Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on July 11, 2023

Between 1965 and 1967, Andy Warhol taped his conversations with Ondine (among others) in the Factory, his Manhattan studio. Two high school girls and two other typists transcribed the tapes in 1967. Warhol published the transcriptions, complete with typos, as a, A Novel. The lowercase “a” doubles as a reference to amphetamines and as a shoutout to e.e. cummings.

Nothing Special is a character study that imagines the lives of the two teenage typists. The story is narrated by Mae; the other typist is Shelley. Warhol, Ondine, Lou Reed, and the beautiful people who surrounded Warhol appear like out-of-focus characters in the background of movie scenes, present but usually unimportant. Nothing Special is not their story. It is the story of a young woman who compares herself to Warhol’s entourage and thinks of herself as nothing special.

After Mae’s father died, Mikey moved in with her mother. Mae had no problem with Mikey but didn’t want to give him the chance to exercise parental authority over her. Nor did she want to end up as a waitress like her mentally ill mother.

At 17, Mae is spending her afternoons riding escalators at Macy’s. She needs a place to go after school to avoid returning home, where she would only fight with her mother or resent Mikey. She feels abandoned by Maud, her only friend.

“Humming with hidden energy,” Mae soon notices that she is attracting male attention on her escalator rides. She enjoys making herself “available for public consumption.” When a man’s hand deliberately touches hers on the escalator rail, she rides the escalator every day until she sees him again. They go to a restaurant and then to bed, where he rubs her “small, pudgy stomach in circular motions as if I was a sick animal.”

The man’s mother feeds her breakfast in the morning and recommends a doctor who can help with her problems. The doctor has a cure for loneliness. Presumably the doctor is popular with certain patients because of the pills he prescribes. Instead of prescribing pills, he gives Mae the address of Warhol’s Factory and tells her that he always needs girls to run errands for him.

Mae becomes a secretary at the Factory. Mae and Shelley answer the phone before being assigned to transcribe recordings. Mae sees Warhol painting or talking at the other end of the studio, but rarely interacts with him. “Even when he was in a room full of people, he was apart from them. Totally separate, though he was connected to everything.”

The recordings are of conversations. Ondine (a/k/a The Pope) “was the main talker, words tumbling from him in a ceaseless monologue. . . . He existed only to be recorded.” Warhol and Ondine share “the excitement of people who thought they were separate from everything else, who had somehow, despite everything, managed to make their own private world.” Yet they also seem to be putting on a show for the rest of the world. There are moments when Ondine sounds “tired of playing himself, moments of paralyzing doubt about the point of any of it.”

Mae feels like God eavesdropping on the conversations of people who are above the law. At the same time, she resents the “obscene entitlement” of beautiful women who “lounge around the studio, unbothered by the idea of work, uninterested in any pursuits,” sometimes appearing in Warhol’s movies. Mae practices being “blank, impervious and assured” like the women in his films. The recordings teach her how to appear seductive and disinterested at the same time. They plant “ideas of humiliation and cruelty” in her mind and give her a “sudden lust for degrading experiences.”

The recordings seem important to Mae in a way that nothing ever has; they become her life. Still, she knows she is just a typist. She has sexual encounters with random men at Warhol’s parties but will never “be in demand” like the women who stand in line to be in his films. She is an audience, not a performer.

Mae’s job allows her to learn about life. In that sense, Nothing Special is a coming-of-age novel. Meeting Warhol’s mother, Mae wants to be “dignified and distant.” Watching her co-workers, Mae realizes it is “fun to watch things fall apart.” Watching the beautiful people who surround Warhol, Mae comes to understand pretense: “You don’t have to actually be a maniac, you could just wear the clothes.” She creates her own pretense, casting herself as a writer rather than a typist.

Mae's most profound revelation comes from watching Shelley and understanding that her true life is “waiting to be found and lived.” When Mae tells Shelley she should try to live her own life, Mae could be talking to herself. And she could be listening to herself when Shelley responds, “I did try.”

Mae also learns about relationships. She does not know how to handle her estrangement from her friend Maud. She stays away from her mother and argues with Mikey. She loves and hates Shelley for the same reason — she sees herself in Shelley’s ordinariness. One of the voices on a tape describes Warhol as leaving people behind, disposing of them — the very thing Mae is starting to do.

Shelley fares less well than Mae. She “had something, even if what she had was strange.” Shelley is mocked for not being among the Warhol elite when she auditions for a part in one of his movies. For reasons she won’t explain, Shelley tears apart one of the Warhol tapes. Mae claims her mother destroyed it, giving rise to the accepted explanation for the missing tape.

Nothing Special tells a clever story, using the Warhol Factory as a backdrop to illustrate important themes that generally have little to do with the iconic artist’s life. The story begins in 2010, when a game show host triggers Mae’s memory by asking “Who shot Andy Warhol?” It ends in 1985, a time when Mae has become a better version of herself. She offers brief descriptions of the phases of her life — the drinking phase, the Bible study phase, the self-help reading phase, the family reconciliation phase.

Mae has rejected society’s demands for righteous indignation. She does not want to denounce Mikey or her mother. Perhaps the greatest lesson she has learned — perhaps the best lesson to draw from the story — is the importance of avoiding judgment, including self-judgment. Mae has learned not to judge herself for living her own life, for not living up to the standards of people like those who surrounded Warhol, people who didn’t know how to be themselves. Maybe she is nothing special, but opinions about who is or isn’t “special” don’t matter. Learning to live your best life, even if that life goes largely unnoticed, is what matters. I recommend Nothing Special because Mae's contrast of an unusual time in her life to the life she would eventually settle into brings clarity to those lessons.

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