Rufi Thorpe’s third novel, The Knockout Queen, follows unlikely protagonists Bunny and Michael through high school and beyond, weaving a relatable and enchanting tale about friendship, identity, and impulses.
Thorpe took time with The Nerd Daily to discuss this novel, which has been ten years in the making. Read on to learn more about the author’s thoughts on friendship as a “lens that allows people to see each other as fully as possible,” why she is against using abstract concepts to categorize people, the uber popular ‘90s movie that she knows by heart, and much more.
First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to answer a few questions for The Nerd Daily! To start, tell us a little bit about yourself and what our readers should know about your newest novel, The Knockout Queen.
Well, The Knockout Queen is my third novel, and it is about good people doing bad things, and bad people doing good things, and the impossibility of ever truly sorting which is which. Specifically, it is about a boy and a girl who are friends in high school in a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business. The boy, Michael, is gay but not out, and he lives with his aunt since his mother went to prison. Bunny is his next-door neighbor and the daughter of the most prominent real estate dealer in town. She is also the tallest girl in their school, and even as she is an Olympic hopeful in volleyball, she also wishes she were normal sized and could get a date to prom. On the outside, it is an unlikely friendship, but in reality they are struggling with a lot of the same things: gender identity, fitting in, alcoholic parents. They can take their masks off with each other.
And then she does something on impulse and their lives change forever. In many ways, it’s a book about impulses, about the problems of being in a body that maybe wants things you would rather it didn’t want, about the distance between who you think you are and who you can’t help but be, and about violence and its centrality to our lives, it’s inescapability. You can live in a McMansion with clean marble countertops, but that doesn’t actually make you less of an animal. Oh, and it’s a comedy! You could probably tell from the lighthearted description.
One of the epigraphs to the novel is the following quote from Hannah Arendt: “It is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.” Without spoiling the book, could you talk a bit about whether this quote guided your writing or if you found it later in the process and just felt that it fit?
I read some Hannah Arendt in college, including On Violence (which is where the quote is from), but I managed to really thoroughly erase those tapes, so I found myself returning to her not exactly sure what I was looking for. When I saw the quote, it felt like something I had been trying to remember for more than a decade. It was the perfect articulation of a very ugly lesson, and one I had learned in other ways through my own life. And in some sense, I think I wrote this entire novel trying to remember it or say it again to myself in a way that I could understand.
The two main characters in this book, Michael and Bunny, are utterly unforgettable. How would you describe each of them in a sentence or two for someone who has not yet read the book? And how did you dream up such wonderful characters?
With the abs of a ninja turtle and the face of a boy angel, Bunny is absolutely, flat footedly sincere, incapable of lying, innocent in a raw and almost frightening way, and she likes to make pop tart butter sandwiches. Michael is as incapable of being authentic as Bunny is of being duplicitous. Part of it is his sexuality, part of it is trying to hide pieces of his background to avoid the stigma around prison, but part of it is just him. He is an incredible mimic, for example. He is built in some kind of double way, and inside he is a hidden planet, and Bunny is pretty much the only person who is allowed in, even though he is so lonely it feels like his bones are dissolving into paste.
As to where they came from, Bunny has been knocking around in my brain for years. I wrote a novel titled Bunny Lampert ten years ago and shelved it. Knockout Queen has an entirely different plot, but the character is recognizably the same. I was trying to write the book from Bunny’s POV and it just wasn’t working, and then I got the idea of Michael and he had that voice and that backstory from the very start, and suddenly it felt like the book was writing itself.
A core theme in The Knockout Queen is friendship — the desire for that unique love and bond, as well as the highs and lows such a relationship can experience over time. What do you hope readers can glean from Michael and Bunny’s friendship?
I think one reason I keep returning to friendship as an orienting relationship in novels is because friendship is an ill-defined thing, a word that can be used to describe anything from a coworker you talk about TV with, to someone you would die to protect. Even at its most powerful, it has a lesser status than romantic love. You can move across country for your lover, but you might not even think to do that for your friend, even if that friendship is as deep and profound as any relationship you have ever had. Because of its lesser status, friendships often drift, with the two friends becoming close and then distant and then close again, and friendships can often last a really long time because of their intermittent nature. An old friend knows who you were when you were in your stupidest and rawest youth. I may have mom friends now whom I adore, but they didn’t watch me pick a zit and sing along to RadioHead when I was fifteen. They can’t see all of me because they can only see me in a narrower frame of time. Friendship is the closest I have found for a lens that allows people to see each other as fully as possible.
I am a complete sucker for a novel that explores identity, and this construct is at the core of The Knockout Queen. Both Michael and Bunny are coming of age during the story including trying to figure out who they really are, how to express that, and what it means. You also quite deftly blur the lines between the ideas of what is “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong.” What interested you in exploring these aspects of identity in your writing?
I suppose I have been troubled by how it is possible to love someone who is a bad person for a long time. I have loved many broken people who did bad things, and I have also had the experience of being bewildered by how someone else could persist in loving a person who has done bad things. Even though it is something we all do, we still can’t understand it when other people do it. I think abstractions and people don’t mix terribly well? I don’t think that describing people as good or bad, or even male or female, is a very reliable system, and yet it is in our nature to create these abstract concepts and try to stuff each other into them. We are almost unable to stop doing it. I find that really interesting.
