It’s 1966, and Mae is bored of high school and the pettiness of other girls and contemptuous of her mother, a waitress. Her life seems to change overnight when she gets a job working at Andy Warhol’s studio in midtown Manhattan, known as the Factory. It wasn’t only where Warhol produced much of his work, including his 1964 films Blow Job and Couch; the Factory also became a gathering spot for New York’s artistic and bohemian crowd, including drag queens, actors, writers and rich patrons, everyone from Lou Reed to Bob Dylan to Mick Jagger, most of them high on drugs. Nicole Flattery’s novel goes beyond these big names to examine the lives of those who kept the Factory going and whose contributions have been forgotten.

At first, Mae finds Warhol’s crowd endlessly fascinating. She gushes, ‘I was finally surrounded by genius, by grace, by people who had made decisions about their lives.’ Her job isn’t especially glamorous – she’s typing transcripts of recordings Warhol made of his interviews with the actor Ondine (the actual transcripts formed the basis of Warhol’s avant-garde 1968 book A Novel) – but she gets sucked into her work and the life of another Factory girl, Shelley, who fled her boring hometown but still seems like an innocent throwback to another era. She and Shelley are the only ones working on Warhol’s recordings, a distinction that makes them feel special: they think they hear ‘the excitement of people who thought they were separate from everything else, who had somehow, despite everything, managed to make their own private world’. Mae and Shelley become fast friends and establish a private world, congratulating themselves on having escaped mundanity.

The actresses, hopefuls and hangers-on at Warhol’s studio seem cool to Mae and Shelley because they are set apart – ‘they were above the law, above the humdrum dailiness of life, above hurt.’ These tapes model a certain kind of adult behaviour to Mae and Shelley – detached, cynical,