Nothing Special Nicole Flattery
Inside Warhol’s Factory
Nothing Special is set in the grubby avant garde of Andy Warhol’s Factory studio, which, in 1966, when the story kicks off, was establishing itself as an artistic and cultural force to be reckoned with. Seventeen-year-old school drop-out Mae and her new friend, fellow Factory worker Shelley, are cut from precisely the same cloth as the jaded, affectless women who populated Flattery’s short stories: they’re perceptive about the limits placed on female experience, but too disillusioned to do anything other than accommodate them; they yearn for significance but can find no way of attaining it.
While Warhol’s superstars – Ondine, Susan, Edie – loll on viscose sofas, drift from party to party, bitch about each other, and occasionally smile, or frown, or cry for the camera, Mae and Shelley are engaged in real, recognisable labour. Their place of work may be filled with intoxicated bodies and “covered in demented silver paper, tacky and peeling”, but they “work efficiently and without passion”, keeping regular office hours. They sit at their desks; they put on headphones. They listen. And then they type.
What they are typing is 24 hours in the life of the Factory: Warhol made round-the-clock recordings of every conversation, every sigh and whisper, every siren, or slammed door, or struck match that was heard in the place over the course of a single day. It’s the job of Mae and Shelley – initially employed as all-purpose secretaries, then promoted to this special project – to transcribe the lot, and they approach their task with diligence, typing up everything, to the last creak and sniffle. All of this, by the way, really happened: the resulting manuscript was published as A: A Novel in 1968, with Warhol’s name on the cover. The typists who transcribed the pages were never credited; in fact, of the four women who did the work of turning Warhol’s concept into a reality, two have never been identified.
Into this dismal gap in the historical record, Flattery slips her two protagonists. As the title suggests, Mae and Shelley aren’t special: they just walked through the Factory door at the right moment. But special or not, they were there: they listened to every word the big shots uttered (and formed their own opinions on them); they took pride in their act of construction, their choice of nouns and adjectives. The project may not have been theirs, but the execution was. And just as importantly, perhaps, they were elsewhere, too: they went to the park; they had snippy rows over cups of coffee (Flattery has a fine ear for dialogue). They had lives beyond the Factory door. “I was still interested in them,” Mae says of the Factory stars, midway through her transcription, “but something else had crept in: an interest in myself. I put more and more of myself in the book – misspellings, pauses where there weren’t any, my own emphasis, my own in-jokes. I had to leave a mark. You couldn’t be around egos like that for so long and not develop your own.” In fitting her complex, heartfelt, vexing characters into the spaces left where the names of Warhol’s typists should have been, Flattery is finally giving those egos, or a version of them, a chance to tell their own story, in their own words.
Nothing Special Nicole Flattery
Inside Warhol’s Factory
Nothing Special is set in the grubby avant garde of Andy Warhol’s Factory studio, which, in 1966, when the story kicks off, was establishing itself as an artistic and cultural force to be reckoned with. Seventeen-year-old school drop-out Mae and her new friend, fellow Factory worker Shelley, are cut from precisely the same cloth as the jaded, affectless women who populated Flattery’s short stories: they’re perceptive about the limits placed on female experience, but too disillusioned to do anything other than accommodate them; they yearn for significance but can find no way of attaining it.
While Warhol’s superstars – Ondine, Susan, Edie – loll on viscose sofas, drift from party to party, bitch about each other, and occasionally smile, or frown, or cry for the camera, Mae and Shelley are engaged in real, recognisable labour. Their place of work may be filled with intoxicated bodies and “covered in demented silver paper, tacky and peeling”, but they “work efficiently and without passion”, keeping regular office hours. They sit at their desks; they put on headphones. They listen. And then they type.
What they are typing is 24 hours in the life of the Factory: Warhol made round-the-clock recordings of every conversation, every sigh and whisper, every siren, or slammed door, or struck match that was heard in the place over the course of a single day. It’s the job of Mae and Shelley – initially employed as all-purpose secretaries, then promoted to this special project – to transcribe the lot, and they approach their task with diligence, typing up everything, to the last creak and sniffle. All of this, by the way, really happened: the resulting manuscript was published as A: A Novel in 1968, with Warhol’s name on the cover. The typists who transcribed the pages were never credited; in fact, of the four women who did the work of turning Warhol’s concept into a reality, two have never been identified.
Into this dismal gap in the historical record, Flattery slips her two protagonists. As the title suggests, Mae and Shelley aren’t special: they just walked through the Factory door at the right moment. But special or not, they were there: they listened to every word the big shots uttered (and formed their own opinions on them); they took pride in their act of construction, their choice of nouns and adjectives. The project may not have been theirs, but the execution was. And just as importantly, perhaps, they were elsewhere, too: they went to the park; they had snippy rows over cups of coffee (Flattery has a fine ear for dialogue). They had lives beyond the Factory door. “I was still interested in them,” Mae says of the Factory stars, midway through her transcription, “but something else had crept in: an interest in myself. I put more and more of myself in the book – misspellings, pauses where there weren’t any, my own emphasis, my own in-jokes. I had to leave a mark. You couldn’t be around egos like that for so long and not develop your own.” In fitting her complex, heartfelt, vexing characters into the spaces left where the names of Warhol’s typists should have been, Flattery is finally giving those egos, or a version of them, a chance to tell their own story, in their own words.