Emma Cline

JZ

It feels like a lifetime has passed since we talked about The Girls. Does that book seem like it came out a long time ago to you too?

EC

What’s so weird, as you know, is that the timeline with book publishing is such that by the time the book comes out, you’ve moved past it already. Sometimes it’s been years—usually it’s at least a year. So, I think with every book, you go through the process of alienation. It’s probably necessary, because otherwise it would be too excruciating to have it out in the world when it’s so freshly created.

It’s weird, even when I’m just reading things that I’ve written more recently, I always feel a little bit surprised. It’s because writing, or at least the way that I experience a lot of my writing, is almost a non-conscious thing—it happens in another psychological state, so that anytime I encounter it afterwards, it has that aura of unfamiliarity or otherness. I guess I’m interested to see what themes recur for me naturally, without any conscious effort. There’s something I find comforting about that, because there are these directions that your brain takes you without your exerting any force. There’s something about there being native concerns to you specifically, as a person, and that’s gratifying for me.

JZ

It’s funny, I remember that the last time we spoke we touched on how you often gravitate towards a certain kind of dark humor, and that it comes up in everything that you do, on one level or another. I don’t know if this book is maybe the darkest humor for you, or if I feel that way because there are such deeply funny moments at the same time as there are those moments that crush you when you read them, for Alex’s sake. Having now finished your book, looking back at it with a little bit of distance—what do you see as some of those preoccupations that came up?

EC

I always think power, and sex. I feel like those are things I’m kind of drawn to. And the dynamic between insider-ness and outsider-ness, and kind of a watchfulness. Does it give you power to be the observer? In a way, just being invisible gives you more power as an observer, because people don’t read you as fully human—they’ll say and do things in front of you that they wouldn’t otherwise. And also, transactions, human relationships as transactional. I could say that all those preoccupations are visible to me in everything I’ve written, all three books. I think what was especially fun about the book is that, because Alex is a sex worker, a lot of the power dynamics and sexual dynamics and transactional nature of these interactions get literalized more. So, it’s almost a way to press more firmly on those concerns.

JZ

For me, there’s a real tension between Alex wanting to make herself invisible and wanting to be known. We witness her urge to conform to the expectations of the transaction, “You give me money, I give you this service,” but also, as we see throughout the book, she’s really rebelling against that; she’s trying more and more to make herself act out and demand a reaction somehow, and we see how she tries to force others to see her as a person. Even when she jumps in the pool at that dinner party, which of course is completely the wrong move, but also just perfect and hilarious. She’s saying, “I dare you guys to look at me,” and I think she toes that line beautifully throughout the whole book. I wonder what you think about that constant tension of wanting to be acknowledged, but also wanting to fade into nothingness?

EC

I was thinking, okay, here’s a character who, in some ways, is extremely perceptive, extremely knowing, but then at the same time is so delusional and has a sort of void at her center, in a lot of ways. So, what is the interaction there, when you do have X-ray vision for social information, but at the same time, you have these massive blank spots in your ability to experience reality. And what you’re talking about, the sense that she’s both invisible and passing like a ghost through these worlds, but then also, acting out in these ways that push up against and disrupt the fabric of these tightly woven social milieus.

JZ

She’s kind of telegraphing, “You are all complicit.” At one point, she’s talking to a very wealthy man’s assistant, who’s driving her to the train, and the assistant acknowledges that the guy is a monster. For Alex, it’s a moment of, “I know it, and we both know it.” I love that moment, because she completely recognizes how everybody is contributing to a web, and network of bad behavior or selfish behavior.

EC

And I think it’s something she’s seeing, not only between men and women, but also, as you pointed out, it’s playing out between the employees and the employers, this community of people who kind of keep the delusion going of unfettered leisure, or whatever it may be. But then even seeing it in family relationships, the father and the son she interacts with—I’m not sure that it’s reality, but for her character, the lens that she has on reality is that every relationship is a transaction, a kind of power struggle, or that everyone is withholding their true selves in order to motor the relationship.

