Peter Orner keeps a small writing studio inside an old hotel on the Connecticut River, where Vermont meets New Hampshire. That room, to put this kindly, is often a landfill, a mess, though not without raw charm. The hotel dates to the 1920s, some artists work here, some people live here. The neighborhood has a drug problem. Orner wades to his desk, he doesn\u2019t walk to his desk. He steps across papers and books. On a wall is some research he did for his latest book, though if you didn\u2019t know he was a writer, you might assume from its pastiche of photos and news headlines that he was a conspiracy nut. He\u2019s embarrassed when friends visit, but all of it works for him.<\/p>\n
Across the river is Dartmouth College, where he teaches, and he\u2019s never been comfortable with its Ivy League comforts. His studio is a retreat. His window looks out on the red-bricked rear of a restaurant, where staff take smoke breaks.<\/p>\n
He misses home, he misses Chicago.<\/p>\n
He keeps a row of Chicago books collected on a shelf, the lives and writings of Harold Washington, Richard J. Daley, Jane Byrne, Ben Hecht. He likes to joke, having grown up in Highland Park, \u201cI think of Chicago as being ripped away at birth. It\u2019s become the original sin of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a whole chapter of Orner\u2019s new novel, \u201cThe Gossip Columnist\u2019s Daughter,\u201d in which the fictional narrator, but really Orner \u2014 Chicago native son, Highland Park-raised, now homesick and running the English and Creative Writing Department at Dartmouth \u2014 just lists the names of the people he misses. Names he\u2019s heard a million times. Chicago names. \u201cIt\u2019s their names,\u201d he writes, \u201cwe\u2019ll never shake their names.\u201d Some of those names stand alone, some of the names are lumped, and some cascade down the page.<\/p>\n
Big Bill Thompson, Mayor Daley, Jesse Jackson.<\/p>\n
Bozo.<\/p>\n
Oprah.<\/p>\n
Ditka.<\/p>\n
Ye.<\/p>\n
\u201cThrough the osmosis of repetition,\u201d he writes, certain names \u201cbecome part of the permanent vocabulary.\u201d Meaning, certain names in Chicago no longer indicate people so much as a kind of geography, as inseparable from the city as Lake Michigan. Like: Donahue, Payton, Ernie Banks, Ryne Sandberg, Tim Weigel, Buddy Ryan, Buddy Guy, Ray Rayner. But also: Harold Washington, Jane Byrne, Bill Kurtis, Harry Caray, Frazier Thomas, Linda Yu, Butkus, DuSable, Mamet, Cisneros, Terkel, Bellow, Wright, Algren, Belushi, Dybek, Hansberry. Orner lists all of them, and many more.<\/p>\n
But one name dominates: Kup, as in Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet.<\/p>\n
For the sake of readers who didn\u2019t grow up entrenched in local lore, Orner\u2019s narrator says: \u201cChicago didn\u2019t name Kup \u2018Mr. Chicago.\u2019 Kup crowned himself. But he repeated it so often, and for so many years, that the city had no choice but to accept it, if only to tune him out a little. Okay, okay, okay, have mercy, you\u2019re Mr. Chicago. Now leave us alone. We\u2019re reading Mike Royko on page 2.\u201d<\/p>\n
Orner, 57, was once a sewer worker for the city of Highland Park, for a short time. He\u2019s held other jobs, like professor, distinguished lecturer, volunteer firefighter. He didn\u2019t work in sewers long, but the point is: He knows Midwest tics and trash, intimately. He\u2019s written closely about nearly every place associated with his life: Fall River, Massachusetts; California; Namibia. But his writing never shakes Chicago. When I mentioned to him last spring that \u201cGossip Columnist\u201d is the most Chicago novel I\u2019ve ever read \u2014 and maybe the long-underrated author\u2019s first hit \u2014 he wrote back that it was his only way of being where he wishes he lived. It tells the story of a man obsessed with a footnote to local crime history, and how his narrator, like Orner himself, brushes up against that history.<\/p>\n
The daughter in the title is Karyn Kupcinet, also known as Cookie, though certainly better known, by anyone who may remember, for being murdered mysteriously in 1963.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a remarkable read, so tricky to parse or summarize, so willing to subvert wherever you think it\u2019s headed, that Stuart Dybek, the Chicago short story writer, and a friend of Orner\u2019s, declined to write a blurb for the novel. He really tried, he told me, but eventually: \u201cIt just became too hard to do it justice. Peter\u2019s book is this total cross of fiction, non-fiction, memoir, reporting \u2014 and yet! No big deal is made of it! Peter plunges in, but also gives you the standard things to expect from a good story, so reading it is not really startling. It\u2019s not a chore to read. He gets you to accept it. And 95% of writers couldn\u2019t get away with writing like that \u2014 95% of their agents wouldn\u2019t allow it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The book\u2019s narrator, a well-respected writer who had never had much success (and sounds not so dissimilar from Orner), explains to the reader, probably shooting himself in the commercial foot, deflating his narrative: \u201cThis isn\u2019t a detective story or a police procedural. It\u2019s not a mystery.\u201d And still, at times, the novel that follows and its wandering, punchy plot read exactly like a mystery.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s just not about the mystery you think you\u2019re getting.<\/p>\n
