The Stories We Can’t Let Go: An Interview w/ Cynthia Weiner
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. The novel has been featured in The New Yorker, Town & Country, Oprah Daily, and People Magazine, among others.
Weiner now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Elizabeth England’s stories have appeared in the Nebraska Review, North Atlantic Review, Berkshire Review, Connecticut Review and New Rivers Press American Fiction Vol 16. She won The OSU Journal’s as well as Inkwell Magazine’s short story contests, where the winning story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her story “First Girl” was reprinted in the Writers Studio 30 Anthology, published by Epiphany Magazine in Spring 2017, and “When She Got it,” a winner of Hallard Press’s 2021 Covid-19 contest. Additionally, Elizabeth is a college consultant and essay coach as well an Advisory Board Member for Epiphany Magazine where she was the Fiction Editor.
Elizabeth England: Do you remember a first line or image that ignited A Gorgeous Excitement? Was there anything that kicked it off, where you knew you had that kernel or nugget that you had to keep worrying or perseverating?
Cynthia Weiner: Well, as you know, Robert Chambers, who killed Jennifer Levin in Central Park in 1986, was part of my social circle when I was in high school, and I was always both horrified and intrigued by the case. I was about the same age as Jennifer Levin, and I had a huge crush on one of Chambers’ best friends, who I would have happily gone to the park with in the middle of the night. The image of Jennifer stuck with me. I imagined her in the park having fun and being sexy. I had this image of him, getting angry at her, her not recognizing his rage until it grew too big to fight back against. Of course, I don't know if it happened that way, but in my mind, that dynamic between them was always there.
England: Were there little details that you could use as almost a touchstone when you wanted to connect to or access the mood of the book? Her hair color or the temperature outside or the sound of the tree, or what she was wearing, or laughter, or…
Weiner: I did picture the tree. I always saw my two characters under this big tree. You know at the Writers Studio, where you and I first met, we study other writers and the narrators they’ve created to learn how we can create scenes which become stories or novels. First I had the couple under the tree, and then I used a Dylan Landis story, “Rana Fegrina,” from Normal People Don’t Live Like This that starts, “Angeline Yost keeps a switchblade in her sock. Angeline Yost has B.O. Angeline Yost did it in her parents’ bed and a week later they had crabs so bad they were in their armpits.” I thought: Gardner Reed does this. Gardner Reed does that. Gardner Reed, you know, fingered two girls at the same time at a Police concert. Gardner Reed drove the headmaster's car into the lake. Breathless and starstruck. I was like, that's what the book is.
England: An incantation. I was entranced from the beginning. The confidence and drive of the narrator.
Weiner: I remember being up in my little attic of my old apartment, and I had a notebook and I just started writing. Once I heard the narrator’s voice, I almost felt channeled.
England: Like possessed by the voice. I love that. I’ve gone to bed hearing my narrator say lines. Switching gears now. You mentioned the historical frame of the murder. Would you say that, along with the image of the characters in the park with the tree, that true-crime incident was a helpful structure for you? Was that an important element to you? Could there have ever been a Gardener Reed and Nina Jacobs without the frame of the Preppy Murder? In other words, what if I'm a writer who doesn't have that inciting incident from my past, no incident that impacted me growing up?
Weiner: I think what's important is to look at your own obsessions, whether it's a family tale that you remember and wonder about, like some missing great grandmother whom you’ve heard stories about, or maybe something happened in your town years ago, and you thought, well, that's a weird story. Some people find their material in a newspaper or a magazine. Ask yourself: What's the story you tell a lot?
England: The story or the tale that you rub like a worry bead.
Weiner: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” It's like you can't stop telling the story.
England: There's some reason that it’s stuck in your craw.
Weiner: Yes, and finding out, what's that about? What's going on there? That’s the process of writing. Being a sleuth.
England: So if I'm a writer and I've figured out what my “thing” is, my Gardner Reed and the girl in the park with the tree, how do I then find my story? What would be a good next step to take in order to unpack the image or discover why I'm so intrigued by it?
Weiner: Ask yourself how it relates to you personally. For me, my story was about a girl who was showing off and having fun, connected to her body, exhibiting herself with this boy, and was completely shut down. And I think there was something in that that was so resonant for me.
England: And by shut down, you mean killed? Killed for being sexy.
Weiner: Exactly. And I think that was the beginning of my understanding the “inciting image” and why it kept coming to me. I had to ask myself, what's it have to do with me? What's it have to do with my own adolescence and all of that.
England: Ok, then, so of course I want to know: how did it have to do with you and your adolescence?
