Rufi Thorpe Books in Order

Rufi Thorpe was born in Dallas, Texas, and moved with her single mother to California when she was six. She grew up in Southern California as an only child, in a household where reading mattered. Books became a refuge early on.

Her school years took her east. She attended high school in New Hampshire, then left early for college in New York, where she studied literature and creative writing at the New School. Later, she earned an MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009.

Fiction arrived through a very human impulse: she started writing stories partly to impress a girl she had a crush on.

Before publishing novels, Thorpe waited tables and wrote. After graduate school, she began teaching academic writing at the college level, work she has said she loved. She has also taught writing in other settings, bringing the practical questions of plot, structure, and point of view into the classroom.

She sold her first novel, The Girls from Corona del Mar, when she was 26, while living in a small Maryland basement apartment with her baby. The book follows the long, complicated friendship between Mia and Lorrie Ann, two girls whose lives diverge in painful ways. It put friendship, motherhood, class, and Southern California at the center of Thorpe's fiction, without pretending that love makes people easy to understand.

Her second novel, Dear Fang, With Love, takes a different route. A father and his teenage daughter travel to Lithuania after her mental health crisis, and the trip opens up questions about family history, absence, and what parents owe their children. Thorpe drew on time she had spent in Lithuania, while keeping the story focused on the uneasy, often funny work of a father and daughter getting to know one another.

Then came The Knockout Queen, a darkly comic coming-of-age novel about Bunny Lampert and her neighbor Michael. Their unlikely friendship moves through wealth, sexuality, violence, gossip, and the mistakes that can reshape a young life. The novel was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Thorpe's fourth novel, Margo's Got Money Troubles, follows a young single mother trying to support herself and her infant son. It brings together online sex work, professional wrestling, family messiness, and the daily math of rent and child care. Her interest in wrestling grew after living with a husband and two sons who loved it, and that curiosity helped shape Margo's relationship with her estranged wrestler father, Jinx.

Her books often return to California, uneasy friendships, complicated parents, and people trying to make a life with limited money or support. She writes about big problems, but she leaves room for odd humor, bad decisions, tenderness, and the small bargains people make with each other.

Thorpe lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons. Her household also includes Coco, a much-loved bull terrier with a reputation for bad behavior.