American Girls(71)
Los Angeles, I wrote, is not really so different from the rest of America. Los Angeles was Olivia Taylor spending the rest of her life trying to become Olivia Taylor again. And then I borrowed a phrase from Dex, who’d borrowed it from someone else. Los Angeles is simply the illusion America most chooses to treasure. The Manson murders changed that, and America, but maybe not that much.
And then something weird clicked, the way an idea can start to make sense only when you’re in the middle of writing, and so I wrote what would become my paper on the airsickness bags in the pocket in front of me. I wrote about Jay Gatsby and Leslie Van Houten. They might have seemed worlds apart, but they weren’t so terribly different. They both wanted to escape their families. They both believed in something that wasn’t half as awesome as it seemed to be at first, and believing in the wrong things ruined both of their lives. Had the Manson murders really changed America? Or was Manson just America gone wrong all over again, but with women in the headlines? I was either getting an A or going to hell.
As I finished writing, I thought about Valley of the Dolls and the long line of beautiful women, from Daisy to Sharon Tate to Olivia Taylor to my sister, who made books and films and music come to life. In the middle of Kandy Kisses, Olivia Taylor smiles at the camera and says, “If I could blow the whole world a kiss, I would.” Then I almost started cracking up, because I remembered the afternoon when Josh was making fun of his sister, and he puckered up and said, “If I could blow the whole world, I would,” and he and Jeremy almost laughed themselves off their chairs. I knew Daisy was just imaginary, but I also wondered if the real girls, or women, or whatever, weren’t sometimes just as make-believe themselves. I thought about the wall of women’s faces in Roger’s movie, the new girls and the old. By the time the flight attendants turned the lights back on, I had a draft of something.
My mom was supposed to be meeting me with Lynette, and I wondered if she would still look like herself when she picked me up from the airport, if she’d let Birch stay up past bedtime to meet me as well, if she’d come at all. Lynette had promised that they would both make it, even though my mom was still more tired than usual from the chemo.
A calming voice announced: “Please fasten your seat belts and prepare for landing. All electronics should be turned off and properly stowed.”
I closed my eyes and for just a minute I felt how much I’d missed my mom, and I wondered if she missed me as well. It almost didn’t matter that within ten seconds of seeing her she would probably be driving me insane, or that for all I knew she wouldn’t be there at all, she’d just be the lame sound of parroted excuses escaping from Lynette’s mouth. But even that didn’t matter. In the moment, with my phone off and the landing strip ballooning in the window, anything was possible. I might turn on the phone and Jeremy would have called, begging me to go back to California. Or Doon would have texted to say that she hadn’t meant anything she’d said, that there was no need to apologize, that we would be best friends forever. I could imagine my mom healthy and Lynette and Birch standing next to her, and my dad back from Mexico, all waiting for me at the gate with one of those cheesy signs and flowers: Anna, we’ve missed you. Welcome home!
My mom asked me about a million times over the summer why I ran away. If it was because LA was so fabulous, or I liked my sister better than her, or if I was dealing drugs or whatever weird conspiracy she’d read about on the Internet that week. But the truth of it was, I didn’t really have a plan past getting on the plane. Even when my sister showed up, which seemed like the thing that had to happen, that should happen, part of me was still kind of surprised. I guess, at the end of the day, what I wanted most was to feel that moment when you’re on a plane and everyone around you is in their own world, anxious to stand up and open the overhead bin and get ready to start the life they’ve only ever dreamed of, or reenter whatever life they left behind: that moment before the plane hits the ground, when the air starts to hum and it seems like if the impact doesn’t kill you, the possibilities are almost too much to bear.
Author’s Note
Why the Manson Girls?
I never set out to write a book about the Manson girls. In fact, I’d been at work on this novel for some time before the book told me that it wanted to be about the Manson family—and my first thought was that it couldn’t. The material was sensationalistic and a little clichéd, and who wanted to give another American psycho more attention anyhow?
Before I wrote this novel, my first thought about the Manson girls, like that of many people, was “Yuck, the Manson girls? They’re still in jail, right?” I wanted to write a book about Los Angeles, girlhood, and what the American dream might mean to a kind of lost, basically decent, deeply cynical fifteen-year-old girl. I definitely didn’t want the book to be about Charles Manson—and I don’t think it is.
To be honest, I didn’t even enjoy researching the Manson girls all that much. I kept looking for the key, the really horrific thing that must have happened in their lives that turned them into killers, a poorly wired circuitry that might excuse such colossally shorted-out humanity.
What I found was that most of them had screwed-up lives but low-level screwed up—their biographies suggested they could have gone on to become perfectly functional adults had they encountered a different group of friends (and had they had a few years of good therapy).