“There were certain days when I was working on it that I cursed myself that I did something so ridiculous. And there were other days when I was, like, I’m glad I attempted this.”
Nicole Flattery is talking to me via Zoom from her home in Stoneybatter (“my spare room/office/wardrobe. This is where the magic happens!”) about her debut novel. She’s already a celebrated short-story writer: her collection Show Them a Good Time, published in 2019, was lavishly praised and won a prize at the Irish Book Awards.
What made her nervous about the novel was its “hugely ambitious” idea, which she then had to follow up on, and write. It is set mostly in the late 1960s in New York, at Andy Warhol’s Factory, the studio where his staff worked on artworks under his direction, and numerous hangers-on (or, in Warhol language, “superstars”) gathered.
The novel is called Nothing Special. “I read somewhere that Andy Warhol wanted to make a TV show: Nothing Special. I thought, that’s a great title. Also, with [Show Them a Good Time] and this, I’m setting myself up for critics in a very bad way.” (Early reactions to the novel suggest these fears are unfounded.)
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The narrator is Mae, a woman who aged 17 goes to work for the Factory as a typist. The story shifts between then and the early 21st century, when Mae is middle-aged and finding that the Warhol magic dust has failed to protect her from loneliness and the other buffetings of time – as it failed to do for many of his superstars, some of whom (such as Edie Sedgwick) didn’t even make it to middle age.
Mae’s job is to type up transcripts of tapes Warhol has recorded of his friends at the Factory, which he plans to turn into an unconventional novel. All this is real: the novel, titled a: A Novel, was published in 1968. Warhol’s thinking was first to create a response to Ulysses – the book faithfully recreates a day in the life of his superstar Ondine – and second to create a “bad” novel “because doing something the wrong way always opens doors”. The current edition of a: A Novel runs to 600 pages of verbatim transcripts, with all typos and glitches retained. Did Flattery slog her way through the whole thing in preparation? “I have read all of it,” she says. “It’s a great book if you can tolerate it. It requires a lot of patience. But it’s interesting.”
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Warhol’s Factory often seems exploitative, and Mae feels voyeuristic when listening to the tapes she transcribes. But she also believes the Factory provides a community for the superstars, a loving family. Flattery says, “I was reading all these stories about these people and they’re clearly ... unstable, and they did lots of insane things, but I’m also really jealous of them, because they got to hang out all the time, and be in the States together and see their friends every night. If you live in a city like Dublin, you can’t do that any more; you make a plan to see your friends every two months.”
And yet Warhol, while we associate him indelibly with the 1960s, seems more modern than ever, not least for his interest in celebrity as a status unattached to achievement. (Reality TV has seen to it that, as he predicted, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”) And the themes in Nothing Special of voyeurism and being on display seem fitting for our social media age, where our lives are permanently witnessed with no need for tape recordings or typists as intermediaries.
“That’s the thing about [a: A Novel],” says Flattery. “It’s ahead of its time. It’s like a Twitter novel. And when I think about the internet, I do think about voyeurism, and surveillance. I’m not hugely into the internet. I sound 90 years old,” she laughs (Flattery is 33), “but I am interested in the creepier aspects of the internet.” In Nothing Special, Mae is “becoming kind of obsessed with these people” on the tapes, “and you go online and that’s happening all the time. People are obsessed with these celebrities, these parasocial relationships developing. So it just feels very contemporary.”
What Flattery didn’t want to do with Nothing Special was write a traditional New York novel. “I wanted it to be completely from Mae’s perspective – how she sees everything should reflect how she feels inside. You don’t need to be, ‘I walked down the street and saw some graffiti and went to the bodega’ – if you want to read a book like that, there’s hundreds of them. I was thinking a lot of [Stanley Kubrick’s film] Eyes Wide Shut. The fact that [Kubrick] wouldn’t fly to New York, so he rebuilt New York. That’s what makes the film so strange and memorable, because New York just feels a little off. And I wanted to re-create that.”
And similarly, this novel about the writing, or typing, of Warhol’s novel doesn’t feature Andy Warhol very prominently. He makes just a few appearances, and even his full name appears only once. (“Twice!” Flattery corrects me.)
“People are probably gonna feel cheated. They’re gonna ask for their money back, if they’re going in for Warhol. I was interested in how power works. He has all this power and control, and the interesting thing is that you rarely see the most powerful person. They’re there, but they’re not there. So I wanted him to be more a presence than a person. I wasn’t tempted to write these scenes where he comes in and he’s like, ‘It’s the 60s, baby!’”
It took me a long time to write into Mae’s voice. There’s certain things you can do in a 10-page story that you can’t in a 200-page novel. I had to unlearn everything I’d done before
The process of writing a novel was challenging. “Obviously I write short fiction generally, and still do. People talk about it like, short fiction isn’t real, you’re just working yourself up for a novel because you’re too scared. I always wanted to write a novel, and I feel happy that I’ve done it. But there’s some writers who write stories, and why should they try their hand at something they might not want to do?”
Tell Claire Keegan or Anton Chekhov that short stories aren’t proper writing. “Claire Keegan is a great example.”
“And it took me a long time to write into Mae’s voice. There’s certain things you can do in a 10-page story that you can’t in a 200-page novel. I had to unlearn everything I’d done before.” And finishing it – she began working on it four years ago – felt like a release. “I was so excited to finish it, you’d think I was going to the moon or something. I was, I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do that, I’m gonna see all my friends. And I did that for a week or two. And then I was, like, I’m depressed! I have no reason to live!”
Speaking of those themes of surveillance and eavesdropping, what about spying on yourself – does Flattery read her reviews? She laughs, then there is a long pause.
“Oh God.” Another pause. “I ... do. I really admire those writers [who don’t], the level of self-control they have. I was talking to students the other day, and they’re all so eager to be published. I was like, I want you to understand how precious that time is before you read anything about yourself ... Yeah, I do read my reviews. I can’t help myself. Maybe I’ll just throw my phone in the Liffey or something.”
Nothing Special is published by Bloomsbury on March 2nd
