Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery is anything but that. I found this coming-of-age tale interesting and entertaining, and I learned a lot about Andy Warhol’s Factory. Of course, his famous studio has been written about before but probably not from the perspective of a lonely teenage typist who finds herself in the midst of it all.
The book’s primary landscape is New York City in 1966 where 17-year-old Mae lives with her alcoholic mother and her mother’s on-off boyfriend, Mikey. After a falling out with some other girls, she ditches school and a chance meeting with the mother of a sleazy one-night stand leads her to the office of an even sleazier doctor. He suggests she might find work at an address that turns out to be The Factory.
Nothing Special follows Mae’s awakening to a world inhabited by bohemian characters, celebrities and rich patrons. All desperate to be in Warhol’s orbit and featured in one of his films, sculptures or photographs. She gets to know the other typists and develops a friendship with Shelley, another high schooler. They soon start to work on transcribing the tapes that become Warhol’s book ‘a, A novel’.
It’s a matter of record that four typists were hired to transcribe the tapes and that two were high school age but never identified. Flattery’s Nothing Special fills that gap with an imagined reality that is in turn funny, wry, observational and sad. When Mae is tasked with accompanying Warhol’s mother on a shopping trip it struck a chord with me. He was happy to pay the bills but chose to send a typist rather than spend time with his ageing mother.
Mae and Shelley operate on the fringes of The Factory, barely noticed by its inhabitants but getting the opportunity to attend parties and screenings and explore their developing sexuality. Over time Mae becomes obsessed with the tapes which are increasingly disturbing to listen to. It’s supposed to be art but starts to feel more voyeuristic. It occurred to me that it was an early forerunner of reality television.
Interspersed with all this are Mae’s interactions with her mother and Mikey, as well as chapters of Nothing Special that provide glimpses of her life after The Factory in the mid-80s and in 2010. Times when she wondered why it had all happened to her. Times when she looked at photos of parties from the 60s that looked like they must have been fun, but she “was as disconnected and estranged from these images as someone who hadn’t been there”. There were no photos of her or of Shelley to look at. Maybe because in Warhol’s world, they were nothing special.
I bought Nothing Special second-hand from Awesome Books but you can also get it in your local library or you could try Oxfam, the largest retailer of second-hand books in Europe. I’m a book volunteer at my local Oxfam shop so that’s where my copy will be going!