Peter Orner is a novelist, essayist, and short story writer with eight books under his belt. He’s also a swashbuckling reader who doesn’t shy away from discussing his influences and making the case for reading great, lesser known like Wright Morris, Breece D’J Pancake, and Gina Berricault (as he did in Recommended Reading here). And yet, for such a dedicated reader, there’s nothing fussy about Orner’s prose. His sentences roll off the page with the cadence of a conversation. One moment he lands a pulpy punchline, the next he delivers a quiet, devastating observation. A doorway becomes the dissolution of a marriage, a rainy Sunday becomes a best friend’s death, a dime becomes a grandmother. Razor sharp observations that land without a hint of gravitas. He’s just talking on the page, just remembering family stories that were whispered in the hallways at night. These moments might appear within the space of a couple pages yet they don’t crowd each other out. There’s a lightness to the language that allows them to glom together and distill each other. That’s the intangible, contradictory magic of Orner’s writing. 

Back in 2013, Recommended Reading published his short story “At the Fairmont.” For the release of his latest novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, we sat down to discuss the new book, the old story, and the experience of looking back on a multi-decade writing career. This proved auspicious because The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter is a leap forward in Orner’s writing—it simultaneously reconstructs and fictionalizes a painful rift between his grandparents and famed Chicago columnist Irving Kupcinet. The novel becomes a genealogy, an autobiography, and also, in an unexpected turn, crime fiction. It follows a writer obsessively trying to understand the truth of Irv Kupcinet’s daughter’s death. Is it a murder? Is it a suicide? Why does she play a key role in JFK conspiracy theories? And why did the writer’s grandparents and the Kupcinets stop talking after she died? These questions might have answers, but The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter isn’t about that. It’s a gorgeous reckoning with the answers we can’t have.

We met continents apart via Zoom—Orner was in Namibia celebrating the rerelease of his first novel The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo—and dug into indelible questions of craft that fill writers’ days.

Willem Marx: Recommended Reading published “At the Fairmont” more than a decade ago. Is it a story you return to?

Peter Orner: Before you publish a book, you get an uncorrected galley. I wrote that story after the galley for the book Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge was printed. I had to insist that the story get included. It felt like the book needed to have it. So, it is an important story to me. I had heard an old story about my grandfather who was in the South Pacific during World War II, he was stationed in San Francisco for a little while. I was imagining him and my grandmother meeting in a hotel in San Francisco—things didn’t go very well in my imagination, I’m not sure they went so well in real life either. It’s a personal story and one I fought for.

WM: Why was it so important to have the story included?

PO: I think it was a story I always meant to try and tell—this reunion in San Francisco that was built up between two people and then doesn’t quite meet their expectations to say the least. The Fairmont Hotel is in a fancy part of San Francisco, Knob Hill, the area I did not live in, but I often walked by it. God knows, I’m not sure if my grandparents had anything to do with the Fairmont Hotel, but it was this iconic place. I think I hung out in front of it one day and wrote that story or a draft of it.

WM: Do you recognize ways that your writing has changed across books?

PO: I feel like I’m still learning. I’m still trying to figure out how to do this. The one thing I can say is that I feel less confident now than I did before. I look at earlier work, and I’m like, damn, you really thought you knew what you were doing. Now I’m like, did I? 

But it was nice to feel like that. I took a lot of chances and I trusted myself. Now it’s different. Maybe I’m more at ease with myself, more contemplative. I rushed things earlier. There’s a time when everything you see is fodder for a story. Things are much harder now. I wish I had that sense of finding a story everywhere—right now it takes me a while to get a story under my skin. I’ve noticed that difference. There’s this old tale about Chekhov: Somebody challenged him and said, “You can write a story about anything, can you write a story about an ashtray?” And the next day, there was the story about an ashtray. I had a period of time when I could have done that. Now? No way! I would need three weeks to figure that one out. I’m lying in wait more than I used to, I’m not in as big a hurry.

WM: In another interview, you say that during Covid, you learned to “eavesdrop” on yourself and your memories. The phrase jumped out to me because it feels so relevant to the way you lace characters and family histories together across stories and books.

PO: Memory is what I work with. When I think about a character, I think about what that character remembers. That’s usually how I figure out a way into a story: What is it that my character can’t stop remembering? You’re supposed to ask, what’s that character doing? What kind of movement? But what prevents your character from moving? Where’s the paralysis? I’m interested in that.

