The Girls

“Why would she care? She was lost in that deep and certain sense that there was nothing beyond her own experience. As if there were only one way things could go, the years leading you down a corridor to the room where your inevitable self waited—embryonic, ready to be revealed. How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed.”

This quote describes Sasha, Julian’s girlfriend. Sasha is young and therefore ignorant of the ways the world is difficult and disappointing. Evie sees herself in Sasha. Sasha’s “deep and certain sense that there was nothing beyond her own experience” reflects how Evie was before she met Suzanne. For Evie, Sasha’s youth is enviable but also something to fear. This quote suggests that Evie has become pessimistic about life and what’s in store for young people because her own adult life has not panned out the way she had once dreamed.

“When a coyote would come down from the hills and fight with the dog—the nasty, quick hiss that thrilled me—my father would shoot the coyote dead. Everything seemed that simple. The horses I copied from a pencil drawing book, shading in their graphite manes. Tracing a picture of a bobcat carrying away a vole in its jaws, the sharp tooth of nature. Later I’d see how the fear had been there all along […] How they told me I was having fun all the time, and there was no way to explain that I wasn’t.”

An important part of Evie’s backstory is growing up anxious and not knowing how to deal with fear. When she meets Suzanne, she overcorrects her nervous nature and dives into a dangerous kind of fun and excitement. Evie doesn’t know balance. The coyote in this quote symbolizes the natural danger inherent in being a human, and her father’s shooting the coyote represents the ways Evie’s parents protected her from danger. Despite their protection, Evie was still scared, which helps to explain her disassociation from her parents during the summer of 1969.

“That was the first time I ever saw Suzanne—her black hair marking her, even at a distance, as different, her smile at me direct and assessing. I couldn’t explain it to myself, the wrench I got from looking at her. She seemed as strange and raw as those flowers that bloom in lurid explosion once every five years, the gaudy, prickling tease that was almost the same thing as beauty. And what had the girl seen when she looked at me?”

This quote captures a pivotal moment in plot and character development. Evie’s first sighting of Suzanne changes the course of her life. Everything about Suzanne is different and therefore interesting. Evie finds Suzanne beautiful because of how confidently Suzanne carries those differences. The question posed at the end of this quote is important to understanding Evie’s character. She projects her own desires to be seen, to be interesting, onto Suzanne. If Suzanne can notice her, then that attention would make Evie special.

“That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and straightforward; they weren’t hiding anything.”

Cline explores how girls develop their sense of self in reflection of what boys are doing and how they are thinking. This is a societal issue in which girls internalize pressures to be special in the eyes of boys. Rather than get to know boys as equals, girls project how they want to be seen onto the boys. Childhood can be simpler; for example, the boys Evie meets as a teenager herself are “silly and straightforward.” Though the girls have to primp and hide and put on a mask, the boys are free to not hide anything.

“The way these girls spoke of Russell was different, their worship more practical, with none of the playful, girlish longing I knew. Their certainty was unwavering, invoking Russell’s power and magic as though it were as widely acknowledged as the moon’s tidal pull or the earth’s orbit.”

Cline characterizes the girls’ worship of Russell as a commitment that defies the playfulness behind the way other girls think or talk of boys and men. This heightens Russell’s intrigue; by seeing Russell through the girls’ eyes, Evie (and by extension, the reader) is attracted to the mystery of who Russell is and what he is capable of. When people speak of someone as though they are somehow super-human, that person becomes iconic, admirable, mysterious, and interesting. This quote also marks the difference between these girls and other girls Evie’s age; namely, that these girls are capable of deep and committed devotion that evokes a more adult lifestyle.

“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.”

In this quote, Cline characterizes Evie through her self-conscious self-perception. Because Evie is consumed by a sense of shame, she is unable to be critical of other people. She assumes that they’ll be critical of her first, and that criticism bothers her more than any signs that other people are not to be trusted. In other words, Evie is vulnerable because she is young and inexperienced. Her lack of experience and her anxiety about who she is make her an easy target for manipulation and abuse.

