When I picked up The Girls by Emma Cline, I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy it. There were so many low reviews on Goodreads that slammed it for following closely to the Manson Family while not just writing out the real life events. Since I’m trying to avoid real-life cults in this series, I wasn’t sure if this book would be “too real” for me to put into the category of social imagination. But reading it, I came across two important discoveries:
- I shouldn’t give too much weight to Goodreads reviews. They can have some interesting points to be aware of, but they rarely fit my reading lens. So… a whole saltshaker of salt when it comes to reviews.
- I may need to rethink what I am reading as far as “real cults” goes. The goal of this project is to create a sampling of the social imagination around cults through time and space. For me, this is done by contrasting the tropes of the period with what the author chooses to emphasize. While works about fictional cults are (imo) likelier to use period tropes, rewriting a popular cult can also show social imagination by riding even closer to the mass imagination of specific events. The comparison of what happened and what the writer chooses to emphasize or rewrite is just as powerful when trying to understand how cults form and why we are fascinated with them.
In other words — I very much enjoyed the novel. I found it poignant and bittersweet and, at times, too real for comfort. If you want to read a book, read it. Don’t second guess yourself because it wasn’t what someone else was looking for.
As a note, I listened to the Audible version narrated by Cady McClain. I really enjoyed the narration, but there were some parts where I could tell if I was reading it my emphasis would have been different.
If Cultism Took Practiced Being Embodied
As the title suggests, The Girls follows the girls and women involved in a cult. The main character, Evie, begins the book lost and adrift in a confusing adolescence when she sees the titular girls running through a park, reveling in chaos, and then dumpster diving. Evie is entranced with the way these women take up space compared to the other women in her life (herself included) who are oppressed, weak, and static.
While the book addresses the cult leader and some of the men in the cult, it centers around the women. Amanda Montell, author of Cultish, writes that cults most often follow the same misogynistic structure as society: an all powerful man at the top, surrounded by fair-skinned, young women who surrender their sex and autonomy for power, and then everyone else. The Girls explores that inner circle.
If the cult leader is the head, then these women are the body. They are the arms and legs and beating heart of a cult. Many times, the book felt like a practice in embodiment: what if we forgot that a cult had a head and instead existed in its muscles and bones for 300 pages?
Want to follow me down a rabbit hole about whether women are more likely than men to join cults and why we think they are? Check out this article by Amanda Montell.
I’m guessing this book is not unique in its take. Many books will focus on the cult members. But I think I was shocked by how little like a victim the cult members were written. Yes, you could clearly see Russell taking advantage of them, and there were clear sketches of the oppression of women in the patriarchy drawn around these characters, but these scenes seemed a digression from the novel: living as young woman.
And life as a young woman is hard. It is complicated. It is equal parts shame, fear, excitement, rage, and bitterness. These girls felt oppression and some learned how to turn it, using its weight to slap out at those around her. They were far from sweet and innocent victims. But they were, all the same, victims. The were complex.
Add to this that Evie is experiencing her sexual awakening as a bi woman. We get fourteen year old Evie in a body she has already learned to judge faced with a woman she isn’t sure if she wants to hang out with, have sex with, or be. In that way, a lot of the book is about Evie’s body — her relation to it, the way she uses it, and the way others use it.
Genre: Literary Coming of Age
The Girls is a literary coming of age novel. There’s a lot of fourteen-year-old navel gazing, but in a good way. Entire paragraphs dedicated to ice cream melting. I think the literary genre may get at the motivation that drives cults more clearly than other genres because it’s allowed the space to examine our desire, awareness, and sensation. The entire book was a trope, in a way, because it pulls on the knowledge of the Manson Family – not the historical details as much as the blurry conception of who the Manson girls were. But it takes them from who they were in the moment of murder and places them in a dozen positions of who they might have been. At the end, the narrator even guesses that Suzanne spared her to allow her to live on as her avatar – a version of her who was not corrupted by the cult. But is that Suzanne’s wish, or the narrator giving her own wish – that Suzanne will continue to exist as a darker side of herself?
POV Character
Evie was a fourteen-year-old girl whose story is one of finding, joining, and separating from a cult. It is a lot to fit into a single novel, and I feel like it can work because entire weeks were swept into a few paragraphs of emotion. This smudgy painting style of writing captured how it feels to be a fourteen year old girl – time speeds by and you’re stuck in a lazy river, and then suddenly you find the current of it and are swept along. Slow. Fast. Slow again. Summers passed, each one significant enough to fill a novel.