JZ

I also remember a little bit from The Girls—there is a funny sense of Alex as not really having a past, and I think the same was true for Evie; Alex kind of just comes into the book at a stage in her life in her twenties, and is all the more vulnerable for that, because she’s this person alone in the world, especially in a place like New York. And then a place like the Hamptons becomes a microcosm of both that excess and that loneliness.

EC

When you just said “coming to New York,” I feel like that is such a classic New York thing, to arrive with the wish of erasing one’s backstory, whatever that is. But also, I was just thinking about The Girls, which, in so many ways was me thinking, here’s 1969, here’s the present day, you’re always toggling between them, and then in what ways does the past inform the present? The scope of psychological history that I was dealing with was so much bigger, and I think almost as a reaction against that, just as a writer, I was deciding: what would be the parameters of the next project that I’m going to spend years working on? I really thought, I don’t want to be engaging with the past in this way. I want it to be a straightforward, forward-marching narrative that has tight limits on the world, which focuses the story. Also, especially with a character like Alex, I find it would distract from the moment in time, or offer easy avenues to her backstory. Or maybe it would just offer these simplistic ways to explain her or fit her into some kind of spectrum of deviant behavior, or cause and effect of trauma, or something like that. Those are questions I’m not interested in for this character. I think that’s not how this character is experiencing her life, either. It’s very immediate, it’s very day-to-day survival—both material and more existential survival. Something is driving her forward. And I don’t think the past is alive for her in that way.

JZ

I love the physicality of time, the tangible march of it here. There’s an idea that she needs to get through six days to get to the party, and there’s a mounting pressure that sustains and builds as each day passes. That’s the engine, that’s the motivator. And then she gets to the party, and of course it’s how life is: you’re in the present up until that moment, and then suddenly there’s an ending. That ending was so devastating to me—she’s been thinking about this party as the gauntlet. If she can only survive the next six days and makes it to this last party, which also marks the end of the summer, she’ll be okay and she’ll be back in the fold of this wealthy man’s protection. But she gets to the party, and no one’s looking, no one cares. She’s barely acknowledged. I wonder how you conceptualized that feel of time, because the arc of the story takes place over one week.

EC

I was thinking about it lot, because in between The Girls and this novel, I was writing a lot of stories, which I love to do. I’d started the first draft of The Guest in 2016, before The Girls came out. But in thinking about getting back into a larger project, something in me knew that I wanted to carry the things I love about writing short stories into the novel, for instance, how to hold tension of a short story. The stories that I’m drawn to are often proposing something: you’re dropped into the incident, and then you’re kind of plucked out of it. In what way can I carry that across the span of a novel? So, a lot of the structure was created around that.

I was also thinking about a John Cheever story, The Swimmer. I don’t know why the ending of that story has always been so frightening to me. I read it as as an existential horror story about life depositing you somewhere so far afield from where you thought you were, even though the character in that story is a middle-aged dude in mid-century Connecticut drinking his way through pools. Alex is obviously not that, but there’s something about this devastating, surreal place that he finds himself in, and I thought, this feels correct for this character. That nightmare logic of, “I am in dark woods, and I don’t know how I got here.” There’s a kind of inevitability to all of your self-delusions and where they’ve carried you. That Cheever story leaves you in such a bizarre place without really explaining much; somehow you gather that forty years have passed, and everyone he loves is dead and gone, and there’s just no explanation. It’s just that emotional reverberation. It’s so forlorn and lonely and awful. I’m interested in endings that are more atmospheric or tonal and less conclusive or neat.

JZ

I mean, Alex is not not drinking her way through different pools [Laughs.]. There’s a lot to be said for the fact that this story is being told from a young woman’s perspective, and the way she takes her freedom is remarkable—she’s ultimately doing exactly what she wants to do. She’s acting very much on her own volition, which feels like a rebellion, this way to claim her space. Whether that’s sneaking into a country club, or crashing dinner, or finding a way to stay with strangers in a house she picked at random. And this book has a point of view, for me, on the question of what it means to narrate from the perspective of a difficult character. As we spoke about earlier, there’s this fascination of that mindset, not just with Alex, but with some of the other characters in this book. The Guest also gestures toward class in a more direct way than some of your other work. Did that become a conscious choice? Or is that just how it bears out following this particular character and her misadventures?

