When Emma Cline signed her $2 million, three-book deal with Random House, back in 2014, at just 25, she had already written her Manson family–inspired novel, The Girls, and started work on some of the dazzling stories collected in Daddy. But it wasn’t until the native Californian went out to the Hamptons for the first time, in the summer of 2015, that The Guest, an incisive novel about an escort who masquerades as the girlfriend of an art dealer so she can stay at his beach house through Labor Day, began to take shape.
“I was just so struck by the specifics of this community,” Cline tells me from Silver Lake, Los Angeles, where she now lives. “Where I’m from, in Northern California, the water is frigid. There’s sharks and these rocky, dangerous cliffs. And then I went out East, and it was this really mild, lovely, almost surreal landscape.” It is a place, she observes, “that’s not really oriented towards temporary visitors or outsiders. Even the idea that you can’t park at the beach unless you have a residential-parking sticker. A certain slice of the Hamptons is designed either overtly, or in more sort of subtle, insidious ways, to kind of delineate who should be there and who shouldn’t.”