Memories are so personal to us. What else have we got that’s only yours? You’re going to have shared memories, but that’s where there’s going to be that friction because people are going to remember differently. I’m endlessly fascinated. What sticks?

WM: You have two non-fiction books—two essay collections—and both are called “notes” in the subtitle: Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margins, and Am I Alone Here? Notes of Reading to Live and Living to Read. I wonder about this emphasis on notes. What are notes for you?

PO: It’s a way of approaching an essay in a less pretentious way for me. I’m not trying to accomplish anything. I’m just taking notes. It’s a way of tricking myself into thinking out loud a little bit. I’m not building something up so I have to make a point, I’m just taking some notes. It’s helped me immensely—sometimes it’s copying stuff I’m reading, literally verbatim, and then maybe thinking of something off of that. And that, somehow, is movement towards some kind of essay…maybe.

WM: You’re leaning away from telling yourself what you’re doing.

PO: It’s a trick, but it’s also something I truly believe in. I tell my students this: just take some notes. It’s very, very hard to create a story or an essay that works, we know that. But what if we just take some notes and don’t worry?

I’ve even thought, what if I didn’t have a story, just notes for a story? Isaac Babel’s 1920 Diary—those are literally notes for stories. In some ways, they’re better than the actual stories that grew out of that book. I’ve been thinking about that for 30 years, that particular process—not going back and fully realizing that those notes were in themselves extraordinary. Maybe the artifice he created out of the notes is slightly inferior. Arguably. I’ve taken that idea and run with it over the years. 

Babel has a line in the diary that I steal in the new book. He writes, “Describe the wounded man.” When he went and wrote the story, he described the wounded man but in the diary it’s just “Describe the wounded man.” In The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter there’s a burial scene—Jews line up to put gravel and dirt on a grave—and I had a note to myself, “Describe this sound, the stones.” I just left it in the book. My editor was like, “Wait, what?” And I was like, “No, no, that’s what I mean.” I want you to get there with the sound—I can’t give it to you, the book doesn’t come with a soundtrack, but you probably know the sound, or you can imagine it.

WM: One thing that stands out in The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter—it’s also in your stories—is the way you shift between first and third person POVs. A lot of writers lean toward one perspective or the other, but you’re very much at home in both. You even blend the two within the context of a single character. How do you choose what perspective is right for a piece?

PO: This is something I’m obsessed with. Over the years I’ve become convinced—more convinced, because I was always suspicious—that it’s a limitation to name the point of view. My first-person narrators can talk in third-person. And my third-person narrators can talk in first-person, and all the shades in between. The worst thing is to be dogmatic about any of this, but I am dogmatic when it comes to people who are dogmatic about point of view. I think of them as “the point of view police.” They say, “wait a second, no, no! That is a third person!” First of all, go back and read some Joyce or Cervantes. Great writers are always slippery with point of view.

I try to open myself up to be free to make those slippages, and it’s only because I learned from other people. The less transition the better, a reader will follow you or not. In this new book, Solly, the uncle, is a favorite of mine. Sometimes we slide into his point of view, but more often it’s Lou, the grandfather. He’ll be being described in third-person, and then he’ll start thinking in first-person. I gave myself the freedom to do that.

WM: That’s a question I had, even when we are with Lou and Solly—the older generation—I could feel Jed, the grandson and the central narrator, behind them. I would wonder: Is Jed telling this? Am I in Jed’s imagination now or have I actually moved in time to see things that happened before he was born? You can’t tell. I mean, you can tell, but there’s always a small doubt. Maybe not.

PO: That’s what I’m looking for. I want you to forget, then remember; forget, then remember.

WM: As a writer, are there certain questions you used to ask yourself that you don’t ask anymore? And are there new questions that you ask now as you’re coming to a new project?

PO: I think the biggest one is: Do I have the stamina to do this? Time becomes different. It can become a killer if it’s in your head and you’re thinking: Do I devote my time to this story or this story? When I was younger, I would devote my time to all the stories. Now I feel, “all right, you’ve got to start choosing.” It’s not a good thing. There’s time, there’s time even if you’re ninety-five and have two more years. There’s time for these stories you need to tell. I’m trying to tell myself, “Chill out. You’re going to be able to tell as many as you want.” But part of me is nagging back…maybe you don’t have time.

