The Girls, by Emma Cline

Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten
after their 1971 conviction in the Manson murders.

The Girls is a coming-of-age novel on steroids. Its protagonist, Evie Boyd, is as malleable, impressionable, and affection-seeking as any adolescent girl. Evie, however, falls in with the slightly older group of girls who hover around Russell Hadrick. In 1960s California, that might be the beginning of a hippy, trippy tale of teenage abandon, but this rapidly turns dark when we realise that Russell is a dead ringer for Charles Manson and the young women for his "family."

I found this book gripping and chilling. I remember my own adolescence---my alienation from my parents, my rebelliousness and isolation, my almost desperate hunger for affirmation and camaraderie. As I look at Evie, I see a 14-year-old who is relatively bright, self-aware, from a decent enough (if broken) family---and utterly vulnerable (and that vulnerability escapes her self-awareness until she's telling the story, in retrospect).

To compound matters, she's fallen in with a cult that drifts around a charismatic man, whose followers see him as all but mythical.

Donna said Russell was unlike any other human. That he could receive messages from animals. That he could heal a man with his hands, pull the rot out of you as cleanly as a tumor. “He sees every part of you,” Roos added. As if that were a good thing.

When one believes that Russell is practically superhuman, of course his opinion carries a lot of weight. In retrospect, Evie can see the power dynamics.

The possibility of judgment being passed on me supplanted any worries or questions I might have about Russell. At that age, I was, first and foremost, a thing to be judged, and that shifted the power in every interaction onto the other person.

Evie's hindsight is beyond acute, and what she sees is painful. The cult's male members, led by Russell, treat the women as little better than livestock (and of course the story's version of Sharon Tate fares even worse). I found myself wondering if the real Manson family women ever looked back on events with this much clarity.

We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them—they would never sense the lack or even know there was something more they should be looking for.

I love books that delve into the territory of "What on earth was s/he thinking?" We Need to Talk about Kevin comes to mind, plunking us right into the centre of a high-school mass-killer's family. The Girls is an astute and stylishly written look inside the dynamics of the Manson cult, or perhaps any cult.