On August 26, 1986, I awoke to the news that 18-year-old Jennifer Levin had been found strangled to death in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum. The next day, a popular, preppy, movie-star-handsome 19-year-old she had left an Upper East Side bar with was charged with her murder. After first claiming he hadn’t been with her, he changed his story: her death was an accident, he said; he was fighting her off when the sex got too aggressive. The press would sensationalize her death, calling it “The Preppy Murder,” and engage in gleeful slut-shaming of Levin, with headlines like “Jenny Killed in Wild Sex,” “Sex Play Got Rough,” and “How Jennifer Courted Death.” A week after it happened, I overheard a guy at a bar say that Levin “was a drunk and a slut”—as though her killer had been an innocent bystander and Jennifer got what she deserved.
I knew the guy who did it. His name was Robert Chambers, or “Rob” to his friends and the swarms of girls always buzzing around him. I was there that summer, drinking with Rob and his friends at Dorrian’s, the bar he and Jennifer would leave from that late-August night. I had a huge crush on one of his best friends, making me practically the only girl there who was interested in someone other than Rob. Not that he wasn’t every bit as good-looking as people have said. He really was breathtaking: thick dark hair, black-lashed cobalt eyes. Maybe I was intimidated, an out-of-my-league self-assessment. I doubt he’d remember me now, but I knew him well enough then to sit at his table and administer one of those magazine personality tests (his favorite animal: gazelle) and, later that summer, to smoke a joint with him in my parents’ bedroom when they were away (he got mad at me when I prematurely tossed the roach out the window), and, just a couple of weeks before he killed Jennifer, get stoned with him behind the Museum of Natural History. I was so out of it, I couldn’t walk, and he carried me to a taxi.
How could a guy show kindness and concern for one girl, yet two weeks later, strangle another to death?…Would I have met the same fate as Jennifer?How could a guy show kindness and concern for one girl, yet two weeks later, strangle another to death? Truthfully, I’d probably have gone with him to Central Park the night of August 26th—or any night—if he’d asked. Would I have met the same fate as Jennifer? I think about that whenever I pass the 84th Street entrance to the park, beside the Met. I picture them walking down the dark path past the Temple of Dendur, the silence punctured only by the rustle of raccoons in the bushes, the towering elm tree they stopped beneath a few yards from Cleopatra’s Needle. I imagine his broad shoulders and sharp jaw, and I can feel the quickened heartbeat in my chest, what it felt like at eighteen when a boy bent his head to kiss me, when his arms came around me and pulled me closer. What was it like for Jennifer when desire and anticipation abruptly gave way to confusion, then terror? When his hands became violent, grabbing her throat, squeezing, clamping off her oxygen? The deep gouges the police noted on Rob’s face when they arrested him the next day were evidence of her desperate struggle, how she’d dug and clawed at him with her nails to get him to let go. When did she know that these were her last moments alive, that she’d never see her family or friends again?
I’ve asked myself these questions a thousand times. Yet it’s only recently, nearly four decades later, that I completed a novel about that summer. In the intervening years, there were a few attempts to write it as a short story, from one point of view or another or in one time or setting or another, but nothing came of them. I felt a vague unease I couldn’t shake: what right did I have to fictionalize someone else’s tragedy? I didn’t even know Jennifer, and I only knew Rob superficially. What gave me license to make Jennifer’s story my story, however fictionalized? (Even now, I squirmed as I wrote the previous paragraph, imagining her death, putting myself in the scene, filling in blanks, ornamenting with prose.) Was it exploitative, even immoral, for a writer to essentially co-opt someone’s tragedy for a novel?
One day, while again trying to untangle the tentacles of that question, I was thinking about the manic energy of New York City in the 1980s—Wall Street, the nightclubs, neon clothing, Madonna, sky-high hair. That word, “manic,” triggered a realization: the summer Jennifer was killed was the summer that my mother, who suffered from profound, soul-sucking depression, had a manic episode. It was also, I recalled, the summer that some friends and I started using cocaine, which brought about its own kind of mania. To be honest, it was a terrifically fun summer. My mother was high, and so was I, and even if neither of us was high in a healthy way, seeing her happy and energized after all the darkness was exhilarating. She bought one of those mini cassette recorders at Sharper Image, and it became her constant companion. She talked into it incessantly, recording her autobiography for posterity, she said. I got one too, and brought it everywhere, including Dorrian’s, where I dictated cassette-letters to friends who were away for the summer, getting everyone around the bar to say hello.
