Emma Cline is a writer who seemed to hit her stride straight out of the gate. Her bestselling 2016 debut The Girls, which told the story of a Manson family-type cult, was praised for its canny structure, moving seamlessly between time frames, and for the sheer density of imagery, although what was most striking about the novel was how assured it was.
In person, Cline is more hesitant. We are in Brooklyn today, in the flat of a friend she is staying with while visiting from LA. The 34-year-old is Californian by birth and upbringing, and it is tempting to read in her a sort of wispy Didion-esque aura one associates with that part of the world. She appears watchful, her voice tremulous with good humour, and she is a leaver of pauses, some more agonised than others, while seeking out the right meaning. Writing her new novel The Guest was, she says, partly a reaction against The Girls – a deliberate flexing of other muscles – and partly a way of “giving myself the challenge of can I write a novel-length work that has some of the tension I like in a short story”.
Appearing seven years after The Girls, The Guest is a contemporary tale that unfolds over the course of seven days. Its protagonist, Alex, has almost no backstory. The action is limited to a few square miles of Long Island. There are no deaths, or explosions, or external dramas of any great magnitude, just an intense engagement with the narrow field of vision before her, as Alex moves through an increasingly stressful and impossible week. The tension never wavers. It is weirdly compelling and often very funny. The story follows Alex as she leaves the city, bridges burned, debts trailing, in pursuit of a wealthy older man she is dating to his second home in the Hamptons. This is rich material for Cline, who trains a chilly eye on the preposterous affluence and exclusivity of that part of the world. We never leave Alex’s head and through her passive, affectless gaze find ourselves in an environment in which she is almost invisible; a young woman and former sex worker, a grifter of sorts, who believes herself to be in a “real” relationship with a man about whom the reader may come to different conclusions.
The inquiries of the novel weren’t always apparent to Cline at the time of writing, but are “things that I only notice in retrospect. With Alex it is this question of: is there a weird power in being an object? What is that power? What are the limits of that power? And what does it mean to have that invisibility, so that people will do and say things in front of you that they wouldn’t say and do if they thought you were a full-fledged human being?”
Some of Alex’s deadpan observations are so on the money they made me wince to imagine on whom Cline might have based them. One night, Alex is taken by the man to the house of a rich friend of his, where the hostess, Helen, is regarded by the much younger woman with frank derision. Helen has invested in an app, which if she were to be believed, writes Cline, “was perfecting a technology that diagnosed illness from a breathalyzer you plugged into your phone”. Helen says certain phrases with emphasis: “SDKs. Daily granularity. Someone must have just taught her what these terms meant. ‘Our art needs more technology and our technology needs more art,’ Helen bleated, looking into the middle distance.” On the wall, there are framed sketches, as Alex thinks, “probably the leftovers of someone important. People like Helen loved to display the artefacts of creativity as if that implicated her in the process.”
Cline spent time in the Hamptons during the decade she lived in New York after finishing graduate school at Columbia University. What struck her most about it was its deceptive mildness; that part of the world, at a glance, looks like England and many of the towns have English names. Certainly compared with where Cline came from, a part of northern California where, she says, “the beaches are rocky and the waters are shark-infested and it’s more of an aggressive encounter with the elements”. By contrast, Long Island’s “micro-community” can appear almost “surreal” in its placidity. “But then [underneath there are] all the ways in which it is mediated by money. It’s so obviously not a place for outsiders. And there are all these overt and less overt ways that they make that clear. That combination struck me as very strange and engaging. I wondered what it would look like to be in this setting when you weren’t supposed to be.”
In The Girls, which Cline wrote over a period of years when she lived in an unheated shed in the Brooklyn garden of a friend (more on that in a moment), the protagonist, Evie, is a 14-year-old experimenting with what happens when you let yourself drift; from your family, your community, yourself. Cline’s eye for an arresting image is never more acute than when she’s describing young women, in this case followers of a cult leader, who move around “with their air of biblical poverty”, simultaneously powerless and unnerving. In public, writes Cline, these woman appear as “sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water”.
Drift – the idea of coming in and out of focus – interests Cline. With Evie, this particular dynamic ends up placing her on the periphery of a notorious murder. In the case of Alex in The Guest, it gets her evicted from the tiny, precarious ice floe of safety she had been, for a second, enjoying. Cline exposes the peaceful civility that characterises the wealthy spaces of the Hamptons as a sham, “the appearance of calm demanding an endless campaign of violent intervention”.
At one point in a group setting, Alex strategically makes herself small and invisible, and Cline writes, “she was used to this, the politeness of pretending that things that were happening were not, in fact, happening” – a particularly female form of self-erasure. “I had this image of a woman out in the ocean and people were waiting for her on shore. And once she got to shore she would have to face some horrible thing. And the feeling of just being, like, can’t I stay out here for ever? Knowing you have to go in but not wanting to go in. That emotional atmosphere is what I was looking for. But of course you don’t want a lecture about female agency or who has power and who doesn’t. This stuff naturally ripples out of a character, but not in a conscious way for me.”
