Girl Crush: Emma Cline
In the fall of 2014, Emma Cline couldn’t quite wrap her head around the fact that— at 25 years old—she had just landed a $2 million book deal (and sold the movie rights) for her debut novel, The Girls, which is loosely based on the female members of the Charles Manson cult. “I had a legitimate nervous breakdown,” said Cline. “Someone said to me, ‘This must be the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to you’. And I was like ‘yes’ and then I would go back to my house and watch a lot of reality TV. I watched about seven or eight seasons of The Real Housewives.” Cline has an MFA from Columbia where one of her professors said the stories she submitted tended to focus on “that moment in a young woman’s life when she is wrestling with an emerging sexuality that’s scary and slightly dangerous, but also empowering” while another described her as being “head and shoulders above everybody else” in her class. Having grown up in Northern California, Cline was familiar with the Manson legend—thanks mostly to Vincent Bugliosi’s infamous book Helter Skelter—but ”I never felt I knew enough about the Manson women,” she said. “I was probably 15 or 16 when I read Helter Skelter again, and a lot of the girls in the Manson story were only a few years older than I was at that time. I wanted to know more about their psychology, about what would lead these young women from “normal” families, who had been homecoming queens and straight-A students, into this horrifying other realm. No books really answered the questions I had about them.” Cline’s book deal with Random House includes a future short-story collection and a yet-to-be-written second novel. The Girls will be released June 3. Here’s a video of Cline and her editor giving the backstory on how the novel came together.