“It took me a moment to process this idea that parents didn’t have the right. It suddenly seemed blaringly true. My mother didn’t own me just because she had given birth to me. Sending me to boarding school because the spirit moved her. Maybe this was a better way, even though it seemed alien. To be part of this amorphous group, believing love could come from any direction. So you wouldn’t be disappointed if not enough came from the direction you’d hoped.”

Evie is shocked and intrigued by the girls’ idea, bred by Russell, that children don’t belong to their parents. Evie has been so alienated from her parents, who are on their own individual journeys through the challenges of adult life, that she welcomes this perspective. Evie doesn’t want to be controlled by her parents because she thinks they don’t understand her or truly care about her beyond how she makes them look. Evie likes the idea that love can be shared and spread around. If everyone is allowed to love everyone, then Evie doesn’t have to risk not being loved. This quote evokes some of the free-love philosophy of the 1960s.

“It was nothing like the feast I’d been imagining. The distance made me feel a little sad. But it was only sad in the old world, I reminded myself, where people stayed cowed by the bitter medicine of their lives. Where money kept everyone slaves, where they buttoned their shirts up to the neck, strangling any love they had inside themselves.”

Evie willfully ignores the signs of poverty and desperation at the commune. She convinces herself that these signs of poverty are sad only because she’s been raised by a materialistic and capitalistic society. She quickly uses terms like “old world” to connote the difference between her past life and the new life she pictures with the girls and Russell. Her ideas about money enslaving the human soul are also a byproduct of the free thinking and radical shifts in American culture in the 1960s.

“Already he’d become an expert in female sadness—a particular slump in the shoulders, a nervous rash. A subservient lilt at the end of sentences, eyelashes gone soft from crying. Russell did the same thing to me that he did to those girls. Little tests, first. A touch on my back, a pulse of my hand. Little ways of breaking down boundaries.”

This quote exposes Russell as a predator. He knows how to prey on girls weakened by the pressures of their society. He is an experienced seducer of vulnerable girls who don’t have other people to turn to. The little tests mentioned here are an important part of his process. He uses little tests to figure out if his hunch about a girl is correct; he knows not to take things too far and therefore avoid trouble if a girl ends up not being willing to fall for his masquerade.

“Poor Sasha. 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 song, 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.”

Sasha represents a haunting past for Evie. Evie has been through traumatic experiences with men and with love. She feels pity and sorrow for Sasha—and for herself. This quote is not just about Sasha and Evie; it’s a criticism of the ways society treats girls and women. Sasha believes society’s lies about romance and love; in believing in this narrative, Sasha will surely be disappointed, even crushed. Society lifts girls up to believe that their worth is tied to love, but then love ends up being a farce. Love can quickly turn to violence, and when it does, the girls and women are left abused and alone.

“Society was crowded with straight people, Russell told us, people in paralyzed thrall to corporate interest and docile as dosed lab chimps. Those of us at the ranch functioned on a whole other level, fighting against the miserable squall, and so what if you had to mess with the straight people to achieve larger goals, larger worlds?”

Russell feeds his followers a Robin Hood narrative in which stealing from the rich is acceptable as long as you reappropriate what has been stolen for a greater good. What his followers refuse to acknowledge is that the greater good, the larger goal, is Russell’s notoriety and pride. Through narratives such as the one communicated in this quote, Russell creates a worldview that manipulates his followers into distrusting the world outside the ranch, giving them no choice but to believe in him and the commune he’s created.

“Operating as satellite versions of Russell, though Guy’s deference was different from Suzanne’s. I think he stayed around because Russell was a way to get things he wanted—girls, drugs, a place to crash. He wasn’t in love with Russell, didn’t cower or pant in his presence—Guy was more like a sidekick, and all his blustery tales of adventure and hardship continue to star himself.”