Continuing with this concept of identity … you recently Tweeted about how the film Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken “created huge sections” of your personality. I loved this film growing up as well, so I’m curious to hear more about how this movie impacted you! And I’m also wondering if you set The Knockout Queen in the time period that you did (primarily the late 2000s-early 2010s) to allow for certain influences in relation to the identities of Michael and Bunny?
I wound up setting the book in the 2000’s in part because I just needed them to get to a certain age by the end of the book and still be in the present day. So if they were going to grow up to be X years old in 2020, I had to make them born in 2020 minus X. But I think it was also natural because I had them growing up pretty close to the time that I grew up, and the book is full of pop cultural references. At one point, I tried setting it more recently but I kept feeling like an old grandpappy trying to use the new hip lingo to communicate with the whippersnappers.
As for Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken, you must keep in mind, I have not watched it since I was a child, but what I mainly remember was that it was on some channel alllll the time over a period of a couple years, maybe it was Lifetime, maybe it was USA, I don’t remember, but it was on all the time. So it was this movie I could watch again and again, but I never owned, I could never control when it would be there, which gave it an odd kind of power because I was slavishly devoted to this movie. If you have never seen it, it is about a woman who does a kind of depression era circus trick of jumping on a horse from a great height into a large barrel of water. It’s based on a true story. In some sense, when she first starts the jumping, it feels like she is being victimized into doing this dangerous thing, but then you watch her fall in love with it. She becomes powerful by embracing such terrible risk. Eventually, she goes blind from accidentally keeping her eyes open as she hits the water, and it seems like her career is over and she’s lost everything, but then she decides to keep jumping even though she is blind because SHE TRUSTS THE HORSE.
As a little girl who rode horses (okay, okay, it was one summer camp, but I still identified as a horse-interested-person at the time of watching the movie, and I knew what it felt like to be thrown from a horse—their raw physical power was still a very recent memory), this movie felt like a metaphor for all of life. From trying to become an artist, to trying to be a woman and interact with the world and with men. It was also a movie about a female protagonist who was embracing risk and peril that wasn’t in an obviously fictional universe (don’t get me wrong, I also obsessively watched Xena and Buffy.) But there was something so the-knife-cuts-both-ways about the way Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken explored the way women are stuck and the way they are free. The way they must be “tamed” and the ways they can never be. The idea that continuing to jump after you have lost your vision is insane, but also the only thing you can bear to do.
I found myself chuckling many times while reading this novel. In fact, it could turn into a downright depressing read if not for the (sometimes dark!) humor infused throughout. Could you talk about your choice to incorporate humor as a vehicle for telling this particular story?
I think life either strikes you as funny or it doesn’t. Life, even in its most tragic (or mundane!) moments, has always given me the giggles a little bit. Maybe laughter is a way of just releasing the tension of how horrifying it all is. Over the course of the last few books, I think I’ve learned to rely more and more on the comic to act as a leavening agent so that I could talk about the really yucky stuff about being a person in a way that felt more honest, and less lachrymose.
What have you learned from writing your previous novels, and/or from your MFA program at the University of Virginia, that you feel most helped bring The Knockout Queen to life?
One thing I learned, mainly just from reading books I admired, is that a book is not defined by its weakest sections, but by its strongest. When I remember a book I loved, it is for a handful of moments so extraordinary that I will never be able to forget them. As a writer, you have to aim for those moments, and not worry about the mistakes as much, or the weaknesses. You try to shore up your weaknesses the best you can. But a reader doesn’t love a book because it merely wasn’t bad. “Not weak” will never be the same as “good.” I think that is part of the difficulty of workshop; it is designed to show you your weaknesses, but gives you no idea how to find your strengths. But that is exactly what you have to try to figure out, is how to get to those moments that are truly transcendent.
Let’s Get Nerdy: Behind the Writer with 9 Quick Questions
- First book that made you fall in love with reading: Misty of Chincoteague
- Three books you would take on a desert island: My answers here are really oriented around cheating and trying to cram as many stories into one book as possible: Collected Shakespeare, The Decameron, and perhaps some kind of world mythology book
- Movie that you know by heart: Clueless
- Song that makes you want to get up and dance: Block Party by Chuck Brown
- Place that everyone should see in their lifetime: The ocean? I mean, I think standing at the edge of the sea is one of those vital experiences every human being should have. But if I had to say a travel destination, then I guess I would say Rome. If you only get to take one trip in your whole life, Rome is a great choice.
- Introvert or extrovert: Introvert!
- Coffee, tea, or neither: Coffee in the morning, tea after that
- First job: My first real official job was at the Gap at Times Square and I only made it through a couple of months, and then I got a job at a 24-hour deli working the night shift.
- Person you admire most and why: Mostly, I admire the same people everyone else does: those who fought for freedom or justice, those who protected the weak or helped check the strong, those who advanced human knowledge or made great art. But I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about those figures. I do spend a lot of time thinking about Alexander the Great’s mother. I do not claim to possess deep academic knowledge of Olympias, I just mean that she is a figure my imagination finds particularly rich. To be clear, this is not a person I can say I wholeheartedly admire because she kept killing people and she slept with snakes in her bed, but I do often think of the intensity of her will, her dogged, almost pathological persistence with what I am forced to admit is admiration.
RUFI THORPE received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. She is the author of Dear Fang, with Love and The Girls from Corona del Mar, which was long listed for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize and for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. A native of California, she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and sons.