Gradually, a story that felt like my story, or at least less uncomfortably someone else’s, started to reveal itself, with mania as the arc: an escalating, out-of-control excitement, experienced simultaneously by a girl and her mother over the tumultuous summer of 1986 which would end tragically. Even the title I settled on—A Gorgeous Excitement—reflected this main theme (it was Sigmund Freud who famously called a cocaine high “a gorgeous excitement”). But resolving one dilemma presented another: who was I to capitalize on my mother’s tragedy? Her last ten years were good ones thanks to an effective cocktail of newer medications (she died of a heart attack in 2000) but except for a couple of vague allusions to her past “hard time,” we never talked about the darkness that had preceded her recovery. I’d tried to write about her depression before she died but couldn’t. I was so invested in shielding her, from the memories and the stigma, that even touching on the subject in a story felt wrong. Even after she died, writing about her mental health struggles felt like a betrayal, an airing of her dirty laundry.
And speaking of dirty laundry: the more immersed I became in the atmosphere of the 1980s, the more my shame from that time resurfaced. How much I’d hated being Jewish, nothing to do with the religion itself but how insignificant it had made me feel in a blue-eyed blond WASP-dominated society, their delicate features and stately names, their pedigree and sailboats and Hamptons summer houses. How it had felt to be pale and big-chested and big-nosed in the midst of them, with an easily mispronounced and easy-to-make-fun-of last name. How much of that shame and self-loathing did I want to reveal? But again, if I was going to write about other people, I had to locate myself in the story; I had to summon the courage to start there. An 18-year-old Jewish girl in that world, at that time, desperate to be included and admired, yet resentful and dismissive of the very people she wanted to include and admire her. The only virgin among her friends from the snobby private girls’ school she attended. Perhaps with a volatile, severely depressed mother at home, from whom she steals Xanax and Valium to numb herself to it all. What if that girl becomes obsessed with a popular, preppy-handsome, out-of-her-league guy with a troubled past, and throws caution to the wind in pursuit of him?
Still, there was that lingering feeling of guilt about exposing my mother’s secret, however fictionalized. Permission, of sorts, came from Adam Johnson, who wrote a fantastic story collection called Fortune Smiles and guest-taught a craft class at the Writers Studio, the school in New York City where I teach. One of his stories, “Interesting Facts,” is narrated by a cancer-stricken wife who’s worried her husband will replace her. In real life, Johnson told us, his wife, also a writer, had survived a brutal bout with breast cancer, but she chose not to write about it despite Johnson’s encouragement.
A student asked, “How did she feel about you writing the story?”
“Cancer didn’t happen just to her,” Johnson said. “It happened to all of us in the family, and this was the truth of my experience.”
His comment had stayed with me. My mother’s mental health struggles happened to everyone in our family and affected each of us deeply, in distinct ways. The truth of my experience was surely different from the truth of my father’s, or either of my two brothers’, but it shaped me as a person and a writer. It was my truth, my experience, to excavate and fictionalize from my unique perspective in a way that I hoped would resonate with readers. Similarly, Jennifer Levin’s tragic death, the slut-shaming, the mania of the city in the 80s, the yearning for acceptance, the loss of an adolescent sense of invulnerability—that happened to all of us as well.
Whatever lingering doubts I might have had about the propriety of writing about that tragic summer were dissipated by the “grab ’em by the pussy” mentality that was re-normalized in 2016. I have four young nieces growing up in a society where attitudes about women seem to be devolving to 1980s levels: Roe v. Wade overturned, a man found liable for sexual abuse re-elected president, women on the street randomly punched in the face. The gains won are slipping away, and the lessons learned are being undone, even ridiculed.
A writing prompt I give my students is: “What’s a story or subject you’re always talking about, but haven’t sat down to write?” I’d been thinking and talking about the summer of 1986 for ages. Thirty years later, it was time to sit down and write.
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