When he appears in Nicole Flattery’s recently published novel Nothing Special, Andy Warhol is a spectral presence. “I never saw him come in but I felt the atmosphere change when he did,” Flattery writes from the watchful point of view of the teenage narrator of the book.
The coming-of-age novel set in the mid 1960s, with some flashes into the present, follows Mae, a lonely teenager who drops out of school after finding herself drawn into the new world of Warhol’s storied Factory in Manhattan. While art and drama and debauchery happen around her among the artist and his acolytes, Mae has the more prosaic job of typist. She is transcribing recordings of conversations that will form the basis of a: A Novel, Warhol’s (real) experimental book from 1968.
