What if solving a decades-old murder could unlock the secrets of your own family?
That question drives professor Peter Orner’s new novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, a book born from a mystery that has shadowed him since childhood.
The story begins with a real unsolved case: the 1963 death of Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet, a Hollywood starlet found strangled in her Los Angeles apartment at just 22. Cookie was the daughter of Irv Kupcinet, Chicago's legendary newspaper columnist, and his wife, Essee. Orner's grandparents had been friends with the Kupcinets—until Cookie’s death severed that bond seemingly overnight.
“That closeness ended and I’ve never really understood why,” Orner says. “It was a story that haunted my childhood.”
Decades later, Orner channels that haunting into fiction. His protagonist, Jed, becomes obsessed with Cookie’s case, convinced that if he can illuminate this long-cold mystery, he'll somehow crack open the locked boxes in his own family history. What unfolds is both a detective story and an excavation of how relationships fracture and why some wounds never heal.
The author of the Rome Prize recipient Esther Stories and the essay collection Am I Alone Here? (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), Orner brings his characteristic attention to emotional truth to this new novel. But The Gossip Columnist's Daughter stakes new territory.
“In some ways I was fighting against the use of Karyn’s story in a cheap way—you know, for a 20-minute true-crime podcast that recycles information,” Orner says. “There are many of those out there. I wanted to, in my own way, give her another fictional identity, one with more depth than she’s usually given.”
Orner, who will discuss the book in conversation with acclaimed Argentine comic artist Liniers (Ricardo Siri) as part of the official opening of Dartmouth’s Literary Arts Bridge on Nov. 4, says he found the key to his story in an unexpected place: a single line from William Faulkner.
“There is a line from Faulkner where the character says the most important thing that happened to him in his life, the absolute most important thing, happened before he was born,” Orner says. “Ever since I saw that line, I knew it was going to help me write this book. I knew that I was going to have a character who honestly believes that an incident that happened before he was born somehow shaped the course of his own life and his family’s life.”
At its core, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter is, in the end, neither a detective nor a crime novel, Orner says, but rather serves as a contemplation of an even greater mystery: the breakup of a friendship.
“I realized there aren’t a lot of books about this,” he says. “But we all get ghosted. Friendships are these really complicated things, and they often end without explanation when couples just fade away.The book ultimately comes down to my narrator trying to untangle what happens when couples break up.”
Orner’s interest in how to turn true stories into novels carries over into the classroom. He teaches a creative writing class, Uses of Fact, that explores how fiction writers weave facts into a larger fictional story.
“It’s exciting to watch how my incredibly talented students take their own fact-based preoccupations and turn them into stories,” he says.
The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter has struck a chord with critics. Among many rave reviews, the New York Times called it “a moody and engrossing meditation on the ephemerality of memory, the persistence of family myths, and a haunting ode to a bygone Chicago” and the New Yorker named the novel among the “Best Books of the Year So Far,” praising how it “weighs the slippery connections among family, identity, and history.”
Ultimately, Orner’s measure of success is simpler. “I want readers to care about my people, to believe the stakes are high,” he says. “I want the reader to feel something. I think that’s why we read: to connect with other people. That’s what’s so beautiful about fiction—it’s another way of connecting with other human beings. And I feel like lately, more than ever, we need that.”