The Assault of Emma Cline

Emma Cline is the author of 2016’s breakout novel, The Girls. The other story of what happened after publication for the extraordinary writer is an outrage.

“Art is a lie that tells the truth,” the well-worn maxim states. If the story of Charles Manson and his cult followers were ever of any interest to you, The Girls is the novel to read. The book answers the question often asked of women perpetrators of violent crimes, “but how could such nice girls do such things? They came from good homes, they were good girls.” Reading The Girls answers those questions.

But Cline’s book is more expansive than its widely publicized premise of the Manson family. The novel is distinctly female with its depictions of girls’ insular friendships. Fall in with the wrong crowd of friends, when the peers one wants to be accepted by are deviants and criminals, destruction happens.

I was glad to have read Cline’s first novel; the book remains on on my personal top twenty fiction list. I was pleased to be proven wrong about Cline herself: because of Cline’s age — she was twenty-seven when The Girls was published — and the $2 million advance Random House had bestowed upon her for a three-book deal, there was the rampant and cruel speculation that Cline’s work could not possibly be any good. Certainly this publication buzz regarding Cline’s talents was merely talk and Cline did not deserve such fame, such reward for supposedly brilliant writing.

But Cline is the brilliant writer she was purported to be and earlier this month, when I read several news accounts of her being sued by an ex-boyfriend for plagiarism, I was outraged.

In February 2017, Cline received a fifteen-page letter from the law firm of Boies Schiller Flexner that presented a list of complaints. The law firm had been hired by Emma Cline’s ex-boyfriend, Chaz Reetz-Laiolo. The complaint alleges…

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