Months after reading it, I\u2019m still not sure which of the book\u2019s mysteries is the main one. \u201cIt\u2019s about personal failure, generational failure, the failure of its characters within the sweep of history,\u201d said Joshua Kendall, Orner\u2019s editor, as well as executive editor of Mulholland Books and Little, Brown. \u201cI also read it as true crime from the vantage of a family secret, but secondly as a Jewish-America comedy \u2014 look, it\u2019s incredibly active.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/CTC-L-ENT-PETER-ORNER-STUDIO-01.jpg\")
A wall of book research in writer Peter’s Orner’s office. His latest novel, “The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter,” partly digs into the conspiracy theory that followed the 1963 murder of Karyn Kupcinet, daughter of Chicago journalist Irv Kupcinet. (Alberto Rodriguez)<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the thing about that story: Peter Orner is from a well-connected family.<\/strong> He heard a lot of stories. He knew people. His stepfather, Daniel Pierce, was a Highland Park mayor and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives; his mother, Rhoda Pierce, is still a trustee with the North Shore Water Reclamation District. His grandfather owned an insurance company on Garfield Boulevard on the South Side; its faded awning still hangs over a hair salon. His grandparents were also close friends with Kup and his wife, Esther.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you wanted to make it in this country and were a celebrity, you had to go through Chicago,\u201d Orner said, \u201cand if you were going to make it in Chicago, you had to go through Kup. I was fascinated with our connection. My grandfather went on fishing trips with him. (His grandparents) might not have thought of Kup as a serious journalist, but he had staying power.\u201d They were friends when Kup\u2019s daughter was found strangled in Los Angeles, just a week after President John F. Kennedy\u2019s assassination, which, in those hothouse days, and forever after, made Karyn Kupcinet something of an improbable minor figure with conspiracy theorists.<\/p>\n Her murder was never solved, though often glib newspaper accounts from the time paint a promising 22-year-old actress, heartbroken over a boyfriend, possibly suicidal, maybe using drugs.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of it ruined her reputation, this kid just trying to make a life separate from her father,\u201d Orner said. \u201cShe deserved better. Anyway, around then, there was also a falling out (between Kup and his grandparents). We carried it around, like \u2018Whatever happened to that friendship with the Kups?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In \u201cGossip Columnist\u2019s Daughter,\u201d a family that sounds a great deal like Orner\u2019s family (but is fictional, not his family and named the Rosenthals) has a falling out with the actual Kup family. The narrator becomes convinced that their friendship breaking up sowed the roots for his own problems decades later and \u201chobbled\u201d his family\u2018s future. But the family themselves (like Orner\u2019s real-life family) had long since moved on.<\/p>\n \u201cThe mystery of Cookie\u2019s death led to a lot of questions,\u201d Orner said, \u201cbut in writing this, I was most interested in the collateral damage of the aftermath. I was interested in a friendship that ends suddenly. I had heard that when a child dies, friendships can be among the things affected. Your life gets a hole blown through it and friends especially can get expendable in cruel ways. The book is fiction, but then there\u2019s kernels of truth.\u201d<\/p>\n Orner knew Kup a bit.<\/p>\n For a while, he was a sports stringer for the Sun-Times and would run into Kup in the hallways. Orner worked for sports legend Taylor Bell. \u201cHe had these owl glasses and he would get scary. I\u2019d be standing at a pay phone in like Glenbrook North or Romeoville or somewhere and would call in a high school football game and wouldn\u2019t be able to describe a touchdown well enough and he would give such (expletive). He would yell: \u2018I need texture! I just need more!