Tag: Emma Cline

‘Los Angeles’ by Emma Cline

Alice has recently moved to Los Angeles and gets a job in flagship fashion store selling provocative clothing, that may, or may not be, American Apparel. She meets an older, ostensibly more confident woman named Oona who describes how she’s been selling her dirty underwear for money. In need of some extra cash herself and wanting to fit in with Oona’s crowd, Alice does the same. It works for a while and then things take a turn for the worst. Paralysed, Alice dissociates from the situation and thinks about how she will fictionalise the story when telling Oona the day after. Here, fiction is not the saviour it’s often portrayed as, it’s a trauma. This is a fable about the perils of turning too much of life into short stories. 

First published in Granta 139: Best of Young American Novelists 3, Spring 2017, and available to subscribers to read here, and collected in Daddy, Chatto & Windus, 2020

‘Los Angeles’ by Emma Cline

‘Los Angeles’ is a tremendous portrayal of the exploitation and insecurities of young women. The protagonist is working in a clothing store in L.A where everything’s overpriced and the girls are hired on how they look, not their intellect or experience. Management picks too-tight clothes for her to wear, and all the models in the pictures around the store have a sort of starved nymphomaniac aesthetic. We see how the structures that exploit women can be fought against or leaned into (the protagonist ends up flogging her dirty knickers to men in car parks for cash) and how sex is used as a tool and a weapon to exploit us all as consumers. 

First published in Granta 149: Best of Young American Novelists 3, April 2017 and available to read there for subscribers. Collected in Daddy, Random House/Chatto & Windus 2020