"There were so many things that returned me. The tang of soy, smoke in someone's hair, the grassy hills turning blond in June. An arrangement of oaks and boulders could, seen out of the corner of my eye, crack open something in my chest, palms going suddenly slick with adrenaline"
Emma Cline's The Girls was the most-hyped book of last summer, and while you shouldn't judge a book by its PR I was fated to read it the moment I heard it was, in a roundabout way, about the Manson Family. I'm one of those people with what may well be an unhealthy interest in cults, killers and all things a dark. I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts (SSDGM, fellow murderinos!) and I watch a LOT of Snapped: Women Who Kill. There are so many elements of the Manson Family Murders that make it morbidly fascinating to many - the fame of the victims, the age of the perpetrators, the hold that their leader had over them, the connection to the Beatles, the 'witchy' writing on the wall... I could go on and on.
I read The Girls in the spring/summer of 2016, a few months after listening to Karina Longworth's 'Charles Manson's Hollywood' series on her podcast You Must Remember This, which I'd recommend to anyone into Old/Past Hollywood scandals and stories (she's currently doing a series called 'Dead Blondes', and I'd thoroughly recommend the last series on Joan Crawford, which is every bit as juicy as you want it to be). Longworth's storytelling technique mirrors Cline's dreamy, drawn-out narrative, and I ended up re-listening to it while reading The Girls, looking for the parallels Cline made between fiction and history.
The thing that separates The Girls from the hundreds of Manson documentaries/true crime novels etc. is her focus. Russell, Manson's fictional counterpart, is a secondary character in the protagonist Evie's narrative, overshadowed by the titular girls. One girl in particular, Suzanne, is the object of Evie's focus - you could take away the events of the final act and this would still be a compelling tale about the dangers of putting people on pedestals, of hero-worship, of the intricate relationships between women - or, more specifically, between girls. But it wouldn't be as interesting. Even if, somehow, you managed to stumble across The Girls without knowing what it was mirroring, Evie reveals the fact of the fictional murders in the first few pages and they hang darkly, heavily over the rest of the story as it unfolds through flashbacks to the 60's, interspersed with her uninspiring present-day life. I could write a whole essay comparing Cline's fictional crimes to the real-life horrors that inspired them, but I won't. Like Cline, it's the mindsets of the girls who gave up their futures for Manson/Russell who interest me more.
While Russel is a secondary character in Evie's memories, Evie herself is a tertiary character on the ranch where Russel and his gaggle of followers make their base - she spends a lot of time there, staying over multiple nights, but ultimately always returns to her mother's mansion (inherited from a film star grandmother who I would like to know much more about... possibly an allusion to the fact that Angela Lansbury's daughter supposedly ran with the real Manson crowd for a while, way before the murders?), and I think that there's a fair argument to be had that Cline has given herself a bit of an easy get-out when it comes to exploring the psychology of the girls in The Girls. Evie describes Russell's charisma, and the power he has over the ranch dwellers, but she is also distanced. She notices, but forces herself not to notice, that he is not the great musician the rest of the group believe him to be. She wonders what makes the girls commit his crimes, just as the readers do. Ultimately, she is on the outside (a major theme of the book), and while her teenage loneliness rings heartbreakingly true, how much more interesting could The Girls have been from Suzanne's perspective, exploring what sort of mind would allow another person to take over so completely? Or, perhaps, that is the entire reason that Suzanne couldn't be the narrator - how can you be the main character of a book if you aren't the protagonist of your own life?
Ultimately, I would recommend The Girls to anyone looking for a dreamy summer read (I'm sure it's just as good in winter to warm you up, but I can't imagine reading this without sunlight streaming through the window and the smell of cut grass) with a grubby, gritty edge. The prose is gorgeous and perfectly nostalgic, the characters three-dimensional and as developed as the voices of teenage girls still undeveloped in themselves can be. It isn't salacious - the antithesis of the "paperbacks with the title bloody and oozing, the glossy pages of crime scene photographs" that Evie is pleased to have been left out of, but it's impossible to pretend that this isn't an imagined experience of one of the biggest stories of the century.
Read while:
Read while:
Listening to | You Must Remember This' 'Charles Manson's Hollywood' series and/or Stop Children What's that Sound on repeat
Wearing | a slightly grubby, full-length vintage white nightgown, no shoes, lots of rings, last week's eyeliner, flowers in your hair
Drinking | bitterly cheap red wine. From a mug.
Wearing | a slightly grubby, full-length vintage white nightgown, no shoes, lots of rings, last week's eyeliner, flowers in your hair
Drinking | bitterly cheap red wine. From a mug.