Cline’s sensitivity to space, power and group dynamics all draw from her family background. She grew up in Sonoma, northern California, where her parents were winemakers, the second oldest of seven children – five of them girls – all born within 10 years of each other. Even now, it occasionally startles her how many of them there are. “Sometimes when I’m out to dinner with friends I’m like, OK, this plus four more people would be my family.” She laughs. To have that many siblings takes up an awful lot of one’s hard drive. As Cline says: “The psychic weight of a human being is huge. And seven of them?!” But those relationships are nourishing and “have been so sweet to me, especially as an adult”. Her next youngest sister, Hilary, is her first reader and she dedicated The Guest to her.
As a young person growing up in a family that large, finding a singular identity was paramount and as a child, Cline wanted to be an actor. She took herself off to auditions and booked a few jobs. (She had a small role as the young Billie Jean King in a 2001 TV movie called When Billie Met Bobby, in which Holly Hunter played the adult tennis legend.) Now she smiles and looks pained. “I was a really bad child actor. Extremely bad.” Did she know she was bad at the time? “I could tell based on the reactions of the adults that sometimes I was bad, and sometimes I was less bad, but I couldn’t tell the difference. So it was this baffling and stressful experience.” But it was the first indication, says Cline, that she was “drawn to artificiality; that you could make a world off to the side of the real world” in a way that was related to writing. “I think the impulse is similar. Like, what does it mean to be a human, why do humans act the way they do, what does it mean if they’re saying this but their face is saying this?”
After studying for a degree in art at Middlebury College in Vermont and receiving an MFA from Columbia she started writing The Girls. Cline had already had some success at that point; a short story she wrote in college, Marion, had won the Paris Review’s prestigious Plimpton prize and publishers were circling. When The Girls eventually sold at auction as part of a three-book deal, it went for a seven-figure sum. (The screen rights, which are now with Hulu, were at one stage owned by Scott Rudin and there is a script in existence written by Todd Field, writer and director of the recent Oscar-nominated movie Tar. “He wrote a bananas and great script for it; so cool,” says Cline, who has no idea where the project lies in development.)
She came up with the idea for The Girls, which tells a loose version of the Sharon Tate murder, as a kind of “container” for a lot of thoughts she wanted to explore “about California, and girlhood”, among other things. While writing it, she lived in a shed in her friend’s garden. It was unheated, there was a toilet but no shower, and it got so cold in the winter that “the olive oil got slushy. Oh and I remember the many months of silverfish.” She laughs. “What was so great about it was that I could see everything I owned all at once. It was a winnowing down to the totally essential. I didn’t have internet. I would listen to the radio. I wrote a lot of letters. I miss the shed!”
Cline has since moved back to California and now lives alone in LA. In between writing The Girls and The Guest, she published a book of short stories called Daddy inspired by the post-Weinstein downfall of an entire cohort of men, with particular focus on their self-justifications.
In 2017 she had to deal with the messy and upsetting business of an ex-boyfriend, Chaz Reetz-Laiolo, suing her for copyright infringement, claiming sections of The Girls drew from a screenplay of his that she had accessed on their shared computer. A judge dismissed the suit, and Cline characterised the relationship as “abusive” and the lawsuit as a “total assault”.(Reetz-Laiolo denied any allegations of physical abuse.)
The legal action wasted a lot of her time, energy and focus. For years, The Guest was a work-in-progress, only without a great deal of progress – a project she repeatedly picked up and put down again. She had been inspired in part by The Swimmer, a short story by John Cheever in which an apparently conventional tale of a man at a suburban pool party takes a sudden surreal plunge towards something much more terrifying. “And there’s no explanation,” says Cline. “There’s just this horrible hurtling sense that you have landed in a nightmare and your life is gone. In what way did you waste it? That story is so harrowing to me.”
Cline calls the long gestation period of The Guest normal for the way she writes novels, a process of bumping up against the initial idea countless times. “A novel is so long haul, you have to psych yourself up for it. You have to trick yourself into writing a novel, ease into it.” In the early stages, she says, a lot of the thinking happens “in the corner of my eye. OK, the novel’s there, but I’m not going to freak myself out too much by going to work on it. I’ll write a little bit; keep loose notes. Allow myself to sneak up on it a little.”
Meanwhile, it’s important to participate in the world. “You just have to live! You have to be a human being!” There is almost no such thing as procrastination, says Cline; everything is useful, even reading the Daily Mail. She bursts out laughing. “As a record of our culture’s deepest fears and deepest obsessions, it’s actually a totally fascinating document. I find it really moving in a way.”
Moving?
“Or I can get a lot out of reading about this horrific thing that is happening and then the next article is six foods to eat if you never want to get cancer and die! Or these are the rules we have about who’s a winner and who’s a loser. I just find humans so interesting.”
She carries into her reading the same curiosity she brings to her writing, plus something else, a distancing technique that allows for all sorts of possibilities in the face of injury. “I’m not interested in colluding over a character’s head about how we’re so much better than they are,” she says. Passing judgment in that way isn’t helpful. She is merely observing; collecting data; sharing her findings. There is, of course, “a place for moral judgment in society”. Cline smiles. “But fiction writers are not my preferred enforcers.”
• The Guest by Emma Cline is published by Vintage (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
