That can be what’s so wonderful about it, that you have this cohesive experience of living when you’re in New York, and in LA it’s much more choppy. I’d been in New York for nine years, and I love it so much, but it’s also a place where you’re very aware of social context, professional context.
“I was hoping to turn in a final draft by the end of the summer, but time has gone so sticky.”Ĭline is talking to me from her home in Los Angeles, where she’s been living on her own for the past five months, since moving from New York in March. I just feel tremendously stupid, like I’ve lost all personality,” she laughs, when I ask how she’s been spending lockdown. I haven’t been working in a concentrated way, and I’m very jealous of people who have been. “I’m editing a novel that I wrote last year, but only in fits and starts. So I’m a little surprised to be greeted by a relaxed and smiling young woman on my computer screen when Cline, now 31, and I connect by Zoom. Yet she always looked like she was holding her breath, as if she was watching something terrible approach on the horizon. She was photographed in Vogue, interviewed by the New Yorker, feted everywhere. Cline, then 27, was paid an almost unprecedented $2m advance, and the film rights sold before the book was even published. Not since the publication of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth in 2000 had a young woman made such a splash with a debut literary novel and, as with Smith, people were as fascinated by the author as they were with her book. I n the many photos of Emma Cline that appeared in the media in 2016, when her hugely successful first book, The Girls, was published, she tended to look both severe and fragile, guarded yet also exposed.
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