\u2019 I internalized that. I think he helped me learn to write.\u201d<\/p>\n Orner became the quintessential \u201cwriter\u2019s writer,\u201d which meant everything that means both good and bad, forever on the periphery of fame, respected but unknown. He had no illusions about that trajectory. He set out to write short stories for a living. He studied with Marilynne Robinson at the University of Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop and taught writing himself for years at San Francisco State University. He was a Fulbright scholar, landed in the New Yorker and won three Pushcart Prizes. He\u2019s also written three novels and three books of short stories; the first, \u201cEsther Stories,\u201d from 2001, even got a shout-out in Kup\u2019s column. If Orner ever received a negative review, I\u2019ve never seen it.<\/p>\n \u201cBut the line on him just stayed \u2018writer\u2019s writer,\u2019\u201d said Alex Gordon, a Northbrook native and friend of Orner\u2019s since they met as undergraduates at the University of Michigan. \u201cIt\u2019s fascinating to me because, without casting sideways glances at other Chicago writers, he\u2019s very accessible. But he\u2019s also never tried to put a finger on the culture in the way someone like, say, his friend Dave Eggers will. Peter\u2019s probably never going to write an AI novel.\u201d<\/p>\n Rather, Orner remains in the lineage of someone like Dybek, another \u201cwriter\u2019s writer\u201d from Chicago. \u201cI don\u2019t know if Peter\u2019s really flown under the radar,\u201d Dybek said. \u201cI\u2019m not sure it\u2019s entirely true, but I\u2019m also not sure if people know what an original voice he has.\u201d<\/p>\n Orner once told an interviewer that he imagines himself like a scavenger, circling old memories. That speaks to the casual drift of his prose. His sentences \u2014 \u201cutterly focused on every line, and it\u2019s rare to meet a writer anymore who is thinking through every word and line,\u201d Kendall said \u2014 have a comfortable bittersweet fogginess that snaps into view around strange and telling specifics. The way Rosehill Cemetery is practically a neighborhood unto itself, yet somehow easy to drive by without really noticing. The way a person can be so striking that they look like a \u201cmyth.\u201d The way Ricardo Montalban was once a routine signifier of class. The way the Drake Hotel used to freshen its bathrooms by leaving fresh fruit in the urinals. You never know where his paragraphs will leave you.<\/p>\n In conversation, Orner describes what little he knows of his family\u2019s relationship with the Kups as \u201cbread crumbs of our history,\u201d ones he follows through his novel, fictionalizes in places, but also, the kind of bread crumbs he doesn\u2019t want to become forensic about. He doesn\u2019t want to know exactly why his grandparents and the Kups stopped speaking.<\/p>\n \u201cAll I know is something happened 60 years ago there and it\u2019s been in my head for so long, I wanted to play it all out in fiction. Which is not the first time I have used family in fiction. A lot of writers, of course, do that. My hero, Isaac Babel, would say never make something up, there is no need for that. But of course I make (expletive) up. There is too much for me to figure out using fiction. I can\u2019t resist. In the past, I\u2019d get harsh about this with family: \u2018Look, this is what I do for a living!\u2019 But my father, who passed away 10 years ago and takes a lot of hits in my work, which he deserved \u2014 I treated him roughly, but he also knew the difference between fiction and nonfiction.<\/p>\n \u201cHe helped me figure this out. We need to tell the stories we avoid. We need to go there. So I go back into 1963, to say the things that maybe we aren\u2019t supposed to say.\u201d<\/p>\n cborrelli@chicagotribune.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Peter Orner keeps a small writing studio inside an old hotel on the Connecticut River, where Vermont meets…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":163602,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[1022,960,171,5386,1818,2765,1370,1072],"class_list":{"0":"post-163601","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-illinois","13":"tag-keywee","14":"tag-latest-headlines","15":"tag-things-to-do"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115066421282640228","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\""The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/orner.jpg\")
“The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter” by Peter Orner. (Little, Brown and Company \/ Aug. 12, 2025)<\/p>\n