Alive with word play and humor, suspense, romance, and the honest emotions of a young woman coming of age in 80s New York, Cynthia Weiner’s A Gorgeous Excitement will bring to mind the misspent youths of many Gen Xers: Coke, booze, pot, sex, friends, frenemies, staying out all night, feeling immortal in a way; yet what looms in Weiner’s narrative is darkness, a fictionalized version of the crimes of the Central Park Strangler (aka the Preppy Killer), a boy Weiner knew and socialized with in her youth.
In a nifty trick for a work of historical fiction, Weiner is able to transform the truth, to turn history into a mystery that leaves the reader puzzling over the identities of victim and killer until this book’s final pages. She also achieves a level of emotional resonance that elevates A Gorgeous Excitement well beyond standard thriller fare.
I met Weiner earlier this year at a reading for my own novel, Twilight of the Gods. She was kind enough to speak with me about her book’s genesis in history and story, the years of hard work that led to something one might call a career achievement if it weren’t her debut, and many other topics.
How did you begin writing A Gorgeous Excitement and when? Was there a specific realization you had, a point at which it dawned on you—Five years ago? Twenty-five years ago?—that you were going to write about this very famous crime and your connection to it?
The murder that the book is inspired by took place in 1986, when I was part of that WASPy Upper East Side world, and in fact, I knew the killer and used to hang out drinking with him and his friends. The murder was shocking and disturbing for everyone. I was already writing but I couldn’t yet get my head around what had happened; it took about another twenty years to even start approaching it. For a long time, I worried about exploitation or insensitivity, and I also didn’t yet know how to write it, in what form and from whose perspective. I’d been writing short stories so I tried that, from various points of view and with various chronologies, but it never quite felt right. During this same time, I was also writing about difficult mother-daughter relationships, and at some point it hit me that the two stories are not only related but intertwined—it was one big story, not two shorter ones. That’s when I knew what I wanted to say about that time, and that event, and started working on a novel in earnest. So one could say it took nearly 40 years for the story to come to fruition, with fits and starts in between, capped by eight or nine years of serious work on what ultimately became A Gorgeous Excitement.
Would you talk about your emotional proximity to this murder and carrying the weight of that for so many years before setting it down on paper? Was the process of writing this book cathartic, taxing, both?
One of the most cruel and infamous aspects of the Preppy Murder was how the victim was spoken of and portrayed in the media. It was ugly and personal: slut-shaming with more than a little antisemitism thrown in. Chambers himself, after he was questioned by police, was overheard saying to his father at the station, “That fucking bitch—why couldn’t she leave me alone?” The media bought into his and his lawyer’s narrative that she was a loose and “pushy” girl who “courted death” by initiating, according to him, “rough sex”—instead of simply a high-spirited 18-year-old with the usual adolescent mix of confidence and insecurity. Meanwhile, her handsome and popular killer was treated, at least initially, as if he himself had been victimized by this incident. That kind of misogyny had a big part in how I saw myself for many years.
As I wrote the book, what struck me as one the saddest and most ironic aspects was that while New York was overrun with danger in the ’80s, and New Yorkers understandably terrified of falling victim to random acts of violence on the decrepit subways or to muggings on the streets, Jennifer Levin was killed by a guy she knew and was crazy about, or at least who she and everyone else in his world thought they knew.
At an event a few months ago, we discussed a mutual admiration for the novel London Fields by Martin Amis. London Fields and A Gorgeous Excitement were written decades apart yet they are very much of the same era, and I do sense a certain kinship in, among other things, the way their characters embrace substance use (and abuse) as a way of dealing with reality.
Whereas Amis was projecting into the near future, telling his murder story with a certain satirical coldness and authorial distance, A Gorgeous Excitement uses a fictionalization of past events to tell a much more human, personal tale. Though this is a murder story, there’s a warmth to it. Do you think this is a fair assessment? Why or why not? What would you credit for your book’s warmth? Is it Nina’s voice? The fact that it’s based on actual events? Authorial temperament?
First, thank you for putting my novel and London Fields in the same sentence! If my book is warmer, I guess I’d attribute it to the main character’s personality. Nina is a good person who sometimes wishes she weren’t. Her vulnerability and innocence despite a desire to be tougher, along with having to walk on eggshells around her mother at home and keep her mother’s illness a secret, evoked a strong empathy in me. And as you pointed out, the book is based on real events with a real victim and a devastated family and friends, which necessarily called for a measure of delicacy. Besides, I’m too much of a people-pleaser to have the nerve to carry off Amis’ brilliant, high-octane venom.
Which writers have been significant influences for you? Which books? Are there other pieces of art, whether they be film, music, fine art, or architecture, which have resonated with you strongly, that you’d call especially inspiring to your work?
My favorite writers are language show-offs, which touches off a kind of vitality in my own brain: Garielle Lutz, Stephen Dixon, Tom Wolfe, Rick Moody, Lorrie Moore. I also love Joyce Carol Oates for the way she handles violence, Jen Beagin and Raven Leilani for their humor, Jhumpa Lahiri for heartbreak, I could go on and on…
In terms of art, I live near Dia Beacon, and not only are the exhibitions incredible (Richard Serra, Robert Ryman), but the structure itself—a former Nabisco factory—is this massive, open space with enormous windows and pockets of more intimate spaces branching off it. Hardly anyone comes during the week, and something about being there seems to calm and inspire me.
