The Girls by Emma Cline

When my daughter, Rebecca, recommended The Girls by Emma Cline, I hesitated. Since I grew up in Northern California and knew of the horrific Manson killings, I felt reluctant to visit a fictionalized account of that gruesome time. She persisted, “Mom you will like it, there is minimal violence. The book focuses on the psychology of the people involved.” She was right and I am pleased I read it.

The Girls is an impressive novel by a woman who knows both the terrain of 1960’s northern California and the emotional vulnerability of young girls. Cline seeks to understand how a group of teenage girls could follow a charismatic, insane man and eventually kill for him. The novel’s power derives from its unique structure: the narration rotates between the protagonist Evie Boyd’s present middle-aged voice and her past teenage voice that describes how she came to join one of the most famous and viscous cults to emerge from that decade. With the benefit of time and perspective, middle-aged Evie offers insight and understanding about the choices she made as a lonely, insecure teen.

Evie’s parents' divorce when she is fifteen. Her father leaves her mother to live with a younger woman. Evie’s mom’s devastation permeates what is left of their little family. Evie is already a bit of an outcast at school and her peer group is cruel. With her parents’ focus on their own lives, their attention toward Evie fades. Evie says, “The hidden world that adolescents inhabit, surfacing from time to time only when forced, training their parents to expect their absence. I was already disappeared.” When Evie meets Suzanne, a 19-year-old cult member who becomes a mother-figure to Evie, Evie begins to feel loved, seen, and known. “Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved.” Little by little, Evie spends more and more time at this remote ranch of runaway teenagers while telling her distracted parents that she is at a friend’s house. “I was starting to fill in all the blank space in myself with the certainties of the ranch.”

The novel follows these lost young people of the 60’s who crave attention from those who understand their profound sense of alienation. Suzanne introduces Evie to Russell, the cult leader, and Evie feels attractive and desired. However, underneath his gentle hippie demeanor, Russell is an abusive, sexual predator. Cline captures the breakdown of the social order in one community during the 60’s when old norms are shattered and replaced by chaos.

What amazes me about Cline‘s book is that she did not grow up during this time. She makes no judgments; she simply describes the emotional snowball effect of Russell and Suzanne’s influence on this group of vulnerable young women. She does not dwell on the specific gruesome climax when the girls follow Russell’s orders to kill. Rather she helps her readers better understand how a group of girls could become brainwashed enough to abandon normative behavior and behave with such depravity. Cline’s pensive prose and impressive insight give us a plausible version of the troubled lives of her characters. Evie joins the group almost by accident and yet, as she tells us later, it destroyed her life. An impressive first novel by Emma Cline.