EC

It didn’t feel like a conscious choice—it comes out of the character for me. I’m trying to think of which parts do end up being conscious, because so much of it feels like it’s happening under the surface in a way that’s hard to trace afterwards. I think the things I am conscious about—something like, giving myself the motif of water, noticing for myself, as I’m writing, the moments when Alex is in water and thinking a little bit about water as a dissolution of the body. What would that mean for this character who’s embodied in such a peculiar way? Not just for herself, but for others? Sometimes it can be these thematic signposts for myself that are conscious: okay, this character needs limitations. What limitations can I give this character to drive forward a story across this amount of time? But in terms of who the character is, that stuff feels like it comes from a subconscious place. I mean, what was interesting to me about writing her—and again, it’s not conscious as I’m writing, but I see it later—is, what does it look like if this character actually gets a lot of agency and power through objectifying herself? Which I think can sometimes be uncomfortable for people to think about. We have certain narratives around what we want female empowerment to look like or what’s “healthy.” I’m interested in how she actually acquires real power this way; it’s not fake, but it’s also not without its own psychic consequences for her specifically as a character. I don’t know, am I thinking through power dynamics? Not really, I think it’s just something I see probably after the fact. But her relationship to her own agency, that idea of, are you a subject, and getting the power of being a subject? Which I think she’s after sometimes, like jumping in the pool; she’s asserting her right to be the subject. There’s also this other power that she gets out of being an object or being invisible or giving people what they want. I am interested in her as a character who kind of toggles between those things.

JZ

How did Alex first appear in your mind? What brought you to her?

EC

I think a lot of it is just coming to New York. I went to New York first when I was eighteen or nineteen, just for a weekend, and then probably once more in college before I moved there in my early twenties. I wasn’t that conversant with New York, it kind of overwhelmed me—not in a negative way, but it was just so different from Northern California or anywhere else I’d spent time. I knew I wanted to write about New York in some way, but through the character of Alex specifically. I spent my twenties in New York; I feel like I ran into versions of this character. I was interested in what would a really extreme version of this look like. And what would it look like in this place, out east, that really is not geared towards outsiders? Even just the fact that you have to have a specific paring pass designating where you can and can’t be—it’s not so much a place where people come for a little while and stay at a hotel. In so many ways, it’s arranged to keep “outsiders” out. So, the idea of seeing that kind of character in this really closed community was interesting.

JZ

And then she’s using it as a foil for the city, but also this crucial point of escape from this person who’s haunting her and chasing or hunting her down. One of my favorite psychological aspects of this book is that she’s constantly holding this other threat in the back of her mind, and it’s just this simmering horrible tension, and we don’t know what she’s done, really. But we know she hasn’t done something good. It just contributes to the chasing feeling: she’s always on the run.

EC

It’s a nightmare logic, and feeling you get in a dream, where you know you’ve done something wrong, and there’s that paranoid, inevitable sensation that you’re being chased, but you can’t run fast enough.

JZ

Nothing that you do is going to get you out.

EC

I’m interested in how to create that in books. I feel like it’s something that’s easier to do in a movie on some level.

JZ

I’m wondering—you spoke a little bit about visiting the city in college. And I learned that you graduated high school quite early.

EC

I had skipped a grade, so I was already young, and then I only went to one semester of my senior year of high school, so when I left I was sixteen.

JZ

Right. And then you get to Middlebury and you’re pursuing creative writing a little bit there?

