The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club for the month of September.

I'm Katie Waldman, Slate's Words Correspondent, and I'm thrilled to have discussing our September selection today with me, Laura Bennett, a Slate senior Editor. Hello, Laura. Hello. And Hannah Rosen,

who should I identify you as an NPR invisibilia co-host or writer or all those things?

Yes, co-host. Okay. Hi, Hannah. Hi. So we will be talking about Emma Klein's, the girls, today.

And this is a reimagining of the Manson murders with special attention paid to these magnetic female acolytes of the cult master.

And the girls is told through the eyes of one 14-year-old girl,

E.V. Boyd, who is sort of seduced by the cult. And you guys, I was telling you

before we went live today that I'm so excited to talk about this book with you because I am very

perturbed about not quite having a grasp on how I feel about it in the first place. I feel a lot of

things, but I don't have a crystallized take on it. And I wonder if either of you can start us off

with a way in.

Well, I'll at least talk about my evolution of how I felt about it. The reviews have basically

said lots of beautiful writing, but a little manipulative. What's the point? Why do we need to

rehash the Charles Manson murders? Like the reviews have been sort of admiring of her

craft as a writer, and we should talk about that. She has many, many beautiful, she sort of captures

slices of life in just a really vivid and very visual way, which is unusual, and I think what

people admire. But then people have kind of pulled back, almost as if they feel like, hey, she's trying to snow me or something. Like she's trying to manipulate me. So maybe we can talk about that. I have actually moved to a sort of like greater and more generous interpretation of the novel as I've read it a couple of times.

But let's just talk about the feeling of manipulation that one gets reading this novel.

Right. I think it's a very good point. It's interesting. I had kind of an opposite evolution to the one Hannah's describing where I started out feeling so seduced by this book.

I was like, oh, man, I'm a client.

She's so young.

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