Emma Cline: influences, peers and legacy

Every connection with its receipt

Emma Cline writes California as a place of heat, boredom and latent violence — The Girls refracts the Manson murders through a teenage girl's hunger for belonging, and The Guest turns Long Island's end-of-summer into a slow-motion eviction. This mix traces the lineage: Didion's dry sentences, the true-crime underground literature of the Manson years, the Sonoma vineyard childhood, and the cohort of women novelists who made drift and dissociation a form.

The Kynda mix for Emma Cline

• Key Influence · Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (1970). The inescapable precursor for Cline: Didion's novel of a woman adrift on California freeways, written in clipped white-space paragraphs, established the register of affectless dread that The Girls and The Guest both work in. Didion also covered the Manson murders and the summer of 1969 in her essays, making her the bridge between Cline's subject matter and her style — the flat sentence that registers catastrophe without raising its voice.
• Influencia Obscura · The Family by Ed Sanders (1971). Before Helter Skelter became the standard account, Sanders — poet and member of the Fugs — published this gonzo, deeply reported chronicle of the Manson group from inside the counterculture it emerged from. It is the Manson book that treats the ranch as a social world rather than a crime scene, and that angle is exactly Cline's in The Girls: the chores, the garbage-bin food runs, the hierarchy among the women rather than the murders themselves.
• Local Roots · Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan (1967). Cline grew up on a Sonoma County vineyard, in the Northern California that Brautigan turned into a deadpan pastoral of creeks, campgrounds and hippie improvisation during the exact years The Girls is set. His book is the literary weather of the region just before the 1969 turn to menace — the utopian version of the back-to-the-land drift that Cline's Russell and his followers represent in its curdled, coercive form.
• Beyond the Medium · Badlands by Terrence Malick (1973). Malick's debut narrates a killing spree through the voice of an infatuated teenage girl whose diction stays girlish while horror accumulates — exactly the structural trick of The Girls, where Evie's retrospective narration keeps circling her crush on Suzanne rather than the murders. The sun-bleached American landscape treated as indifferent backdrop to violence is the visual grammar Cline's prose repeatedly reaches for.
• Peer · My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018). Moshfegh is Cline's closest contemporary: both emerged via The Paris Review and The New Yorker, both write beautiful, affectless young women who behave badly, and both are read as diagnosing dissociation as a condition of American womanhood. Her narrator's pharmaceutical withdrawal from Manhattan is the structural cousin of Alex's drifting week in The Guest — a protagonist who refuses to want what she is supposed to want.
• From the Canon · The Girls by Emma Cline (2016). The debut that made her name: Evie Boyd, fourteen and ignored in 1969 Northern California, is pulled toward a commune modeled on the Manson family, and the novel insists the real story is the girls' devotion to each other rather than the charismatic man or the killings. It was shortlisted for the NBCC John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and set the template for her lyric-plus-dread sentence.
• Key Collaborator · Submission by Michel Houellebecq (2015). Stein edited The Paris Review when it awarded Cline its 2014 Plimpton Prize for the story 'Marion,' the publication that preceded and helped launch The Girls. Alongside editing, Stein was Houellebecq's English translator, and this version of Submission showcases his ear for cold, affectless first-person narration — precisely the register he championed in the young writers the magazine put forward during his tenure.
• Legacy · Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan (2021). Nolan's debut traces a young woman's self-abandonment inside an abusive infatuation, narrated with the same forensic calm Cline brought to Evie's devotion in The Girls. It belongs to the wave of novels that followed Cline's success in treating female desire as a study in willing subordination rather than empowerment, and shares her method of letting beautiful sentences carry genuinely ugly material without comment.

What influenced Emma Cline

• The Virgin Suicides by Sofia Coppola (1999). The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola) — culture for Emma Cline “The Virgin Suicides 25th Anniversary Introduction , Picador Classics Califia: Walton Ford , Gagosian Gallery” (Emma Cline)
• Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion (1970). Play It As It Lays (Joan Didion) — titan for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill (1988). Bad Behavior (Mary Gaitskill) — titan for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• Badlands. Badlands (Terrence Malick) — culture for Emma Cline (themoviedb.org)
• The Family by Ed Sanders (1971). The Family (Ed Sanders) — ghost for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012). Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn) — culture for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babitz (1974). Eve's Hollywood (Eve Babitz) — ghost for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson (1992). Jesus' Son (Denis Johnson) — titan for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)

Peers and kindred spirits

• My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018). My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh) — peer for Emma Cline “Picture Books, Gagosian Gallery Ottessa Moshfegh / Issy Wood Percival Everett / Richard Prince Sam Lipsyte / Jordan Wolfso n” (Emma Cline)
• Picture Books. Cline co-founded the imprint Picture Books. “Cline is the co-founder, along with Peter Mendelsund , of Picture Books, an imprint of Gagosian Gallery .” (Wikipedia)
• Peter Mendelsund. Cline and Mendelsund jointly founded Picture Books. “Cline is the co-founder, along with Peter Mendelsund , of Picture Books, an imprint of Gagosian Gallery .” (Wikipedia)
• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017). Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders) — collaborator for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan (1967). Trout Fishing in America (Richard Brautigan) — geography for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• Where I Was From by Joan Didion (2003). Where I Was From (Joan Didion) — geography for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• The New Me by Halle Butler (2019). The New Me (Halle Butler) — peer for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• Submission by Michel Houellebecq (2015). Submission (Michel Houellebecq) — collaborator for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• Luster by Raven Leilani (2020). Luster (Raven Leilani) — peer for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• Valencia by Michelle Tea (2000). Valencia (Michelle Tea) — geography for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• All Tomorrow's Parties by Rob Spillman (2016). All Tomorrow's Parties (Rob Spillman) — collaborator for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• Chloe Benjamin. The Girls (Emma Cline) — peer for Chloe Benjamin (via The Girls) (openlibrary.org)

Who Emma Cline influenced

• Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan (2021). Acts of Desperation (Megan Nolan) — legacy for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)
• Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (2022). Vladimir (Julia May Jonas) — legacy for Emma Cline (openlibrary.org)