Nineteen days after the first moon landing and less than a week before Woodstock, the tumultuous summer of ’69 built to a frenzied crescendo in the early hours of August 9. What happened that day, when members of the Manson family murdered the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and three others, has been recorded in books, plotted along timelines, and discussed again and again as we've tried to parse out how it all went down.
The details are familiar: The gruesome stab wounds, the word "PIG" scrawled in blood, the horrible fact that Tate was just weeks away from giving birth, and, of course, the young women who carried out the acts for Charles Manson. Young women eerily similar to the central characters in Emma Cline's new book, The Girls.
Yet Cline's book, which focuses on a pair of teenage women involved in a Manson-like cult, is meant to go beyond just being fascinated by its young female protagonists. "I took it as a challenge to write a book about teenage girls, who are so marginalized and objectified and given no agency and subjectivity," Cline says. "How do you write about them in a way that takes them seriously? I knew this topic was begging a certain literary type to dismiss it."
And in some ways, to dismiss Cline herself. A graduate of Columbia's MFA program and former reader for *The New Yorker'*s fiction department, Cline has just a handful of published stories, but her writing in The Paris Review and the bidding war for her debut novel—which reportedly resulted in a seven-figure, multi-book deal from Penguin Random House—marked her as a major up-and-comer. (Having the film rights for her story purchased by Girl with the Dragon Tattoo producer Scott Rudin helped, too.) And while that brings with it a certain level of notoriety and success for Cline, 27, it also set her up to be the next young, anointed author everyone loves to resent.
No matter how many late-bloomers work on their craft for years before finding success, the literary community still obsesses over youth and precociousness. Age has a built-in allure, it’s something to tout in articles (like, uh, this one) and on book jackets. But, just as often that we put young people—particularly women—on pedestals, we wait for them to fall.
As a writer, Cline's gifts are many. Her prose in The Girls is startling (she describes a meal as "a glut of spaghetti, mossed with cheese") and she masterfully builds tiny details to create larger scenes (her 14-year-old protagonist Evie picks her cuticle while talking to her mom’s new boyfriend, pressing on the raw spot "to feel the sting"). But, despite the positive reviews and being included on virtually every major summer book list, some have criticized The Girls for being underdeveloped—which may be a valid point considering she wrote most of the novel in just three months—or reveled in being contrarian. The New York Times' review, for example, was titled "The Girls Has a Great Start. Too Bad About the Rest." Ouch.
Looking to recent literary history, perhaps the most apt comparison to Cline is Nell Freudenberger. While still working as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker, Freudenberger's work appeared in the magazine and she was included in their "20 Under 40" author list. Readers and members of the literati began gossiping: Who was she and could she possibly be good? Critics ripped apart a photo of her in the magazine for being 'sexy.' She became the subject of a Salon article titled, "Too young, too pretty, too successful." Then her first book of short stories fell short of expectations. "Some of the criticism of the packaging was valid," she told The Los Angeles Times in 2006. "But I was so excited at the time. I would have done almost anything." In the same article, her agent spoke of her having to "overcome" the reaction to her younger self. And her next books, 2006’s The Dissident and 2012's The Newlyweds, showed that she did, indeed, survive the early cycle of publicity and criticism with her artistic integrity intact.
The heart of The Girls is the way women present ourselves to the world, the way we look at each other, and the way we understand ourselves through other peoples’ eyes. As Cline writes, "We all want to be seen." So what about Cline? Does she want to be seen? Is she watching us watch her?
Her situation calls to mind the final episode of Girls Season 5, where Hanna Horvath's college enemy, Tally Schifrin, talks about finding early success as a writer in Brooklyn. "I need to see how other people see me because it’s the only way I can see myself […] Tally Schifrin is not even me now. She’s just, like, this thing that I’ve created. She’s a monster that I’ve made and I have to feed, and she feeds on praise and controversy." Schifrin is a caricature, but her struggle is real: How to avoid the hype when the hype pays the bills, how to keep living when you feel locked into work because it’s awfully hard to write good fiction (or good anything) without that, and how to still see yourself for who you are when everyone is watching.
But, unlike Schifrin, Cline has disengaged. She may be facing the same demons, but she's working hard to not succumb to them. She avoids social media, she leans on her circle of friends for support, she is already at work on another novel. "I've tried to remind myself that this stuff is not real in the way that writing is real to me," she says of publicity. But what it has afforded her is the time and funds to keep working. And good thing: It will be nice to see her thrive once the literary world stops waiting for her to fail.
