Cynthia Weiner: On the Long Run of a Writing Career, The Art of Invulnerability, and Capturing a Character’s Psychology in Her Debut Novel ‘A Gorgeous Excitement’
“Your book sounds stunning!!! Congrats!” I wrote to Cynthia Weiner over Instagram. An hour later, Cynthia replied with a generous note, not only thanking me for my message, but also praising my LitHub essay that was again making its rounds on the Internet. “I’m 58, publishing my first novel though I’ve been writing my whole life, and have always had great anxiety around more established writers. It’s so exciting to be publishing, but still so nerve-wracking.”
We quickly made plans to exchange work and her debut novel, A Gorgeous Excitement (Crown, 2025), arrived in my mailbox a week later. The novel is inspired by Cynthia’s upbringing on New York’s Upper East Side during the 1980s, and is particularly influenced by the notorious “Preppy Murder” of 1986. The plot centers around Nina Jacobs, a young woman navigating the complexities of adolescence in 80s Manhattan. Determined to avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages and to lose her virginity before college, Nina becomes immersed in the nightlife of the Upper East Side. She frequents Flanagan’s, a bar where young Manhattan society congregates, and becomes infatuated with the charismatic Gardner Reed. As Nina delves deeper into this world, experimenting with alcohol and drugs, she faces the dangers lurking beneath the surface of her seemingly glamorous surroundings.
The novel has garnered praise for its vivid portrayal of 1980s New York City and its exploration of themes such as identity, desire, and the perilous glamour of high society. What I found so alluring about A Gorgeous Excitement was the world-painting, the capturing in prose of a place as a character, and the complex merging of beauty and pain that accompanies the female experience of youth.
Brittany Ackerman: Congrats again on your debut! So much of Nina’s story resonates with me: themes of mental illness and identity, growing up Jewish, a childhood spent in New York, a complicated family dynamic, a desire to be older and more experienced.
Nina is in a rush to grow up. And I don’t blame her. I think there is a particular pressure on young women in society to know it all and do it all and be it all. This desire brushes up against what you mention in your author’s note with the attempt to “capture the frenzied psyche of the era and the illusory sense of invulnerability my girlfriends and I shared.”
Can you talk about this “invulnerability” and how that might have influenced your writing? As a girl, it’s a feeling so strong, albeit incorrect. But looking back, how did this feeling allow or make space for Nina on the page?
Cynthia Weiner: Maybe every teenager feels this, but for me, growing up in the city made me feel much smarter and more sophisticated than I was. I guess there is a kind of street-smarts confidence/arrogance you get from taking the subway and going out to nightclubs, but I think the savvier you think you are, the more incautious you tend to be.
Because Nina grew up in Manhattan, she has that same sense of invincibility. All the drugs, all the drinking, and the bad spots she gets herself in—she believes that she’ll always be able to slip out of trouble. It was at times difficult to write her, knowing how mistaken she is, and I suspect, and honestly hope, that readers sometimes want to shake her while still feeling empathy and concern for her.
BA: I, too, have my own stories of walking home alone from the bars in college. I went to college in the Midwest and was often the only Jewish girl my peers had ever met. I once had a fraternity boy run his fingers through my hair and claim he was “just looking for horns.”
I really appreciated the way Jewishness as a culture and an identity is portrayed in the book. The pistachio cookies “that looked like green leaves with chocolate in the center” and the use of food as a source of love, of caretaking. Nina tries to give her mother cookies to mend her depressive episodes the way my mom used to buy me a black and white cookie when I’d had a particularly anxiety-ridden day.
How has your own Jewish identity influenced the storytelling in A Gorgeous Excitement, and what was it like to write a story that weaves in elements of Jewish culture or experience?
CW: The pistachio cookies! I just had a couple the other day: still so good. In terms of storytelling, my Jewish heritage made it really fun to work in Yiddish and indulge in almost Borscht-belt humor, with puns, wordplay, and silly jokes, a way to inject a little levity in an otherwise very dark story.
On the flip side, I had to revisit and explore the discomfort and shame I felt being Jewish in a world in which girls I went to school with “summered” at Fishers Island and wore cashmere sweaters passed down to them through generations, to imbue Nina with those feelings of outsiderness. I’m now grateful for the perspective and sensitivity I think feeling different gave me, even though reliving it was often difficult.
BA: You mentioned in our Instagram exchange that you’ve been writing for the long haul. I appreciate this, because social media can often illuminate a writer’s shiniest moments, but in reality, we are working years on a project and it takes time for things to come to fruition.
You said that you’ve been writing your whole life, so I’d love to hear more about what that’s been like for you. What are your influences? What has made you love the craft? What has your path to publishing been?
