Cynthia Weiner’s A Gorgeous Excitement is a riveting debut, a coming-of-age novel as hypnotically told as it is suspenseful.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Terrific debut . . . the book recalls another excellent true crime–inspired novel, Emma Cline’s The Girls. Carefully paced and beautifully written, this edgy coming-of-age novel succeeds on all counts.”
In her own words, here is Cynthia Weiner’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel A Gorgeous Excitement:
Music in the 1980s was unabashedly over-the-top—synthesizers, hard-driving guitar riffs, propulsive drum fills—both mirroring and perhaps contributing to the manic energy of the time. My novel, A Gorgeous Excitement, takes place in the summer of 1986, with many scenes in an Upper East Side bar called Flanagan’s that has a jukebox. Eighties music is not only ever-present in the background, it also sets the tone, defines the characters, and serves as a jumping-off point for dialogue.
As I put together this playlist, it struck me how many of the songs have a restrained and tense lead-in, a feeling of anticipation, then burst into hyperdrive, much like the arc of the book itself and the experiences of the main characters.
So mix yourself a Long Island iced tea, get out your Dippity-Do, and put on these cassettes for a trip back to the ’80s.
“Situation” by Yaz
I didn’t identify “Situation” as the Yaz song playing on the jukebox at Flanagan’s in the first chapter, but that’s the song I heard when I was writing the scene. I imagined Alison Moyet’s deep, commanding voice while Nina Jacobs, the main character, watches guys ogle the sexy girls, and the bar’s windows blur with steam. Nina aches to be ogled, and break free from her good-girl upbringing, a longing that gets her in way over her head by the end of the novel.
“Burning Down the House” by the Talking Heads
A pervy doorman does evening shifts at Nina’s apartment building, so to avoid him, she takes a walk down Third Avenue with the Talking Heads playing on her Walkman. I had a pervy doorman and I was crazy about the Talking Heads, and it was really fun to include this scenario in my book, along with one of my favorite songs. That suspenseful opening guitar, that bam to your body when the beat kicks in, and then the lyrics: Watch out, you might get what you’re after. That would become a kind of warning for the rest of the novel. Of course Nina, having just had what feels like a magic conversation with Gardner Reed, the coolest guy at Flanagan’s, not only doesn’t heed the warning, but hopes that at least once in her life she’ll have the chance to find out why getting what you want could possibly be something to worry about.
“Should I Stay or Should I Go” by The Clash
Nina’s at the jukebox, picking out songs with Gardner Reed right behind her, looking over her shoulder, his breath on the back of her neck. It’s a sexy moment, and I wanted her to pick a sexy song. She picks this one, with that urgent opening guitar riff and the drums pounding through the speakers while Gardner murmurs in her ear: “It’s always tease tease tease.” RIP Joe Strummer.
“Ain’t Nobody” by Rufus & Chaka Khan
Some things in the novel are more autobiographical than others. I won’t say which one this is, but at eighteen, anxious Nina is already developing a problem with alcohol and prescription pills, which she sneaks from her parents’ medicine cabinet. One of her rituals on nights they’re out is to mix vodka and Diet Coke in a tall glass and put Chaka Khan on the stereo. Ain’t nobody loves me better, she sings to the glass, ironically but still meaning it. I wish I could tell Nina that everything would be okay one day.
“Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince
There’s a lot of craziness in the book—euphoria, mania, cocaine—so I thought this frenetic song fit perfectly. It’s another one of those ’80s songs that starts slow and suspenseful, Prince’s voice reverberating over a funereal organ, and then suddenly gears up with insistent percussion. I’ve got Nina pining for Gardner at Flanagan’s one night, wondering where he is, when “Let’s Go Crazy” starts up and Gardner suddenly appears, lip-syncing Prince into a beer bottle as a crowd gathers around him, commanding the bar as surely (through Nina’s eyes) as Prince himself.
“Bad Girls” by Donna Summer
Nothing says the eighties like a coke-fueled analysis of a Donna Summer song. In a scene set at the Palladium, the fantastically gorgeous nightclub on 14th Street (which was demolished in the nineties to build an NYU dorm), Nina and her new friend Stephanie approach a wired-looking guy on the balcony in hopes of sharing his cocaine. “Bad Girls” is blaring over the club’s sound system, and in a typical coke-ramble, white crumbs speckling his nostrils, the guy launches into a disquisition about the song’s lyrics: “Toot-toot, beep-beep,” he urgently explains, “is the call and response between johns and hookers.” Etc., etc., ad infinitum.