As a mother, this was terrifying to read. Because we see just how vulnerable adolescents are. Big enough to be out there in society, and yet helpless. In several scenes Evie ridiculed the adults around her as stupid or embarrassingly inept. While this feels like a childish “I know everything” moment, it also shows just how perceptive and intelligent a fourteen year old can be. They are old enough to understand and even draw out the social structures around them, sometimes even more clearly than the adults who have chosen to become blind to them. But at the same time they are too young to notice when someone is taking advantage of them and they have little sense of how others honestly feel about them. In other words: perfect targets for cults.
And terrifying.
We also get a few chapters of Evie as an adult, looking after Sasha who crashes for the weekend along with her boyfriend and his drug dealer friend. In these moments we see Evie looking out for the younger generation and failing to protect her. Partly because Sasha won’t listen, but also because Evie is helpless. Even though she’s a full adult, she still can’t win when faced with the expectations of the patriarchy, which is maybe the biggest cult of all.
Cult Stage
No name, no philosophy beyond free love, the cult Evie joins is still a mature one. They have moved to several locations before coming to the ranch, and its clear Russell has control over the cult members. Throughout the book his control will tighten, and in the end the cult will dwindle to its core members, followed by the famous killing, after which it will more or less disband when the core circle goes to jail. However, the book doesn’t feel as if it’s vibing on the inevitable life cycle of a cult. The already established cult worked because it became a place where Evie could find acceptance and love, and the ending of the cult almost felt like an afterthought.
Cult Focus
This was a cult of personality. The girls lived and breathed Russell. His desire and emotions drove the cult. When he was happy, the cult did well. When he was ashamed or angry, the cult suffered. The entire spiral of the cult was caused by Russell not getting a record deal. Strangely, since the focus wasn’t on this larger-than-life being, Russell felt like a caricature of a man. We get the feeling that he’s pure evil – that all the men who joined the cult knew exactly what they were doing and were there for sex with young women and power. This felt the most tropey to me, and I think there is room for more nuanced writing of cult leaders. I wanted to feel why the girls fell for him. But since Evie seemed immune to his charms, almost as if she was putting up with him rather than enthralled with him, we don’t get any sense of texture or complexity around him.
Are you a good cult or a bad cult?
This was written as a bad cult. There was very little good to it. Even at its peak, the members were eating rotten food and living in a trash heap. The abuse was also there – although it became more pronounced as time progressed. But even so, Evie saw the good in it. She saw the dilapidated ranch as a palace since it was a place she could be free from her parents’ divorce and impending expectations. She saw the people as beautiful, even though she was able to admit they were just plain. Even as an adult, Evie is able to see the beauty of those months she spent at the ranch. While the cult seemed to offer nothing but pain and misery, it did give her a moment when she felt accepted and powerful and… ironically… free.
Main Takeaways
The main take away I have with this book is that it seems like cults might be written much more obliquely than serial killers. When I read serial killer books, the book is about the serial killer. With cult books, it seems likely the cult is a setting or a force, or a metaphor, but the book is not going to be about the cult. It’s going to be about the one character and their journey, however that happens to touch a cult. This seems like it will make things a little more difficult to get into.
/
| Title | Author | Year Published | Genre | Type of Cult | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mister Magic | Kiersten White | 2023 | Read | ||
| Geek Love | Katherine Dunn | 1989 | Need to Re-read | ||
| Oryx and Crake | Margaret Atwood | 2003 | Read | ||
| The Girls | Emma Cline | 2016 | literary | personality | Read |
| The Stepford Wives | Ira Levin | 2002 | |||
| The Chosen One | Carol Lynch Williams | 2009 | |||
| Jamaica Inn | Daphne du Maurier | 1936 | |||
| The Project | Courtney Summers | 2021 | |||
| The Shadow Over Innsmouth | H.P. Lovecraft | 1936 | |||
| Gather The Daughters | Jennie Melamed | 2017 | |||
| Seed | Lisa Heathfield | 2015 | |||
| Mr. Splitfoot | Samantha Hunt | 2016 | |||
| God Shot | Chelsea Bieker | 2020 | |||
| The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly | Stephanie Oakes | 2015 | |||
| Survivor | Chick Palahniuk | 1999 | |||
| The Family | Marissa Kennerson | 2014 | |||
| Black Sheep | Rachel Harrison | 2023 | |||
| Jesus Song | R.R. Knudson | 1974 | |||
| Blinded by the Light | Robin F. Brancato | 1978 | |||
| The Cult | Max Ehrlich | 1978 | |||
| The Devil’s Daughter | Katee Robert | 2017 | Thriller/Romance | non-christian religious (Persephone) | Read |
| Vineland | Thomas Pynchon | 1990 | |||
| Mao II | Don DeLillo | 1991 | |||
| Bunny | Mona Awad | 2019 |
