Peter Orner. Yes, that Peter Orner. If you listen to TPR’s other literary podcast The Lonely Voice with Peter Orner, you know the name, the voice, the tremendous insights on stories he shares on each episode. We’ve benefitted from his tremendous experience as an acclaimed author of seven books.
His latest is the novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter—and it is as compelling as the title implies.
There is a gossip columnist, and there is his daughter.
But let me start here instead. Jed Rosenthal is a writer and professor who lives in Chicago. He hasn’t published a book in over 10 years. He and his partner Hanna are on the outs. She leaves him and takes their little daughter with her. He is having a very tough time of things.
When he visits his grandmother Babs in a nursing home, an often-told story from family lore takes hold.
He is reminded that Babs and her husband Lou were best friends with another couple—Essee and Irv Kupcinet.
Irv was a columnist. No, he was. There was a real Irv Kupcinet who was a gossip columnist in Chicago—and his influence was far-reaching. He had a wife named Essee. They had two children, including a daughter named Karyn.
Karyn was found dead in her West Hollywood apartment in November of 1963—just days after the assassination of President Kennedy.
Jed is dealing with his own issues, but the questions and the mysteries about Karyn consume his life.
As he has to enter the worlds of the past to get closer to the mystery, there are more questions to figure out, more mysteries to resolve.
This is a book about a lot of different kinds of love. The book includes history, popular culture, and true crime. This is a Chicago story—and all that you might expect from a truly great Chicago story. It’s also about a Hollywood that was as fickle in the early 1960s as it is today.
This is a story about the passage of time, memory, loneliness, family and love.
Oh, and there’s a cat, too.
