The Girls and Charles Manson

The Girls is a hazy, lazy, highly fictionalised, but precisely, gorgeously written reworking of the Charles Manson story. Rather than retread the familiar tales of the cult and the murders it committed in 1969, Cline focuses on a (fictionalised) group of Manson’s young, female acolytes and their bittersweet relationships.

The narrator is Evie Boyd, now middle-aged and watching the days crumble away “like debris from a cliff face”. When she is woken up by unexpected guests in her borrowed home, her mind flashes back to childhood. Aged 14, bored and friendless she lives in a big house paid for by her once-famous actress grandmother with a divorced mother who struggles to notice her.

One day, eating a hamburger alone in the park, she is electrified by the sight of a group of grubby girls with long, tangled hair, diving into a bin for food.

After a couple more chance encounters, she gets on the gang’s battered, black bus and arrives at the ranch where she immediately succumbs to its drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and, soon enough, sex lifestyle. The leader there is Russell Hadrick,who uses techniques honed while working for a religious organisation to woo his prey – “thin, harried girls with partial college degrees and neglectful parents…”

The bloodshed remains on the novel’s periphery, as does Russell/ Manson. What sets the book apart is its exquisitely forensic portrait of what it is to be a young woman, craving attention and a sense of belonging. Looking back on her adolescent beauty regime, she writes: “All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you – the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”