EC

So, when I went to Middlebury, I took a few writing workshops. I’m not sure how I kind of came to this decision at the time, but I knew that I didn’t want to take English classes, didn’t want to major in creative writing. I was a studio art major and then I ended up transferring. I went to a lot of colleges—I transferred to Reed College, and then Oregon College of Art and Craft, and then San Francisco Art Institute. And then back to Middlebury for a semester, and then I finished at UCLA Extension. But the whole time I was doing studio art classes, and some theater, and I think if it didn’t have anything to do with writing, it was because I kind of knew that that’s what I wanted to do in the end. I felt like it would be better to try and make myself do other things or get to similar ends via different means. It’s the way that making any kind of artwork is similar, a painting or a sculpture is similar to writing in that you’re thinking, “Okay, how am I going to convey whatever bizarre thing or feeling or tone is inside of me? How am I going to make it literal to other people, tangible in whatever way?” So, I think in that way, it did help and wasn’t a million miles away from what I ended up doing. I’m always cognizant of life being the most interesting thing, and writing coming out of that. But there was something where I just knew I didn’t want to study writing, and then grad school was such a different thing.

JZ

It's funny for me, because I studied creative writing kind of knowing that I didn’t necessarily want to be a writer in this way.

EC

Oh, that is interesting.

JZ

Who knows what I was thinking with that [Laughs.]. But by the end, I didn’t think that I wanted to be a novelist. I think for some people the MFA is so generative. I wonder what your experience was of that, especially when you had done all these other things, and then to come in and focus on the writing itself for a change?

EC

Honestly, I think it helped that I had not been studying English or only taking writing classes beforehand. I felt like I had built up a lot of momentum around this project, which was what became The Girls. I knew, right when I got in, what I wanted to work on, and that focus was helpful. Columbia was the only school I applied to, and I think a lot of it was wanting a framework to move to New York, because I felt like I would flounder otherwise.

JZ

I like that thought of doing everything else that you can until the moment of inevitability. All of a sudden it’s, “Okay, I made it here in the end.” I’m also curious about your writing for magazines—you’ve written for lots of different outlets, and I was thinking about whether, when you’re writing those kinds of short fiction, do you find that you have a reader or person that you’re reaching for or hoping to find?

EC

I have two friends who I send my work to first, but they’re not even in my mind, really, when I’m writing. I know that when I start, and then I think, “It’s time to send it to this person,” if I resist, then I know I need to keep working on it. There’s something embarrassing to me still, and that means I need to keep working. And then sometimes—I’ve only had this experience a few times—but you’re actually delighting yourself while you’re writing? Like, making yourself laugh. That is so rare, but so fun.

JZ

And how about nonfiction? I’ve read certain short pieces of yours that are nonfiction, but I wonder, does the longer format compel you outside of fiction?

EC

I don’t know—it feels so uncomfortable. I think I’m uncomfortable with the way nonfiction asks you occasionally to draw conclusions or kind of engage with the idea of truth in a way that I find difficult. What’s so nice about being a fiction writer is you get to retreat behind the title. I’m interested in gray areas; I’m not an opinion writer, I don’t want a column where I have to come up with and share what I think about anything. In so many ways, I feel that I don’t know what I think about things, or I don’t trust it when I do. I like the mutability, the ambivalence, that fiction allows me. With nonfiction, sometimes if I can write it in ways where I can mess around with ambivalence, without feeling that I have to land on some theory of anything, then I like it. But sometimes I’ll get asked to write book reviews, and at first, I think that sounds fun. But when push comes to shove, I think it sucks—I don’t want to do that at all. Reading profiles, even of people I really admire, it’s the idea of having to draw a circle around like another human being, or editorialize them, even in nice ways. Ultimately that makes me uncomfortable.

JZ

It’s a very particular style, and there’s something a little anxiety-inducing to me about the idea of even trying to fully encapsulate someone in that form. I want to switch gears a bit and talk about a very different style of writing that you’ve begun with the Picture Books series with Gagosian Gallery. You’ve figured out this marriage of art and writing, which makes so much sense given where you’re coming from in terms of having studied art. When did the idea first surface for you?

