Coming-of-Age Novel Takes Readers Back to mid-’80s NYC and Some Infamous Crimes

New York City, 1986.

If, like me, you were here, you remember the true-crime headlines about the the Preppy Murder involving Robert Chambers, who strangled 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in Central Park, and the face-slashing of model Marla Hanson arranged by her obsessed landlord. You’ll recall that when people weren’t downing SlimFast, they were chugging Tab, a long-discontinued brand that was at the time the best-selling zero-calorie soda. Modern tech was a word processor called Wang. Everyone was reading Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and Jay McInerney, and watching Dynasty, the prime-time soap opera that ran on ABC throughout the decade.

If you are too new or too young to have experienced our fair city during the decade of decadence, buckle up. Cynthia Weiner’s debut novel, A Gorgeous Excitement, will introduce you to a place that’s nothing like Manhattan 2025. The book’s title is a nod to Freud’s description of a cocaine high. (What self-respecting story set in the ‘80s could, in good conscience, not reference the drug?)

All protagonist Nina Jacobs wants to do the summer before starting college is to avoid her mother and their challenging relationship and lose her virginity to her crush: Gardner Reed, the most handsome bad boy at Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side watering hole where young Manhattan society congregates. Too much to ask? Seems so for a Jewish girl among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarefied world. But a new friend, who’s a far cry from the debutante crowd, helps put Nina one line of coke closer to making Gardner her first—until she learns the sobering difference between a “bad boy” and a bad guy.

Weiner, who’s also a writing teacher, ran with the same crowd as Chambers and Levin back in the day, and her novel is inspired by her UES upbringing.

Straus Media caught up with Weiner to discuss Manhattan then and now, why this is the right time to bring this shocking story back into the zeitgeist, and what she wants readers to take away from this coming-of-age tale of pre-social-media youth gone wild.

As a born-and-bred New Yorker, I was brought back by your book. Can you speak to the difference between Manhattan of four decades ago and today?

Cynthia Weiner: There are a few things. One is how homogeneous New York feels compared to the way it was. I grew up on East 77th Street; there was a newsstand and a little diner, it was very homey. Now, there are a lot of chain stores, and visually, a lot of the apartment buildings look the same. And, of course, cell phones, social media, how much less privacy it seems kids have—in good ways and bad. Now, somebody is always watching kids; on the other hand, back then, there was a freedom that led to a lot of irresponsibility and danger. I feel like cell phones have brought parents and children a lot closer. 


How well did you know Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin?

I didn’t know her. I knew him. He was close friends with a close friend of mine.

You wanted to write about your experience because it was really an intense time. So, why a novel instead of a memoir? 


I didn’t want the character [Nina] to know what was going to happen at the end of the summer. I wanted it to be from an innocent young woman’s point of view because for me one of the most memorable parts of that case is how shocking it was and that it just seemed insane for that to have happened; that somebody you know, somebody who was so good-looking and so well known would do something like this. I was hoping to achieve through Nina Jacobs that feeling of shock and just incredible devastation. Also, the victim in the novel is very different from Jennifer Levin.

Why introduce this 40-year-old story back into the zeitgeist now?

I have four nieces, and as they were growing up, I saw them out in the world of boys and friends and with their parents. You and I talked about how much has changed, but so much is still the same; there is still danger out there, like the way the boys talk about girls. The story felt relevant to me: the idea of exhilaration and the dark side of exhilaration, especially when you’re a teenager.

What’s the takeaway you want readers—especially younger ones—to have?

I wrote this book because I wanted Nina to feel the way I did when I was young: I wanted to be free and not care what anybody thought of me. I feel like that’s still universal. That’s what happened with Robert Chambers. The takeaway is that there is a dark side to only caring about yourself.

Do you think that your contemporaries who knew Chambers and Levin, or the Levin family, will give you pushback?

I hope not. I thought about that long and hard, about bringing something up, particularly for her family. It is such a tragedy. The story is fiction and inspired by them, but it is also about a mother and daughter, about friendship, anti-Semitism, and being an outsider. Writing about a true crime is always hazardous because of who it could hurt.

Lorraine Duffy Merkl is the author of three novels, most recently The Last Single Woman in New York City.