The Girls

It was an age when I'd immediately scan and rank other girls, keeping up a constant tally of how I fell short, and I saw right away that the black-haired one was the prettiest. I had expected this, even before I'd been able to make out their faces. There was a suggestion of otherworldliness hovering around her, a dirty smock dress barely covering her ass. She was flanked by a skinny redhead and an older girl, dressed with the same shabby afterthought. As if dredged from a lake. All their cheap rings like a second set of knuckles. They were messing with an uneasy threshold, prettiness and ugliness at the same time, and a ripple of awareness followed them through the park. Mothers glancing around for their children, moved by a feeling they couldn't name. Women reaching for their boyfriends' hands. The sun spiked through the trees, like always – the drowsy willows, the hot wind gusting over the picnic blankets – but the familiarity of the day was disturbed by the path the girls cut across the regular world. Sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water.

I remember being twelve and one hot summer day walking down the street to the mailbox – dressed in the clothes of a child; rainbow shorts, flip-flops, a T-shirt with a Beatles lunchbox on the front and “Ringo” on the back – and as I passed a van with two contractors standing by it, one of them called out, “Ah, Ringo, don't just pass on by.” I turned and gawped at them, and these two grown men were chuckling and leering, and I spun back around, scarlet and frightened, and wondered to myself, “Don't they know I'm twelve?” I remember every detail of that scene and the conflicted emotions I was feeling: Should I be scared? Flattered? Do I suddenly look grownup or are they just pervs? Being a young girl catcalled for the first time is the definition of ambivalence: am I becoming more powerful (provoking outbursts in helpless men) or have I somehow joined the ranks of the powerless (forced to receive vaguely menacing, unwanted attention)? The Girls by Emma Cline is all about this brink, and on nearly every page, I was nodding and smiling and saying, “Yes, it was just like that”. I have never before read a book that so perfectly captured the emotions (if not the actual details) of my own coming-of-age story, and as a result, I can't help but give it my highest recommendation.

Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like 'sunset' and 'Paris'. Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus.

The plot (mild spoilers): In the present, Evie Boyd is a late middle-aged woman; a live-in caregiver between jobs who is staying at a friend's house until something comes along. When the friend's teenaged son and his girlfriend show up unexpectedly, Evie gets an ego boost out of being recognised as a minor figure in a Manson Family-type commune/cult. The book alternates between the present – where Evie can see that the young girlfriend is making all the same mistakes she had once made (allowing herself to be controlled by a manipulative man in a grasping bid for love) – and the past; the summer that Evie was fourteen and in thrall to Russell (the guitar-playing, buckskin-wearing cult leader), but more forcefully, in thrall to his girls (and especially Suzanne). Cline does a wonderful job of showing how Evie would have been vulnerable at the time – her Dad had left with a younger woman and her Mom was “working on herself” and dating inappropriate men; her best friend decided to dump her; she had confused feelings of arousal when she found her father's nudie magazines – and when Suzanne and the other girls showed up in town, when they started paying attention to little Evie, she thought she had found a new mother/best friend/sex object. Everything about Evie at this age – trying to get the attention of a friend's older brother, thinking it was sexy to wear clothes she had outgrown, testing out her powers on younger boys – was so familiar to me, but more important than these frequent piercing details was just the overall feeling of existential sadness that Evie felt: she wasn't poor or abused, just sad, and I can totally remember what that feels like. It was fascinating to me that Evie still feels this sadness in her adult life: having never married or had kids, not feeling real satisfaction in her career – she doesn't even have a home of her own – Evie can look back and almost wish that she had been brought along on the murder spree; if she had spent her adult life in jail, at least she would know who she was .

That was part of being a girl – you were resigned to whatever feedback you'd get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they'd backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.

The format was perfect: since Evie is looking back on her experience, she is able to add in little bits of insight and perspective that she had gained over the years (even facts about the other members of the Family that she had later read in books but wouldn't have known in the moment), and yet in the flashback scenes, I totally believed that I was in the mind of a fourteen-year-old girl. I also marvelled at how Cline (at 25) could have so perfectly captured the vibe of the era: it's even mentioned in passing that Evie had reread a book where, “a silversmith accidentally spills molten silver on his hand” and I gasped; I read that book as a child in the 70s and that image of the liquid silver splashing over flesh has come floating back to me so many times over the decades (I'd love to know what book that was). And here's another thing: In my early twenties, I read stacks of books about cults – Moonies and Jonestown and the Manson Family themselves – and I always got a little thrill thinking about how easy it would be to get seduced by offers of love and group acceptance. In so many ways, The Girls seems written just for me, and although I'm aware that that means it won't have universal appeal, I'm still awarding it all the stars.