Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH)

Apr 9, 2026

Peter Orner, novelist and Dartmouth professor, discusses his Chicago-set novel The Gossip Columnist's Daughter. He revisits 1960s city life, a cold-case mystery around a columnist's daughter, and the blurring of fact and fiction with staged photographs. Conversation touches on Jewish identity, cultural outsiders, literary influences, and how family myths shape storytelling.

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INSIGHT

How Family Myths Shape Narratives

Family myths shape identity even when they're built on partial or false memories.
Peter Orner frames a 1963 friendship rift as the pivotal event his narrator obsessively revisits, like Faulkner's Hightower myth.

ADVICE

Use Familiar Literature To Shape Your Voice

Use literature you love as scaffolding for your own narrative choices.
Orner cites Faulkner, Lowry, and DeBuse as models for embedding readers' reading experiences inside his characters' minds.

INSIGHT

Gossip Columns As City Archives

Midcentury gossip columns created a shared civic narrative by recording local doings, not just trivialities.
Orner realized Irv Kupcinet's frequent columns functioned as a social archive of who attended Palmer House events and who mattered in Chicago.

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Chicago is the main character, the setting, the obsession, and the historical grist for the mill of Peter Orner’s most recent novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter (Little Brown and Company, 2025). In conversation about his hometown with Novel Dialogue host Sarah Wasserman, Peter brings us into a lost pocket of time. It is the early 1960s, when Chicagoans partied in a kind of “Midwestern Weimar” and the gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, holding forth as many as six times a week for 60 years, wrote a garrulous, glamorous story of the city. While the increasingly unhinged narrator of his novel investigates the mysterious death of Kupcinet’s daughter in 1963, Peter delves into his own family’s history, anxiously asking “we can’t hurt our dead, can we?” The novel swerves between fact and fiction, including photographs that are both real artifacts from the historical record and staged photos that participate in the fictional world of the novel. Peter laughs off this contradiction, remarking “the closer I get to real things, the more fictional it becomes.” How to describe such a complicated novel? Sarah offers this gem: “It’s as if Philip Roth were less cancellable and wrote a murder mystery,” a line that results in a poignant conversation about what it means to be Jewish and socially striving in Chicago in middle of the 20th century and what it means to be a cultural outsider, “just slightly outside of the circle.” Peter brings the conversation to a close with a memory of going to the University of Tish.
Mentions:

Reverend Hightower appears in William Faulkner’s Light in August
Irv “Kup” and Essie Kupcinet were Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet’s parents
An Edna O’Brien story appears in Andre Dubus’s Dancing After Hours
Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
Phyllis Diller at the Palmer House
Bette Howland’s line about Chicago being “the raw materials for a city” appears in Blue in Chicago
Alberto Paniagua
Philip Roth
Tish O’Dowd Ezekiel’s Floaters

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