Weiner: That was a feeling I had a lot when I was young, both with boys and also in my own family, as a girl with two brothers, I was stunted.
England: So your narrator was able to, in a weird way, unleash or access a lack of inhibition, a freeness, a sexiness, that you could experience in the writing even if you couldn't experience it in real life as a teenager. The writing, the fiction, gave you the opportunity to be that girl.
Weiner: Yes! And I was also aware of another idea I had while writing, which was that he chose her and not me. I remember thinking, that's such a weird thought. He chose her, yes, to kill her… but still. Like, let's say, I had a boyfriend who killed somebody else. I could imagine being really jealous and thinking, in a weird way, he picked her, not me. This allowed me to tap into my own feelings of being rejected in some way, because if you’re not chosen, you’re rejected. I was always the one who didn't get picked when I was young. I never felt like the special one. And I remember while I was writing thinking, that's f-ed up; I'm embarrassed. Even telling you now, I'm like, it's weird, this weird thing to think, who wants to be the one chosen to be killed? That’s a horrible thought. But I think finding your own weirdness in the situation is thrilling. And motivating. It kept me going.
England: I remember a friend of mine said, my sister always gets in trouble. I never get in trouble. Like I want to get in trouble, you know? We all want attention, right?
Weiner: I remember a friend of mine told me once she was raped, and the whole time she was thinking, he's thinking that I'm so fat. And I just remember thinking what a weird, but totally human thought. And it just felt so real. And fresh. As a writer, you have to find those weird idiosyncratic ideas, thoughts, moments, memories that are you.
England: How did you teach yourself to write a literary thriller? To take that part of you that was titillated by possibly being the chosen one at last, the one killed by Gardner Reed in Central Park, and connect it to your deeply personal family-of-origin story? To make this book a mystery, a sexual assault story, in that we know the perp, but we don’t know which girl will be the victim, and also a beautiful, moving mommy-daughter story?
What makes A Gorgeous Excitement so unique and special to me, is the layers of this historical incident with this deeply personal, heartbreaking relationship. What are some tips for someone who has your ambition and wants to take on this “double genre”?
Weiner: My main character had to have skin in her own game, right? Going through her own stuff. Knowing that she was 18, I asked myself, what's going on in her life? What’s her trouble? What's her problem? Because she was so young, it made sense for it to be family stuff. There's only a few things that cause trouble in life. Your health, your job, your marriage or your kids or whatever. For much of my life, I stayed out of trouble. I'm an observer, I'm not the person who's always acting. But I think a lot of writers are like that. They're the ones who sit back and watch life happen. However, if you're going to write a book or a story, life has to be happening to your character. And they have to be acting, not just observing.
England: But do you think part of the reason why you, Cynthia, the writer, took a step back, is because there was so much drama with your mom, like, your mom was the main character of your family?
Weiner: Definitely.
England: This experience of being a spectator in your family life is what makes your details so beautiful. The scene-building is stunning throughout. For example the dogs, the officers, Nina and her mom on the subway—and the tension with the dogs and Nina’s crotch. Bold and intimate.
Let’s talk about scene-building. I love the image of a patchwork quilt. So you're a writer who has many patches, like you can do scenes like nobody’s business, right? You have a ton of scenes, a ton of gorgeous scenes, from meeting Gardner at the bar to then, oh my god, destroying the Carlyle Hotel room to the racy porn shop. How did you figure out which perfect scenes stay in the book and which ones get tossed because you’ve already communicated an aspect about a character or information about the plot?
Weiner: I had a few shopping scenes, and then I realized I only needed one shopping scene. I had a lot of work scenes that I wound up taking out because I needed a little bit of work here, a little bit of work there, but not a whole long scene because I had one and it was enough. I spent a lot of time writing the scenes, or notes about scenes, and then making charts to see what fits where, what leads to the next thing, what raises the narrative tension. I used online platforms like Kanban or Trello to move scenes around on digital boards and help me figure out what went where to create a surprise or leave the reader with an unanswered question.
England: There were moments in the book where I felt that this was a deciding scene, and it works so well, like it just made me want to read on because the writer knows what she’s doing. I was in expert hands. If I'm a writer who might be a bit plot-adverse and instead gets lost in navel-gazing with my character, and am not always as attuned to pacing or, you know, turning up the volume as I should be, what are some pro tips? How did you teach yourself how to be more plot-aware? Did you read certain writers? Did you read thrillers to write a thriller? Did you write short stories when you were struggling with this book or did you just keep at the book?
Weiner: I didn't write short stories during the course of the book, but I did read a lot of short stories for scene-building. As you know, I'm obsessed with Joyce Carol Oates.
