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- [00:00]
Peter Orner
We gather here tonight to bring women
- [00:03]
Sarah Wasserman
back to their rightful place. The Testaments, a new Hulu Original series from the executive producers of the Handmaid's Tale. It's easier to accept a story than
- [00:12]
Peter Orner
believe that the people around you are monsters.
- [00:14]
Sarah Wasserman
The battle isn't over. There comes a time when you have
- [00:17]
Peter Orner
to take action, when you have to
- [00:19]
Sarah Wasserman
choose your own destiny.
- [00:20]
Peter Orner
Never quite as it seems.
- [00:23]
Sarah Wasserman
What's the new Hulu Original Series? The Testaments, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney. For bundle subscribers terms apply. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola in original and cherry vanilla that Pepsi taste you love with no artificial sweeteners and 3 grams of prebiotic fiber. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola. Unbelievably Pepsi. This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Big news for your kids lunchbox. Welch's Fruit snacks are now made without any artificial dyes, a snack parents can feel good about and the same delicious taste kids can't get enough of. All made with no artificial dyes. Try Welch's Fruit Snacks today.
- [01:07]
Peter Orner
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:18]
Emily Hyde
Hello and welcome to Novel Dialogue, a podcast sponsored by the Society of Novel Studies and produced in partnership with Public, an online magazine of arts, ideas and scholarship. I'm Emily Hyde. I'm one of the hosts and co producers of this podcast, and this is season 10. We are here with the novelist Peter Orner and the critic Sarah Wasserman. Peter Orner was born in Chicago. I feel I really must start there, start this introduction right there. He is the author of three novels, three story collections, and two books of essays, including most recently, still no Word from you. Peter holds the professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Today we're going to start off talking about Peter's most recent novel, the Gossip Columnist's Daughter, a novel that is really about a lost pocket of time. The early 1960s, when Chicagoans partied in a kind of Midwestern Weimar. To quote the book, it was a distant time. It was a much more glamorous time, but one that perhaps could see its own end as we do now. So this is also a book that really lands in our present much more immediately because it's about conspiracy theories and celebrity gossip and what happens when those two things intersect in the suspicious death of a young, beautiful woman. But I think the book is also trying to move past that material to say something about the weight of family histories and lost friendships. So, Peter, welcome.
- [02:45]
Peter Orner
Thanks so much, Emily. I love that idea of a lost pocket of time. That's a gorgeous concept. And I'd forgotten that Weimar line. It's sort of haunting.
- [02:55]
Emily Hyde
It is very haunting.
- [02:56]
Peter Orner
Now, thinking about it today, I was only kidding then.
- [02:59]
Emily Hyde
In conversation with Peter today is longtime and much loved novel dialogue host Sarah Wasserman. This time coming to you in the role of critic. Sarah. And again, I feel this credential is very important to share, Sarah. Sarah has lived in Chicago for almost four years and she is a scholar of lost things and disappearing objects and the emotions that attach to technologies in American literary history and culture. She is currently the inaugural Assistant Dean of Faculty affairs at Dartmouth. Sarah, over to you.
- [03:31]
Sarah Wasserman
Thanks so much. Really happy to be here with the two of you today. I know. Peter, I want to begin today by asking you to read a passage from the Gossip columnist Daughter. But before we do that, I wanted to ask both of you if you think for the purposes of this episode, it might be helpful to have a brief summary of the novel without any spoilers. Emily, you did a pretty wonderful job of that. But it strikes me that if we're going to talk at all in depth about the novel, that might be helpful.
- [04:00]
Emily Hyde
I think you should do it. Because I tried and failed to think of all the different genres I could have listed of this novel and I gave up. So a plot summary might be good.