Russell’s followers represent him in the world outside the ranch, doing his dirty work and sustaining both the ranch and Russell’s missions and reputation. Guy is a secondary character who stands out in juxtaposition to the girls who worship Russell because he is not intoxicated by Russell. Guy sees his lifestyle as an opportunity to be around girls and to go on adventures. Guy uses Russell to live out his own image of himself. This passage is important because it proves that not everybody is hypnotized by Russell. It also proves that the commune is not a genuine space of altruism and free love but rather an environment that fosters abuse and use of other people for one’s own selfish goals.

“The slap should have been more alarming. I wanted Russell to be kind, so he was. I wanted to be near Suzanne, so I believed the things that allowed me to stay there. I told myself there were things I didn’t understand. I recycled the words I’d heard Russell speak before, fashioned them into an explanation. Sometimes he had to punish us in order to show his love. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but he had to keep us moving forward, for the good of the group. It had hurt him, too.”

The ways people excuse Russell’s violent behavior is typical of victims in abusive relationships. To risk believing that Russell is capable of violence is to admit that he is imperfect or even dangerous and that the foundations of their belief in him are false. This quote explains how Russell’s followers willfully accept his narrative and make excuses for him when he acts out of character to his narrative. The ideas, for example, that someone deserves a slap or pain and that Russell doesn’t want to discipline anyone negate Russell’s responsibility for violence, protect his image, and place blame on his followers. Blaming the victims while absolving the abuser of responsibility is a dangerous dynamic.

“I gathered an unfamiliar braveness, a sense of pushing past limitations, and tried to give myself up to the uncertainty. I was locked into my body in a way that was unfamiliar. It was the knowledge, perhaps, that I would do whatever Suzanne wanted me to do. That was a strange thought—that there was just this banal sense of being moved along the bright river of whatever was going to happen. That it could be as easy as this.”

Evie’s attraction to Suzanne motivates her to act in uncharacteristic and immoral ways so that she can hold on to Suzanne’s attention and affection. In this quote, she explains the sensation of abandoning her own conscience to adapt to Suzanne’s behavior and desires. She recognizes that Suzanne has power over her, but she leans into that unequal power dynamic. She finds it surprisingly easy to be led to do things she would otherwise never consider doing. This quote emphasizes Evie’s connection to Suzanne and the power of manipulation on the psyche.

“I had a startling vision of Suzanne then. The desperation that showed through, the sudden sense of a dark space yawning in her. I didn’t think of what that dark space might be capable of, only a doubling of my desire to be near it.”

Evie knows that Suzanne is capable of terror. She senses that Suzanne has a psychopathic darkness that is threatening and dangerous. Even so, Evie doesn’t become averse to Suzanne. She is attracted to Suzanne’s darkness and to the potential for something terrible to happen. This emphasizes how lost in her love and desire for Suzanne Evie has become and the ways a person can hold an unbalanced and aggressive influence over another.

“I could see how rattled she was by this confusing new situation. Her daughter had never been a problem before, had always zipped along without resistance, as tidy and self-contained as those fish that clean their own tanks. And why would she bother to expect otherwise or even prepare herself for the possibility?”

When Evie’s mother is confronted with Evie’s bad behavior, things shift for Evie. The confrontation by her mother changes Evie’s movement and even makes her second guess her own actions. This quote also emphasizes how different Evie has become since meeting Suzanne. Evie may have always been average, but she had never caused trouble or been someone her mother needed to worry about. Now, Evie’s mother sees that she’s lost control of the situation and that her daughter is in trouble. This quote captures the disillusionment that is paralleled in the Manson murders: Essentially, no one prepares themselves for the possibility of horror until horror happens.

“Tamar was sweet and kind, but the world she moved around in seemed like a television set: limited and straightforward and mundane, with the notations and structures of normality. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There wasn’t a frightening gap between the life she was living and the way she thought about that life, a dark ravine I often sensed in Suzanne, and maybe in my own self as well.”

Tamar is a foil to Suzanne. She connects with Evie in safe and affectionate ways, not in the sexual and depraved way that Evie and Suzanne connect. But a relationship built on kindness, friendship, and niceness is not sufficient for Evie. She believes that she has too much darkness in her, which is what attracts her to Suzanne. Because she doesn’t have the doubts and fears that Evie has, Tamar can live a life that feels authentic. Evie is still trying to figure out her identity, so she feels disconnected from life itself.