England: What do you love about Oates? What should someone who doesn’t know her work read? A toe-dip?
Weiner: Her work is very physical. There's often a lot of violence. I can't remember the name of the short story that I kept going back to where this guy is in a car with a knife and kills his girlfriend. Then this woman happens to see the murder, and she's a witness. When she's testifying in court, she meets the killer's best friend, and they become involved. And there's a scene when he comes up to her on the sidewalk, he's barefoot, and he walks through glass, and she notices that his feet aren't cut. Oates creates scenes like that, right in the moment. Visceral, physical and so sensuous.
England: Let's talk about the era for a minute. If I'm a writer that doesn't have a decade that I'm connected to, like the 80s, the end of high school, an Upper East Side New York girls’ private school world, what could I do to simulate or approximate the richness you extract from that time/place? What if I was an Army brat? What if I wasn’t that attuned to my surroundings of a certain cultural zeitgeist moment? How could I create it?
Weiner: First of all, you can always do research. I researched this book. Even though I grew up in the era I’m writing about, I went to the streets. I looked at old photos of subways from the 80s. I listened to the music. I've heard of people writing novels that were set in Uganda and they did their research through Google.
England: I also loved how in your family of origin there are three kids and Nina is an only kid. That distancing mechanism was a wonderful way to make her not 100% you. So it didn't feel quite so autobiographical. Was that a conscious decision to have Nina have no siblings?
Weiner: I wanted the connection between her and her mother to not be diluted by anybody else being around. No distractions, and no one else to ease the burden. I did try a brother first, and it just was like, I don't know what to do with him. He was a flat character.
England: I love that, that you tried putting a sibling in there, and it just didn't work. So the whole notion of play or looking at novel-writing in terms of play, versus you're banging your head against the wall because it's not freaking working, like trying it out, like trying too many characters, trying it from different POVs, wait, did you try it ever from first person?
Weiner: I tried alternating between two different characters. I tried to have all these scenes from Gardner’s perspective, not whole scenes but like little scenelets from his point of view. I tried to write the novel from the present time looking back. I tried to write it during the present time, events happening in the present. And it did feel like, oh my god, this is SO not working. But looking back, it was time well spent doing more writing on my subject matter, my material.
England: And remind me, what is the time distance that you chose? Isn't the narrator writing the story from the recent past?
Weiner: It's close third person, so it's sort of as it's happening. Almost not really any perspective.
England: That’s a great point. Let’s talk about the prologue because I felt that was a great choice. And did a heavy-lift for you. How did that idea come?
Weiner: I don't quite remember, but I will say that writing instructors and critics are often anti-prologue. But I think they’re kind of fun: something big is going to happen, I’ll give you a hint now to stay in the back of your mind as you read, but you won’t get to know all of it until the end.
England: How long did this book take you to write, from when you first had the kernel of an idea to completion?
Weiner: 10 years. I kept saying, I'm just going to keep believing it's going to take shape. There's discovery along the way and you have to stay open to that. Why do I want to tell this story? I kept asking myself that.
England: Do you believe in hiring outside coaches and editors? There are so many online workshops, particularly post COVID. You’re a teacher and former student at the Writers Studio, but was there a time in your own writing journey when workshops and showing your work to a group wasn’t as helpful?
Weiner: In the beginning, it actually can be helpful just to keep yourself excited and motivated. And then maybe you choose to show a group of people a scene here and there, and as long as your readers know that's what you're doing, that they're not trying to be like, wait, this doesn't fit in the story, then it’s fine. You're just writing and showing people and that can be helpful in terms of accountability and peer support. But I do think there comes a point where you’ve got to be alone with it. At the very end, I did have an editor I worked with, and it was invaluable. When I'd gotten to a certain point that I was like, all right, this is ready to be seen, this is as good as I can make it at least at this point, then it was actually really, really helpful. But that took a number of years,
England: And how long did the editor-work take before you were ready to find an agent?
Weiner: Two more years. We went through my manuscript chapter by chapter, rewriting, rewriting.
England: I love that you trusted when your work's too fragile, when maybe it's just not ready to be inspected. And then let's end with, who are some other writers besides Joyce Carol Oates who have helped you along the way, who you turned to for inspiration or guidance?
Weiner: Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss and Pretend I'm Dead were indispensable. I had such a young character that, even though the novel was third person, I worried about it sounding too childlike. Beagin’s voice is very cool and very nonchalant, very helpful in offsetting the childlike-ness.
Mary Gaitskill, always, for her brilliant details. Emma Cline’s The Girls for rooting a story in time and place.