- [04:10]
Sarah Wasserman
There are many. So I'll just start with a few sentences, a plot summary. This is not AI this is my attempt at summarizing the novel without giving anything away. Okay, so the novel's narrator is named Jed Rosenthal, and he is a struggling writer and professor in, let's call it contemporary Chicago Today, whose life is unraveling a bit. He becomes interested in, if not obsessed with, a real life cold case from 1963, the mysterious death of Karen Cookie Kupsinet, who was the daughter of the legendary Chicago gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet. And Irv, with his wife Ethy, was best friends for years with Jed's grandparents until one day they weren't. So in the novel, Jed is digging into the past to try to solve the mystery of Cookie's death and the mystery of why his family and the Copsinuts fell out. That's just a kind of bare bones plot summary. But, Peter, it would be great if you could start us off by reading a passage from the novel. And I think we've chosen a passage from near the start.
- [05:11]
Peter Orner
Sure. Thank you, sir. I thought that summary was great. It's so hard to do. It's so hard for me to do so. I'm so grateful that you did it. I read Light in August in College, and I'm not sure I finished it. But I remember a character, a disgraced reverend named Hightower who tells himself he's a recluse who never leaves his house, that the most important event in his life happened years before he was born, when a Union sniper shot his grandfather off a horse during the Civil War. I don't remember what Hightower did to get himself disgraced. Does it matter? Aren't there infinite ways to disgrace yourself? Faulkner knew plenty of them. But Hightower's grandfather shouting the glories of defeat as he drops out of his saddle. This the Reverend conjures nightly. It makes perverse sense. The pivotal episode of our lives happens before we even exist in our family. Nobody got shot off any horse. To my knowledge, no Rosenthal has ever ridden a horse since we fled the tatters of the Austro Hungarian Empire and washed up in Chicago in the first decade of the last century. No, in my case it's less dramatic. A friendship ended in November of 1963, seven years before I was born. A friendship between two couples abruptly severed, though it would be more accurate to say that these were two entirely separate friendships. One day the friendships were in place, the next they weren't. And to this day, nobody, not even my mother, who has firsthand knowledge, can say precisely why. Not that anybody else wonders about this. My mother certainly doesn't. The four friends, of course, are long dead. I'm digging up the rift again. Maybe our old stories are all I've ever had, but I've now aired enough of my family's dirty laundry to open a chain of dry cleaners. Why stop now? After the rift, the drop, the breakup, the estrangement, the schism, the excommunication, whatever you want to call it. Neither of my grandparents breathed a single word about any of this, and an unofficial rule took hold in my family, honored by everyone except my father, who never followed rules, official or unofficial, that barred us from even uttering the names Irv and Essie cups in it out loud in my grandparents presence, let alone discussing any of the particulars of their friendship in public. The betrayal I've already begun to commit cuts deeper than simply naming names. But don't all families have their myths? And the ones we cling to in the dead of night as Reverend Hightower clung to his if only to explain ourselves to ourselves. We can't hurt our dead, can we?
- [07:59]
Sarah Wasserman
Thank you so much. I love this passage because I think it gets at two things that I found really meaningful in this novel and across your work more generally. So the Familiar familial stories, myths, legends really, that get passed down through generations and come to define people even if those stories aren't true or can't fully be known. But here also we have, through the reference to Faulkner, an allusion to other fictions and the force those stories can have in shaping us. And I'm struck by the way you're often braiding together reflections on storytelling with reflections on story reading or story hearing, the sending and the receiving. So I was hoping that this passage would give us a way for you to talk here at the opening a bit about how you approach writing as a reader and how in the Gossip Columnist Daughter, all your characters are themselves self conscious of being people who tell stories and who consume them, I think so just that confluence for you across your work and here of, of reading stories and telling them together.
