theatre of cruelty ix | sermon in the dirt vi: a cathedral pt 2
thoughts on two books I read on the Manson family, people using fiction to say the quiet part out loud, dirty secrets in Montreal, and the conclusion of the great spiritual saga of tree planting
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I just tore through two books about Charles Manson and the Family—CHAOS by Tom O’Neill, and THE GIRLS by Emma Cline. The latter is fiction, and is and not really about the Family—it’s about some other wannabe musician with a dedicated following of strange young women, living on the brink of madness and fame on decrepit movie ranch in California in the late 60s, whose mix of brainwashing and LSD and amphetamines encourage those women to do some very bad things. I loved it. Cline is a hell of a writer—I can see why THE GIRLS sold for so much money, and why she was targeted by such a transparently vicious litigious campaign. People hate talented women.
Cline does a thing in THE GIRLS that I also felt in Roupenian’s viral short story CAT PERSON—she says the quiet part about being a girl out loud. Roupenian talks about the “self-disgust and humiliation that [is] a kind of perverse cousin to arousal.” Cline talks about the way that so much of the experience of being a young woman is abut the overwhelming need to be an object of desire—something that’s so primal, intense, and embarrassing it almost triggers a kind of disassociation to admit it.