“Like a Virgin” by Madonna
In 1983, I randomly saw Madonna perform “Everybody” at a tiny downtown club; no one knew who she was, but everyone was breathless. By the mid-eighties, I and half the girls in America were copying her floppy hair-bows, rubber bracelets and lace leggings in hopes of embodying, or at least displaying, even an eighth of her confidence and swagger. Of course I had to have Nina wear her own home-scissored lace leggings. On the first night she talks to Gardner, he flatteringly calls her “Madonna.”
Later in the book, “Like a Virgin” playing over the Flanagan’s jukebox prompts a priggish guy in a pink bow tie to ask his date why Madonna thinks anyone wants to hear her sing about what a slut she is. A bit of foreshadowing of the slut-shaming the press and public would engage in when the strangled girl is found dead in Central Park
“Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys
Although I love the Beach Boys, I used this song in the book to give a group of preppy investment banker types, replete with tortoiseshell glasses and suspenders, something superficial and breezy to sing along to at Flanagan’s at the top of their lungs, to musically contrast with what Nina imagines as Gardner’s tortured darkness.
“Fly Me to the Moon” sung by Bobby Short
Bobby Short singing “Fly Me to the Moon” in Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel is as iconic as it gets for ’80s NYC elegance. As the reader of A Gorgeous Excitement comes to learn along with Nina, although Gardner lives in the wealthy, blue-blooded world of the Upper East Side, it’s all a facade. His mother is a nurse, and their rather shabby apartment, by UES standards, is a rental. The pressure his mother exerts on him to pass himself off as one of the privileged elite is a source of conflict and resentment in Gardner, although he does an admirable job of endearing himself to the powerful and wealthy—until, that is, it’s a matter of him or them. After a particularly callous betrayal by his wealthy best friend and his father, Gardner bluffs his way into the father’s Carlyle Hotel apartment while he’s away and, with Nina in tow, trashes it. Before he gets started, he points out the apartment’s grand piano to Nina and says bitterly, “Bobby Short taught me ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ on that fucking piano.” He proceeds to dig a gash in its side with a marble obelisk.
“Girl Can’t Help It” by Journey
Nina and her private girls’ school friends are city snobs, so it was fun adding a couple of unapologetically brash Long Island girls to the Flanagan’s mix to get under their skin. These are girls who parade around the bar polling guys on topics like: Playboy or Penthouse? Spit or swallow? and loudly ask who they “have to blow” to get “Girl Can’t Help It” on the jukebox. At that time, in the mid ’80s, Steve Perry was the epitome of what city girls considered ‘bridge and tunnel’ tacky: long feathered hair; tight tight pants; soulfully eyefucking the camera in cringey, slapdash videos. (All of that said, there’s more than one Journey song I still like to blast in the car.)
“I’ve Loved These Days” by Billy Joel
I played a lot of Billy Joel while writing this book. His music was a major part of my eighties. And yeah, people now say the tunes are hacky and the lyrics yearbook-page banal, but I can’t help it: the songs live deep in my heart. The sense of loss in “I’ve Loved These Days” still brings me to tears. When deciding on a song that the dead girl’s friends would quote at her funeral, there was no competition. It had to be that one.
“Sex Crime (1984)” by the Eurythmics, “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” by The Communards, “Her Last Fling,” by Lloyd Cole and The Commotions, “Accidents Will Happen” by Elvis Costello
A month or two after Jennifer Levin was killed, while the “Preppy Murder” still dominated the news, a journalist friend of mine noticed some cruelly appropriate song titles on the Dorrians’ jukebox and sent a list of them to Spy Magazine, which went on to publish it. In the book, I have patrons playing these songs on Flanagans’ jukebox after the news breaks, while gossiping about the dead girl’s reputation. As happened in real life, the handsome killer was widely viewed as a victim himself, or at most an innocent bystander, who got lured into “rough sex” by a promiscuous girl and caused her death by accident.
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. She is also the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City. A Gorgeous Excitement, her first novel, was inspired by her upbringing on New York’s Upper East Side in the 1980s, and particularly by the notorious “Preppy Murder” of 1986. Weiner now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
