The Girls (Cline) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1988-1989
• Where—Sonoma, California, USA
• Education—B.A. Middlebury College; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Plimpton Award (Paris Review)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York


Emma Cline is an American author, best known for The Girls, her 2016 debut novel loosely based on the Charles Manson murders of 1969. She has also written short stories for the Tin House and Paris Review.

Cline Grew up in California wine country: her father was a vintner, owner of Cline Cellers in Sonoma. Her mother came from the Jacuzzi family, inventors of the Jacuzzi whirlpool baths.

As a preteen, Cline had a brief stint as a film actress. She appeared in Flashcards, a 2003 short film, and When Billie Beat Bobby, a TV movie in which she played the young Billie Jean King.

At 13, she fell into a strange relationship with a much older man, a 54 year-old music promoter, who spotted her one day in Sonoma Plaza. They engaged in correspondence and occasional phone calls, talking about "teen stuff." It all ended when Cline got a boyfriend. Nonetheless, the episode seems an uncanny precursor to her later interest in—and sympathy for—the young women followers of Charles Manson.

Cline earned her B.A. from Middlebury College in Vermont, and two years later won a scholarship to the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Several years later, she received her M.F.A from Columbia University. One of her stories submitted at Columbia, which also ran in the Paris Review (summer, 2013), contained a reference to Manson. In a second article for the Review, she wrote of her visit to the Manson Family cult site, where she felt a strong connection with the girls he'd lured away from their families.

Hired immediately after grad school as a fiction writer by The New Yorker, Cline was already at work on The Girls. Her manuscript would become a hotly sought after property, and its eventual acquisition by Random House earned her (so it is rumored) a cool $2 million. (Adapted from Vulture.com .)