Peter Orner is no conspiracy theorist. Sure, he’s a bit of an obsessive. And yes, his latest novel takes place in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But the questions that drive him are less about schemes and intrigue and more about the nature of stories: why people hold onto them and what that reveals about their lives.
“I guess I just love rabbit holes, and I like to invent them, but a lot of times you don’t have to invent them,” Orner says via Zoom from his office at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he chairs the English department. “In this case it was just there.”
Orner’s third novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, out from Little, Brown in August, follows aspiring novelist Jed Rosenthal and revolves around a death that took place several days after JFK’s in 1963—one mainly known by rabid conspiracy theorists: the unsolved 1963 murder of Cookie Kupcinet, a fledgling Hollywood starlet and the daughter of famous Chicago newspaper columnist Irv Kupcinet.
The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter was, Orner says, a book 15 years in the making. It was a story he wanted to tell; it was just a matter of figuring out how to tell it. While gathering material for the novel, he accrued a “wall of stuff”—not unlike a conspiracy theorist’s evidence board—in his writing studio across the river from Dartmouth.
“I was thinking, because I became obsessed with the Kupcinets to a point, that maybe that’s where the story is. I decided to put myself into a situation where a narrator is obsessed with something that no one else is obsessed with. It’s a story of how a story can’t let you go.”
Orner was born in 1968 in Chicago, but his family lived in suburban Highland Park, a fact the author half-jokingly calls one of the “original sins” of his life. “I was taken out of the city,” he says. “I became obsessed with the city that I was robbed of.”
While in high school, Orner discovered his knack for writing, working as a sports stringer for the Chicago Sun-Times. “I think having to invent interesting and new ways of conveying things that are mundane and repetitive—every game was the same to me—was how I cut my teeth,” he says. After graduating, Oner attended the University of Michigan and Northeastern University School of Law and then earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Orner says about his efforts to publish his first book, the 2001 story collection Esther Stories. “My high school best friend was my agent. He’d never sold a book before. I had some great teachers, such as Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I was very, very lucky.”
Since Esther Stories, a New York Times notable book, Orner has been busy. He’s published two novels, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love; two collections, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge and Maggie Brown & Others; and two books of essays. He’s also edited three nonfiction titles and has taught creative writing, first at San Francisco State University for 16 years and then at Dartmouth. In the classroom, he frequently challenges students to hold the reader’s attention—an approach informed by his Chicagoland upbringing, where he eagerly listened to the same stories over and over from his parents and grandparents. One of those stories was about the mysterious death of Cookie Kupcinet.
Despite its sensational elements (an unsolved mystery, conspiracy theories, JFK), The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter doesn’t have a
conventional plot structure. As Jed confesses to the reader, “This isn’t a detective story or a police procedural. It’s not a mystery. A mystery would leak through my hands like water. God knows I’d write one if I could.” Instead, the novel is driven by deep questions of family, fate, and friendship and unfolds in fractured episodes, with Jed—whose grandparents knew but lost touch with Irv and Essee Kupcinet—attempting to capture the story of how Cookie died while also tracing his own problems back to the end of his grandparents’ friendship with the Kupcinets.
It’s common, Orner says, for people to grab onto an origin story, as Jed does in the novel. “It’s a way to figure out where we went wrong.” He notes that The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter came together from one “failed story” after another. “If I can keep the tautness of a good short story in a novel, then I feel like I’ve done my job. It’s all I ever want to do. I want to write a really good five-page story tomorrow, if there’s time. Everything I do has grown from that desire. I just want to write a tight story that hits you in the face or at least makes you feel something.”
As primarily a short story writer, Orner says, he never had any allusions about finding great commercial success. His less-than-blockbuster book sales have even found their way into his fiction. In one of the stories in Maggie Brown, the narrator (also a short story writer) sends a self-deprecating letter to his publisher, in which he acknowledges that he’s a “charity case.”
It’s a gag, but Orner admits it reflects his own career. “I always feel like I’m a little bit forgotten or an afterthought,” he says. “I’m a short story writer who does his thing, and not a ton of people know about it. I wear that proudly, and I work it as a joke.”
Although Orner would, of course, welcome more readers—he cites short story writers like Alistair McLeod or Peter Taylor who made it big with longer works—his ambition when approaching a novel is no different than when he sits down to write a story. “A novel happens when I need to go more places with a story that I couldn’t compress,” he says. “But my goal is always to compress. That’s just my aesthetic.”
For The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, which clocks in at 448 pages, compression may have been a challenge. But writing long was probably inevitable for a book that explores Orner’s obsession with stories, particularly why people tell and retell the same stories and why people still listen.
“We’ve heard it a million times, why are we telling it?” Orner says. “I think there’s a certain amount of joy that we get out of retelling, and also we’re after something. And even though my own family grew bored of the Kupcinets’ story, and literally would tell me so—I put this into the book, where Jed’s family is like, Why are you bothering with this gossip columnist who just wrote reams and reams of literally absurd nonsense? My own answer to that would be that it’s because I’m after something I wanted to know.”
And while Orner might entertain the idea that he’s an overlooked writer, he’s far less interested in garnering personal attention than in shining a light on other people who are forgotten, like the Kupcinets and those who knew them. “Maybe my story,” he says, “can make them less forgotten.” W
