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Nothing Special
A wildly original debut novel about two young women navigating the complex worlds of Andy Warhol's Factory, and coming of age in 1960s New York
New York City, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Mae lives in a run-down apartment with her alcoholic mother and her mother's sometimes-boyfriend, Mikey. She is turned off by the petty girls at her high school, and the sleazy men she typically meets. When she drops out, she is presented with a job offer that will remake her world entirely: she is hired as a typist for the artist Andy Warhol.
Warhol is composing an unconventional novel by recording the conversations and experiences of his many famous and alluring friends. Tasked with transcribing these tapes alongside several other girls, Mae quickly befriends Shelley and the two of them embark on a surreal adventure at the fringes of the countercultural movement. Going to parties together, exploring their womanhood and sexuality, this should be the most enlivening experience of Mae's life. But as she grows increasingly obsessed with the tapes and numb to her own reality, Mae must grapple with the thin line between art and voyeurism and determine how she can remain her own person as the tide of the sixties sweeps over her.
Nothing Special is a whip-smart coming-of-age story about friendship, independence and the construction of art and identity, bringing to life the experience of young women in this iconic and turbulent moment.
Review
[A] blade-sharp coming-of-age debut novel . . . [Flattery] captures the absurdity and the pain, the texture of city streets and the squalid luxury, and brings a deadpan wit to the whole sex and drugs and Pop-art scene ― Spectator
This debut novel is that rare thing, an original, off-kilter coming-of-age story, in which life and art collide in unsettling ways ― Mail on Sunday
Nothing Special is as stylishly written as its predecessor Show Them a Good Time. Indeed there are shades of Saul Bellow, in her rendering of New York that 'shrieking cartoon hell' . . . [Flattery] deserves only praise ― Sunday Independent
Nothing Special confirms Flattery as a bracingly original writer; her observations clear-eyed and cool-headed, never pretentious. Readers may be tempted to underline every other sentence in this striking debut from an exciting new voice' ― Irish Independent
Flattery demonstrates here how she can shape on a larger scale and be incredibly inventive in the process . . . [Her] willingness to be ugly and merciless on the page is what makes her work so relentlessly engaging ― Financial Times
A riveting read about fame, myth-making and finding your own identity ― Good Housekeeping
Flattery is a keen observer of relational dynamics in groups of women, and how these connections can both support and strangle. Her characters feel complicated and real ― Telegraph, Highlights for 2023
If you've ever found yourself obsessing over Edie Sedgwick (her biography by Jean Stein is a must-read) then Nothing Special will be right up your street. Set against 60s New York and Andy Warhol's Factory, this is a coming-of-age story that conjures up the lure of the era ― Stylist, Highlights for 2023
Nicole Flattery's treatment of determined, bewildered young women - as they discover the vast distance between how they are perceived and how they feel themselves to be - is brilliantly gloomy, droll and so out-of-body as to be real . . .They try on and take off their survival instincts like costumes, in a painful, beguiling, apt twist on art for art's sake. The authenticity of Flattery's work offers its own reassurance that sometimes art is good -- Caoilinn Hughes
There are many things to enjoy in Nicole Flattery's debut novel . Mae is an engaging protagonist with a wit about her coming-of-age struggles ― Independent
A sharp portrait of New York's art scene in the sixties and one woman's place in it. Through inventive prose, Flattery writes into history the under-celebrated voices, and she does it in a masterful way. A superb novel -- Elaine Feeney
About the Author
Nicole Flattery is the author of the story collection Show Them A Good Time. She is the winner of An Post Irish Book Award, the Kate O'Brien Prize, the London Magazine Prize for Debut Fiction, and the White Review Short Story Prize. Her work has appeared in the Stinging Fly, the Guardian, the White Review, and the London Review of Books. A graduate of the master's program in creative writing at Trinity College, Dublin, she lives in Galway, Ireland.
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