WM: Is that nagging voice connected to the fact that there’s a story you want to tell that you’re sitting on?

PO: This whole new book is that idea embodied. Jed is trying to tell a story over many years. Jed is not me, but his struggle to tell the story mirrors my own. I did not rush this story as I might have when I was younger. I let this one have the fifteen years it needed. I wanted it to feel urgent, but to get that I had to be more patient. Isn’t there the phrase, “hurry slowly?” That is what I was doing here.

WM: Coming away from the book, I really wanted to ask why the Kupcinets? At a certain point, I started Googling their names and realized these are all real people. You know so much about this Chicago gossip columnist; the deep relationship Jed’s family has with the Kupcinet family feels so lived. Where did it all come from?

PO: This story’s been kicking around my head for a long, long time. My family was friendly with the Kupcinets, and there was a falling out. My grandfather—and this is all documented in columns that Kup wrote—was one of the people that would go on the annual fishing trip with Kup every year. And then between 1963 and 1964, suddenly my grandfather was no longer the captain of the fishing trip. The Kupcinets were never spoken of in my family. I was sort of haunted by this. No one else was, by the way. Nobody cared. People laugh at me. The Kupcinets are a little bit of a joke in Chicago. He was around for so long, he was a very powerful gossip columnist, but he ended up being a bit of a joke. So Jed is obsessed with somebody who people have long stopped thinking about. But my grandparents were friends with the Kupcinets at one time, there was a falling out, especially between the two women, and I was intrigued by that. That’s all I knew. I went from there.

WM: Did you have conversations about the Kupcinets with your grandmother the way Jed does?

PO: No, it was just something we didn’t discuss. I think I wanted to tell a story that was almost forbidden to tell. And I waited a long time to create the fiction around a real family mystery about why the relationship ended. It haunted me for my whole life, but it wasn’t something you could talk about. It’s sixty years old now, my grandparents have been dead a long time, so I had to recreate the whole world.

WM: The book does feel really different from your other writing. There’s the element of reality, actually weaving the real world into the story, and then there are these genre elements too. At a certain point it morphs into a detective story, and then Jed has a line where he addresses that explicitly: “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.”

PO: I’m glad you pointed out that line. I was sort of trying to write an anti-true crime. I read a lot of Raymond Chandler and Charles Williford when I was writing this book. I learned a lot from them, but I come from where I come from—my preoccupations are different. There was a cover up. There was an attack on an actor who had nothing at all to do with Cookie Kupcinet’s death. There were real world consequences that I was interested in, in a true crime sense. But the crime here was more of the heart. This is where the fiction comes in. It’s about punishing your friends for things that happen in your life. It seems cruel to me, but also very human.

WM: Jed’s a writing professor, you’re a writing professor, and the book lampoons writing maxims and teaching writing in general several times. Do you have any writing maxims that you do ascribe to?

PO: I try to stay away from them. I feel like you invoke them at your peril. There are some metaphors I can appreciate, but are they helpful in terms of writing a story? Probably not. 

If I have any maxim, it’s just hang in there. Hang in there with a story. Hang in there with the writing life. Anyone who loves it enough is gonna be able to do something. I’m hanging in there, that’s been my career motto. 

WM: Finally, so much of your work brings attention to other writers—your essays, and your podcast, The Lonely Voice, in particular, discuss influences and drawing lines between overlooked authors. Do you see that as a kind of overarching project? 

PO: When it comes to literature, there’s always stuff we don’t know out there—stories that may have a huge impact on us that we just don’t know yet. I’ve made it my small task to help people understand that this is not a finite universe. Go into a library and you’d be amazed to see what has been overlooked. I wouldn’t do what I do if I hadn’t found what I found. There’s a beautiful line of Kundera where he says something like, if he hadn’t found certain works in translation, he wouldn’t do what he does. He needed to go out of his own language—which he had a weird relationship with anyway. He almost needed another language. If we box ourselves in, only reading certain kinds of work or only reading work by certain kinds of people, we miss out on significant human experience. Even my characters are always looking for what’s been overlooked. And since so much is overlooked, it’s a never-ending business.