“That was the strange thing—I didn’t hate my father. He had wanted something. Like I wanted Suzanne. Or my mother wanted Frank. You wanted things, and you couldn’t help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong?”

Evie starts recognizing her desire in others. This is a major moment of character development because understanding that your parents are individuals with their own desires just like you is a step toward adulthood and away from childhood. Evie tries to make space for her mother’s and father’s relationships with other people by sympathizing with their desire and thirst for love. But what Evie still doesn’t recognize is that, unlike her relationship with Suzanne, her parents’ relationships with their significant others are healthy and stable. Also important in this quote is Cline’s commentary on the nature of want and how every individual has desires that only they live with and can hold only themselves accountable for. Desire and want are not necessarily formulaic and predictable but are inherently personal and sometimes inexplicable.

“But the ranch proved that you could live at a rarer pitch. That you could push past these petty human frailties and into a greater love. I believed, in the way of adolescents, in the absolute correctness and superiority of my love. My own feelings forming the definition. Love of that kind was something my father and even Tamar could never understand, and of course I had to leave.”

In the biochemistry of the adolescent brain, life is heightened by out-of-control emotions. As a teenager, Evie doesn’t have the life experience or the development to realize that the reason her father and Tamar don’t experience love the way she does is because they are more rational and centered in their adult experiences of love. Evie doesn’t want centered and rational; she wants to experience life in ecstatic and extreme ways. In this quote, the ranch symbolizes Evie’s desire for extreme love and desire.

“By that time, the ranch I’d known was a place that no longer existed. The end had already arrived: each interaction its own elegy. But there was too much hopeful momentum in me to notice.”

For most of the novel, the ranch symbolizes Evie’s desire for community, affection, love, and inclusiveness. But by Chapter 12, the symbolism of the ranch shifts. The ranch becomes a physical manifestation of the evil growing inside the group. Its rundown, dirty, poor exterior echoes Russell’s anger and Suzanne’s capacity for violence. This development of symbolism marks the beginning of the end of Evie’s love affair with the ranch and the commune it hosts. Here, again, Evie attempts to willfully ignore the reality right in front of her.

“I tried to convince myself, seeing the familiarity of Russell’s face, that the ranch was the same, though when he hugged me, I saw something smeared at his jawline. It was his sideburns. They were not stippled, like hair, but flat. I looked closer. They were drawn on, I saw, with some kind of charcoal or eyeliner. The thought disturbed me; the perverseness, the fragility of the deception.”

When Evie realizes that Russell fakes his exterior aesthetic, it’s a step closer to her lifting the mask off the ranch and the pull Russell has on her. Evie has willfully ignored signs of obvious trouble at the ranch and within Russell. Now that she notices Russell’s false scruff, she can start to notice all of the things that are fake, misguided, and farcical about him and his commune.

“But I had never felt scared. That night was different, by the ring of stones with the barest of fires going. No one paid any attention when the flames dissolved to nothing, everyone’s roiling energy directed at Russell, who moved like a rubber band about to snap.”

In this passage, Cline uses metaphor and imagery to capture the fear Evie feels before the murders. The metaphor of the ring of stones with the barest of fires symbolizes the deterioration of the commune. The campfire literally dissolves, but also metaphorically dissolves as a representation of the dissolution of the group’s former sense of joy and joie de vivre. This quote also emphasizes Russell’s control over the group’s emotions, as his stress becomes their stress.

“I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they’d understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly. That seemed fair to me, as if fairness were a measure the universe cared anything about.”

Evie naively believes that love is sufficient to keep people protected. Evie is young enough to still believe that the universe is good, but her experiences with Suzanne teach her the opposite lesson: that the world turns and can’t and won’t care about Evie’s devotion, love, or desires. Because Evie learns this lesson in traumatic ways at a young and vulnerable age, the summer of 1969 haunts her throughout her life.