I have to say, this book reads a bit like a subliminal advertisement for smoking. From about five pages in, I was thinking back fondly to my decades-gone cancer stick habit. Just how much did and/or do you love smoking? How many friends and readers have reported back about falling off the nicotine wagon as a result of reading this book?
Ha! I quit twenty years ago but writing the book definitely reignited (pun acknowledged) my happy memories of cigarettes and those days when you could smoke in bars, airplanes, taxis, movie theaters…I used to buy cigarettes at the Lenox Hill Hospital gift shop, which sold them without a glimmer of embarrassment, down the block from where I lived. So far none of my readers or former smoker friends have told me they’ve started smoking again after reading the book, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Don’t do it!
You’ve been writing a long time and have had a successful career. You’ve won plaudits and been published in notable journals, yet this is your first book. Talk to me about how you started writing and when you first got serious about it. Were you, like Nina, heading that way even in high school? Reaching publication and having the book succeed as well as it has must be very satisfying, but were there times during its writing or during your career as whole when you thought of giving up? What kept you going?
First, thank you for seeing Nina as a burgeoning writer: I wanted to give her that refuge in language. And yes, I was like her, very interested in words from a young age, dictionaries, word games, song lyrics, etc.
Publishing a novel has been terrific. The day my agent said yes and the day my publisher said yes were two of the most thrilling of my life, and I’m forever grateful. But the publishing world and process—finding an agent, revising, getting a publisher, more revising, weeks or months of silence even after the book is sold, the unknown, the tangential tasks leading up to publication and beyond—can feel daunting, disorienting, and at times, disheartening. I’m happiest in my writing space, playing around with ideas and sentences and punctuation, so I do my best to keep the focus on that.
Please tell me about your day job, your work with The Writers Studio in NYC. How has that informed and/or impacted your own creative work, particularly this novel?
The focus at the Writers Studio is persona narrator: who is telling the story or is the speaker in a poem. Students experiment with voices and styles from published works to learn about the millions of ways their narrator could tell the story or novel or poem they want to write. Where does the narrator start? What do they leave out? What’s their tone, and how does it work with the atmosphere of the piece? When I started at the school as a student, this focus was an enormous revelation to me. It was so much fun to write in all kinds of different voices, with different approaches, and it paradoxically made me understand and refine my own voice as time went on. I also learned to create an emotional distance between me and what I was writing about, to concentrate on the telling as opposed to the experience itself, which in turn made me think about affecting a reader, as opposed to just myself. This became especially helpful as I worked on my novel—it may have been inspired by real-life experience, but it’s still fiction—and the techniques I learned and subsequently taught to others helped remind me of that.
You do a great job of developing suspense around the particulars of an actual, albeit fictionalized crime. Even though I generally knew how things were going, I still found myself wondering if this character or that could be the murderer or, even more so, the victim. Were you conscious of this as you were writing? It seems this would be an especially important attribute for a mystery based in reality. Please discuss.
In all honestly, I didn’t know which of my characters would become the victim until pretty late in the game. I actually had a different character in mind but came to realize that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. So in a sense, the victim was a mystery to me as well, which may have inadvertently helped me create the suspense you mentioned, even though it required some backtracking and reverse engineering to make it work. As for the killer’s identify, I deliberately kept things a little obscured in that regard, starting in the prologue, where we learn that a girl will be killed in Central Park at summer’s end by a popular guy she leaves a bar with, but without being told her or his name, and continuing through until the murder occurs and the killer’s identity revealed. Even then, I held onto the victim’s identify until the last possible moment to ratchet up the impact. I’m glad it had that effect on you and other readers.
Based on the narrative’s focus there are clearly gender issues at play, perhaps as a matter of course. Nina spends a lot of time living up to the expectations of society as do many of the other female characters, and society’s expectations often seem to have been developed from a male point of view, to serve men, whether the men realize it or not. How have New York and America changed since Nina’s time? How would a Nina of today navigate the world of A Gorgeous Excitement?
In the ’80s, girls were still being taught and brought up by people from the 1940s and 50s, when things were definitely more overtly unequal and still pretty much accepted that way; women couldn’t even have credit cards in their own name until the mid-70s. When I went to college (in North Carolina), one of the first fraternity parties I went to was called a “cattle drive,” where boys would assess the freshman girls. Debutante balls were still a big deal. What would today be considered stalking and harassment were then acceptable ways for boys to show they liked you. I think most people, women in particular, believed those attitudes were finally in our review mirror, but since the 2016 presidential election there’s obviously been an appalling regression, from draconian abortion laws to governmental censorship of women’s health information to systematic gutting of programs and regulations designed to reduce domestic abuse, sexual harassment and assault, and workplace violence against women. I had major whiplash writing about things I thought had been relegated to a less evolved era, only to see them played out again in real life, in real time.
On a more positive note, I do think these issues are more openly discussed today, especially between girls and their parents. In my experience, girls in the 1980s, especially New York girls, didn’t tell their parents anything, and the parents were just fine with that. I wanted to give Nina and her mother something of a breakthrough in that regard, a glimmer of optimism for their relationship. I hope that came through.