EC

Part of it came out of having written this novella, Harvey, which was maybe 30,000 words or something. Trying to find a home for a novella in contemporary publishing is difficult, and really the only option that people seemed to tell me about was The New Yorker, and they’d publish it online only, not in print. Publishing the project as a standalone book just does not fly at the moment with the landscape of publishing in general. It just felt sad because I love novellas. And there are so many great novellas, so I was thinking, there should be a place, a home for novellas or anything a little longer than a short story. The New Yorker will only publish a story of up to 10,000 words, and that’s a real stretch. There are so many word count limitations for all these other publications.

So, I had the idea in 2020 of coming up with a home for these orphan manuscripts, and I had also been asked a few times to write catalogue essays for artists, which is always so fun and weird. You’re trying to translate in whatever way from one medium to another. I always felt jealous that artists get to have their work interpreted in other mediums, and there’s no similar opportunity for writers. I think the closest most writers come is, if you’re lucky, you get some say on your cover design, but often, the cover is designed by somebody who hasn’t read the book. So, you get the one opportunity to have your book translated into a visual medium, and then the concerns of the market really bear on it and limit it. People are asking, is your book cover going to look good as a thumbnail on Amazon? Which is of course understandable, but sometimes the dream is that you would get to have your work interpreted by an artist without any kind of limitation on it.

I brought the idea to Gagosian because I’d worked with their publishing department before, and they were really excited about it and really great. We’ve put out a few, and there are three or four writers lined up. As a writer, getting to be out of my own writing and into someone else’s work is such a nice break—I can get so much more excited about their work in a lot of ways, and I also just get to see the work of writers that I love, like Sam Lipsyte or Joy Williams. I think the feedback I’ve gotten from the writers who’ve been involved is, someone’s calling them asking, is the weight of paper right for you, or the type, sending color samples; there’s an immense attention to detail. There’s an ability to make books into beautiful objects, as well as lovely books. It feels like a like real gift, I’m happy about it.

From a writer’s standpoint, something I’m very cognizant of with writers is that I don’t want them to just publish in one limited run or edition, and then the work disappears into the ether. They can republish the novella again in their own collection or somewhere else. To me, it’s not about siloing the work in a rarefied art world—hopefully it’s just giving it a nice first outing and extending its life. You and I have talked about these ideas a bit; it’s a fun version of matchmaking. Sometimes there’s an obvious one-to-one example. And then sometimes you want to play off of the writing, or there are different fun ways to think about who might be an interesting person to interpret someone’s work. Sometimes the writer will have like a preference or an idea.

JZ

Right—to what degree are the writers involved with picking the artist? And what’s next for Picture Books? You mentioned you have another slate of novellas coming up?

EC

The one that just came out was with Lydia Millet and Genieve Figgis. And it turned out like Genieve Figgis loved Lydia Millet’s story so much that she ended up painting twelve different paintings, all based on the story. That was an example of a collaborative version, although it’s less of a collaboration and more of a conversation, because the story exists, and then the artist makes art based on it. The conversation reverberated in ways that like I hadn’t expected, but that were fun to see. So that one just came out, and then we have Joy Williams and Walton Ford.

JZ

I love the idea—I can’t wait to see more of these. And I have to say, I’m so excited to continue seeing these books come out in the world, not just as books but also as collectible objects. You end up contributing to everybody’s library in an amazing way. Although now there’s going to be a whole secondary marketplace for these objects [Laughs.].

I do want to talk a bit more about The Girls and if writing in that slightly more historical register shifted your practice at all, or how you approach researching new projects. Do you think of that as sort of a one-off in terms of a period-specific project?

