Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive

look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't

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Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day.

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at Zibby Owens. Cynthia Weiner is the author of a gorgeous excitement, a novel. Cynthia has had a long

career writing and teaching fiction. Her short stories have been published in Plow Shares,

The Sun, and Epiphany, and her story boyfriends was awarded a pushcard prize. She is also the assistant

director of the writer's studio in New York City. A gorgeous excitement, her first novel was

inspired by her upbringing on New York's upriside in the 1980s, and particularly by the notorious

preppy murder of 1986. She lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

Welcome, Cynthia. Thank you so much for coming on, totally booked with Zibi, to talk about a gorgeous

excitement, which I loved. Oh my gosh, so good. Thank you for writing this. I read every word,

baited breath, loved, love, loved. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Sylvie. It's such an honor to be here with you. Oh, I remember the whole preppy murder so well. I remember where I was, like all of it, like hearing about it. I was actually at Hebrew school. And I remember sitting in the chair and being like, what happened? Anyway, let's back up. Sorry, I had to jump in there.

But talk about where the story came from, what it's based on all the stuff, the backstory and the

what it's about. Of course, yes. So the story is inspired, as you alluded to, to by the 1986

prepping murder in New York City, when an 18-year-old Jennifer Levin, and we can get into a young Jewish girl, actually was strangled to death in Central Park during a hookup with preppy, very handsome, it boy, Robert Chambers.

But the novel is fiction, and it follows a bright but very insecure 18-year-old girl during the summer of that summer of 1986.

Her name is Nina Jacobs.

And she's living with her father and profoundly depressed and very volatile mother on the very waspy, upriest side of Manhattan.

And she's desperate to lose her virginity before she starts college and also desperate to save her mother from kind of last ditch electroshock therapy.

And at the start of the summer, she meets this Upper East Side Legend, who I've called Gardner Reed at a very popular preppy bar.

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