CW: I’ve been writing since I was a kid (first published piece, in second grade: “Why Kangaroos Have Pouches”!). I wrote short stories for most of my career, and I still read tons of them—old favorites, like Joyce Carol Oates and Garielle Lutz; and newer collections by Jamel Brinkley and Kirstin Valdez Quade. There’s nothing like getting lost in a great story, but I especially love reading writers who go off on tangents, indulge obsessions, and play around with language and sentence structure and even punctuation. Which is probably why I tend to start off each writing session by reading poetry.
When I first started writing what became A Gorgeous Excitement, I thought it would also be a short story. It was only through unsuccessful attempts, several over the years, that I discovered the story needed the larger canvas of a novel. The problem was, I had never written a novel, which is probably why it took me about nine years to write it, with lots and lots of revisions before I had a draft I felt worthy of sending out to agents. To my surprise and relief, I found an agent in a relatively short time, even though it felt like an excruciating long time. Then came my agent’s submissions of the manuscript to editors, and waiting for someone who liked it enough to want to buy it.
Fortunately, the incredible Amy Einhorn expressed strong interest. But she wasn’t ready to buy it just yet. We spoke on the phone and she shared her thoughts and reservations. I took them to heart and set about revising based on what Amy and I had discussed. Six months later, my agent sent her the revised version of A Gorgeous Excitement, and she bought it! Amy and her entire team at Crown have been amazing. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have published with such a brilliant and enthusiastic group of pros.
BA: “Gardener’s girlfriend, Holland, was gliding by their table…Why couldn’t Nina be named for a country?”
This line is just such a fabulous insight into Nina’s psychology. Her emotions and perceptions are incredibly intense, and her sense of self is both distorted and deeply relatable, which perfectly captures the essence of a coming-of-age narrative.
Nina Jacobs is such a compelling character. How did her voice come to you, and what was your approach to crafting her perspective and inner world throughout the story?
CW: I’m so pleased to hear that Nina felt relatable to you! I’ve always loved reading interesting, quirky, but relatable fictional teenage girls, from Meg in A Wrinkle in Time to Berie in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital. In a lot of ways, I still feel as if I myself am that age, that girl escaping into the world of a book, full of fantasies and insecurities, though perhaps a bit (I hope) more mature. All of which is to say, Nina’s voice came relatively easily. But while her thoughts and perspective might be similar to mine, I had to make her even more anxious and impulsive than I ever was, so her choices and behaviors could be more extreme and consequential.
BA: The book is so literary in its vivid descriptions, depth of character, and the artistry in the language and style. And it’s also a thriller with its suspenseful plot and prose that explores complex themes of identity, societal norms, and human psychology.
What drew you to writing a literary thriller, and how do you balance the psychological depth and character-driven aspects of the genre with the suspense and pacing required to keep readers on edge?
CW: I hope the literary and thriller aspects of the book are balanced—it’s so hard to tell until people actually read it, but so far, I’ve been really pleased by the response. Someone told me recently that while reading it, they were constantly groaning out loud over Nina’s plight and gasping out loud over the reveals. As I said earlier, language and sentence structure are extremely important to me; there is absolutely nothing like finding the exact right word to express what you’re trying to say, or uncovering the internal logic of a sentence or a paragraph. I’ve been writing for many, many years, so I have a bit more confidence in that aspect of it; suspense and pacing was much harder.
Honestly, I used some thriller-novel tropes I’m familiar with—a prologue that “gives away” the ending of the novel; a mystery about who the victim will be—and in each scene, I always aimed for an escalation of tension, things getting worse and worse, and ending each chapter with an unresolved conflict or foreshadowing. Once I thought I had that down, it was back to language and sentence structure, etc., etc.!
BA: The term “a gorgeous excitement” was coined by Sigmund Freud, describing the effects of cocaine and the drug’s high. It’s a phrase that refers to the exhilarating and almost beautiful feeling of intense pleasure, which we as readers feel within the narrative.
What does the term “a gorgeous excitement” mean to you personally, beyond the story?
CW: It’s a wonderfully odd and discordant phrase, given the context, right? Two positive, pleasurable words (gorgeous and excitement) that are rarely if ever seen together, to tout what would turn out to be a highly addictive and destructive drug. In my experience, that misguided phrase—gorgeous excitement—aptly describes a plethora of seemingly thrilling life experiences that, in retrospect, were ill advised… or maybe that’s my knowing where the story goes!
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Cynthia Weiner has had a long career writing and teaching fiction. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, and Epiphany, and her story “Boyfriends” was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Recently, her story “A Castle In Outerspace” was republished in Coolest American Stories 2024. She is also the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City. Weiner now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
