tawk reviews: A gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia weiner

Neighborhoods
Written By Stephanie A.

Page, Stage, and Screen

Some books stay on the page. This one crawls into your bloodstream.

A Gorgeous Excitement is immersive in the truest sense. You don’t just read it, you inhabit it. You’re sleeping on the floor of Nina’s apartment, dodging strange men with her on hot summer nights, laughing too hard as you run from danger that isn’t funny. You’re standing at a high-top in a dingy neighborhood bar packed with people you went to high school with, pretending you belong there. You’re next to her mother as she unravels, muttering rhyme after rhyme in a schizophrenic spiral that leaves you feeling numb.

Nina is seventeen, raw and invisible. Her mother is descending into a full-blown mental health crisis, and no one’s really paying attention. Her new friend Stephanie, who saves her from a deranged homeless man, introduces her to cocaine and club nights and chaos. Nina keeps going out, hoping her crush, Gardner, will see her. Really see her. But no one sees Nina. She could disappear and the world would keep spinning. That’s what makes this book so quietly devastating.

There’s a moment in a sex shop that gutted me: a man casually reading a porn magazine where a woman was portrayed as a pig. It’s fleeting, but unforgettable. That’s how Weiner writes. She doesn’t overstate the horror. She just shows it. And you feel it like a punch to the ribs. There’s subtleties of your early 20’s in this book that you’d rather forget, but feel cathartic to read about. Your friend’s creepy boyfriend that they love. Your parents going through their own shit, leaving you to figure out life now that you’re an adult. Smoking weed with people you know, but don’t quite know but who cares because you’re all drunk.

This book is disturbing, but not for shock value. It’s disturbing because it reminds you of every moment you weren’t safe, weren’t seen, weren’t sure who you were becoming. It reminds you of all the times you shouldn’t have made it home in one piece… but you did. And how lucky that really was. Only, in 1980s NYC, it was even grittier, even lonelier, even less forgiving. But somehow, it’s also FUN. (And laugh out loud funny when you least expect it.)

Cynthia Weiner doesn’t just capture a coming-of-age—she captures the psychic chaos of girlhood with a precision that suggests lived experience. The textures are specific, the atmosphere rich. The result is one of the most lurid, funny, sad, exhilarating books I’ve read in years. It doesn’t just tell a story. It remembers one.

Stephanie A.

Stephanie once found herself very nearly kicked out of the Morgan Museum and Library for weeping incessantly over a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair on display. Apparently the other patrons found that disturbing. Beyond that though, Stephanie is a freelance writer, novelist and owner of the Wandering Why Traveler brand. She lives in the ‘Little Odessa’ part of Brooklyn where’s she’s been studying Russian for nearly a decade yet hasn’t learned jack-shit about the language, somehow. It’s probably because she’s always consumed in art history seminars, museum visits, and indie bookstores. She’s a voracious reader, a prolific writer, and enjoys both the glitter and grit of New York City. An ‘old soul’ is how she describes herself because of her love of classics, actors like Marlon Brando, and penchant for Van Morrison, Motown, and early bedtimes.  

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