EC

Yeah, I was thinking about it—someone pointed out that I often write about real people, like in The Girls, and then White Noise, which is a story about Harvey Weinstein, and they were asking about my approach to research. I think for all my projects, it’s less about the research and more about asking myself if there’s some image I’m after; it’s almost more aesthetic than it is historical. Maybe it's embarrassing to say, but there was a point when I read so much about Charles Manson and tried to get myself in the state where I could then like write something, and at a certain point, I could have been able to tell you the dates and names, but ultimately it leaves my brain, and what remains is an image I’m after. With Harvey, I didn’t do research on the real Harvey Weinstein. I gave him these adult daughters. I think I looked it up at some point after I’d finished, but really, it’s based on the logic of the story, the false reality that I’ve created in a book or narrative: does the fact makes sense? I’m cueing more an internal logic of the project and less the real-world logic of the thing itself. I think that’s something that I often do whether it’s based on or informed by something real.

JZ

It’s more about the vibe of the setting, rather than the place and the time. Touching on your point about the novella and the rareness of it in publishing, do you see yourself doing a project like that? Or do you see yourself writing more in the vein of short stories?

EC

I’ve started a new project, and part of me feels like it doesn’t want to be fully novel length. It might be that in-between thing again, but the idea of trying to stretch it to fit market demand is really depressing. It’s almost like you’re wearing some item of clothing, and you realize was it mistake, but you realize that only after you’ve left the house, and you’re just thinking, oh, and it's the worst.

JZ

I over-committed.

EC

And it just feels so off. I think the new project leads itself in terms of what the length is going to be, and the style.

JZ

Right. As you said, the pace of publishing really gives you time for these ideas to gestate and fully take form. I do really wish there was a bit more of a of a place for the novella because I often feel like that’s what I’m curious to read when it comes to fiction. You’ve touched on the dissociation and derealization at play for the characters in The Guest. It feels like they’re constantly testing reality and pushing up against rules. Do you feel your process varies when you’re writing that kind of character in a short story versus in a novel? Or do you find that your methods are often similar?

EC

I think you can be more extreme in a short story. You don’t have to track a consciousness over such a long period of time. You get a little more leeway to be more intense, whereas if it’s a longer project, there are sometimes just logical reasons why characters need to be more aware of certain things. With a novel, there are so many more balls in the air, narratively, so that is somewhat constraining. But I’m learning to give myself permission to not over-explain certain parts of the world, especially in that longer format. I think there’s such a tendency to explain, because you’re covering so much psychological space when you’re working on a big project. There’s a tendency to talk through every corner of the room, every part of the logic of this world. I read Roberto Bolaño's novel, A Little Lumpen Novelita. There’s something he does really well: certain threads are just not explained, not every part of the world is illuminated. Certain things are allowed to be mysterious—even, sometimes not logical; we don’t get the play-by-play of why something has happened. I thought about that a lot with Alex in terms of these threats from the outside. Part of me wanted to over-explain them or make them very visible to the reader, or trace them, trace the contours of a frightening thing. But I found myself really trying to let there be more space there and allow room for questions that I don’t need to answer.

JZ

I remember we talked about that with your story collection, letting the reader think about the worst thing that could have happened rather than spelling it out. And for Alex, it’s a little bit of a floating brain sensation, because you’re not seeing all of the extenuating circumstances, you’re just watching her wondering what’s going happen if she makes the next step, or next move. If she pleases one person, or she displeases another, how does that ramify for the story? I do think there is something that so many people can resonate with, in terms of how Alex is going through the world, because I think there’s always a degree of guessing what people want. There is always a certain amount of guesswork for her—how does it play out? With Alex, it's such an East Coast story, she’s in that vein. Living in LA at the moment, and having lived in New York for a long time, what do you feel is your relationship to place and sense of belonging? Especially coming from Northern California, how does that inform writing about New York, if at all?

EC

I wish I had a clearer sense of it—it seems like it should be important. When I was in New York, I wrote about California, right? When I’m in California, writing about New York, there’s something about having a little bit of distance from a place that’s helpful. I still love New York so much, and I think I’ll start spending more time there. That was kind of always the idea, and then COVID happened. Maybe in some ways, it’s easier to work in California because you’re less in the middle of a certain kind of world, and there’s just a freedom I feel here sometimes; I can be surprised by different kinds of things here.