typing?
NF: Mae and I have similar desires, I think. My writing is one thing in my life I feel complete ownership over. I can control it. I mean, I can’t control what happens when it’s out in the world. If people are going to love me, hate me, be indifferent etc. But I can still sit down every day and write something. If I have a pen and paper, it can’t be taken away from me. I feel a lot of sympathy for Mae’s plight. She just wants something to call her own.
SP: Were there favorite books, films, etc that helped inform your depiction of 1960s New York City, and Warhol’s factory in particular?
Yes! I never stop talking about Alfred Hayes, one of my favourite writers. His ability to write self-deception has not been bettered. Warhol’s films were hugely influential. The look, the feel, the way his camera moves or doesn’t move. Edie, An American Girl by Jean Stein is an incredible oral history of Edie Sedgwick. Strangely, Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 was a film I thought about a lot; how a city feels when you’re out for revenge, its darkness and violence. Bette Gordon’s Variety as it’s about voyeurism.
Zoe Lund in Ms. 45 (1981). Image via IMDb.
SP: I noticed we jump over the 1970s and only ever get to hear snippets of Mae’s life in the other decades… Was Mae a women’s libber?
I feel Mae is someone alert to power and injustices. It’s one of her better qualities. If she was involved, she’d be down the back at the meetings, probably rolling her eyes at any display of earnestness. She would have done all the reading though.
SP: You’ve been thinking and writing about Warhol for years at this point. What was your reaction when you first heard about the US Supreme Court case involving his portrait of Prince?
Oh this was interesting. I think it was an unequivocally good thing. That portrait was hardly Warhol at the height of his powers. I’m for every single artist getting to call their work their own. Warhol really blurred the lines, in a way history isn’t looking too kindly on. I mean that’s the question the novel raises – who wrote this book, Warhol or the typists? Creative work is being devalued across the board, in nearly every single industry. It’s good to fight.
SP: I was super curious about what books Mikey reads, and which ones he’s lending to Mae; I got the sense whatever it was probably had a good influence on her?
Mikey is definitely reading poets nobody has heard of. He goes to a lot of readings, where he talks to nobody and silently indulges his broken heart. And whatever’s recommended in The Village Voice, he reads. He’s got exceptional taste: Richard Yates, John Berryman, Mikey knows and appreciates real style. He gives Mae a copy of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. Another man who fell for a difficult, hard-drinking woman, just like Mae’s mother.
SP: Last question: if we got a film adaptation… would we even need to cast Andy? But more importantly, who would play Mae?!
Ha! I have thought about this. Warhol, to me, is a background figure. I wouldn’t want anyone famous to play him. But I think Margaret Qualley [of Netflix’s Maid] would make a great Mae, although she’s hardly a teenager now. My fantasy casting would insist upon Kirsten Dunst as Daniel’s mother. I wrote it with her in mind.
****
For more, check out my review of the novel at The Rumpus, and pick up a copy of Nothing Special at your local bookseller!
