Unraveling art and ownership
For Irish author Nicole Flattery, typing is more than just an occupational hazard.
“The act of doing it is sort of addictive,” she said, adding that the process also provides some inspiration for the contents of her writing.
“We’re always so fascinated by machines, and the idea of being consumed by this machine, the typewriter, was really what struck me,” Flattery said.
So when she set out to draft her debut novel, centering the story around a typist felt like a natural place to start. “Nothing Special” follows Mae, a 17-year-old high school dropout in 1960s New York City who, through a series of chance encounters, lands a job at Andy Warhol’s studio.
She spends her days transcribing the pop artist’s manuscript, “a: A Novel,” surrounded by a host of other characters who somehow found their way to Warhol’s factory. Though Warhol’s book is the driving force behind much of the novel, the artist himself is notably absent from the story, as Flattery is careful to point out.
“Ultimately, I’ve always written about work,” Flattery said. “I am fascinated by the idea of work and what work takes from us and how we retain a sense of self even in work, even as we give so much of ourselves away.”
And as Flattery notes, it is easy for the lines between collaborator and consumer to blur. Mae finds herself descending into a parasocial connection with the subjects of Warhol’s films as she painstakingly types up their interviews day after day, to the point where she starts to feel a sense of ownership over the work.
Her relationship to the subjects of Warhol’s manuscript, Flattery said, “was like an early version of something that we see all the time now, I suppose the most recent example is Taylor Swift, and these fans being like, ‘I own her, and every single thing that she does — even though she has no idea who I am — I have some kind of investment in, and she has to pay back that investment.’”
Though the invention of social media has changed the way artists interact with their fans, Flattery points out that parasocial relationships as a concept are nothing new.
“If you think about the 1960s Warhol, that was when this version of celebrity was being invented,” Flattery said.
Nicole Flattery will read at 7 p.m. Friday, July 14, in an event hosted by Harvard Book Store, where she will be joined by Maggie Doherty.