Nothing Special, by Nicole Flattery. Bloomsbury, 2023. 240 pages.A BRIGHT AND TROUBLED INGENUE has made it to New York City. What now? Nicole Flattery’s debut novel the Irish writer’s first book was a short-story collection, Show Them a Good Time (2019) is artfully withholding at the levels of period language and the particularities of its setting. But its protagonist, Mae, who is seventeen in 1967, arrives with obvious narrative precursors: the Joan Didion of “Goodbye to All That;” Sylvia Plath’s stand-in, Esther Greenwood, in The Bell Jar; Therese Belivet in Patricia Highsmith’s Carol (née
At the center of Nicole Flattery’s “Nothing Special” is the 1968 book “a: A Novel,” “written” by Andy Warhol. The scare-quotes that drape like feather boas…
Award-winning Irish author Nicole Flattery discusses her debut novel Nothing Special, which brilliantly explores the fascinating world of Andy Warhol’s Fac.