- [09:05]
Peter Orner
Great, Sarah, thank you. You know, comes to mind just, just popped into my head as you were talking. There's a. My. My great, my mentor and great, great friend who passed away in 1999. Can't believe it's been, what, 27 years. Andre debuse, great American short story writer. He went, he had a story in, I think it's his last book, where he had a, a character on a beach and they were reading Edna o' Brien. And I just remember thinking like, wait, you know, and, and, and there was something about that. And, you know, I love it when, when other stories evoke someone reading something. There's another example that I, that I think about a lot in Malcolm Lowry's under the Volcano. I'm avoiding talking about my own stuff, but under the Volcano, where the drunken console is wandering around this town in Mexico, wasted the entire novel. It occurs to him at one point, he says to himself, he remembers reading War and Peace and he remembers a single detail from War and Peace, and that is that Napoleon had different sized feet. And I love that detail because it's, you know, like, you work so hard. How long did, how long did Tolstoy work on War and Peace? How many years for one drunken guy to remember one tiny thing? Anyway, I do love the thinking about narrative and thinking about why we tell stories. And I was very. I've always been drawn to the, to, to that aspect of Faulkner and in particular in Light Nogus, when he does have this character whose life totally depended upon his, the story of his grandfather having behaved somewhat heroically or very heroically during the Civil War until a Union sniper shot him. It's not, as it emerges later in the book, the actual story right and, you know, we sit on these things that are, you know, and, and a lot of them are we, we're, we're perched on untruths. You know, we were built, we built our whole life how, our whole lives on these things. His grandfather was stealing chickens and he was shot by a homeowner, a Southern homeowner. So anyway, I guess I, but I do love this idea that we just hold on to. And I think, I think we, I think we build our lives on stories true and untrue. And I think that I was trying to work with that idea in a much more mundane. You know, my people were once friends with a gossip columnist. Big fucking deal, right? But it was the same kind of idea. Like, it wasn't that big a thing. And yet this family in the book sort of kind of hangs there, hat on having had this experience. And I thought I could work with that. Yeah.
- [11:59]
Sarah Wasserman
I wonder if it's so interesting in light of that answer that this is, this is a novel about a gossip columnist, or at least in part about a gossip columnist. And when you were talking about hanging your hat on untruths or I heard from so and so who heard that this was the way the story went down, it strikes me that that's all gossip.
- [12:19]
Peter Orner
Just. Yeah.
- [12:21]
Sarah Wasserman
And sometimes in the novel I thought, okay, here we have Jed Rosenthal trying to do the opposite of what Irv Cooksonnet did to not be a gossip colonist, to write a great novel, or that sometimes those are polls and other times they seem quite similar. And I don't know if that's because for you, gossip works the same way those familial fictions do, or if for you, they're very different, maybe you could talk a little bit about gossip.
- [12:47]
Peter Orner
It's so interesting. I, I, you know, I, I, you know, I, I struggle a lot. I did not want to write a book about a writer, but then I realized I was already writing a book about a writer because the gossip columnist, you know, he, he, I mean, he produced a hell lot more words than I ever have or my narrator ever has. I mean, he wrote six columns a week at one time. And yeah, as you say, I mean, it, it like this was, and this was in the 50s, 60s, into the 70s and 80s and 90s, even that IRV Cups. And it was doing this column. And I, in a lot of ways, you know, like we, if we built our, we build our own lives on the stories we tell ourselves, our family stories, the ones we, you know, people, you know, when we introduce ourselves we often, if there's enough time, we will tell the person we were meeting that mythical story, who we are, where we come from, you know, who our parents were, who our grandparents were, etc, And I think in some ways that a gossip at that time, and Emily was talking about the time frame earlier, is that at that time you had a kind of a city narrative. You know, you had a guy who was taking snippets national, but most of it was local, is that they were local tidbits of what was happening around town. Irv Cups in it, didn't consider himself a gossip columnist. He was a. A collector of doings, you know, And I think that. That it provided in a weird way, a sort of collective story that the city, every. Every people, everyone read that column, they'd read this sometimes and they'd go to page seven or whatever pager was on that that year, and. And they would read about who is doing what around town. And I. I think there's something. I felt really stupid researching a book about something trivial for so long, but then I realized at one point that even though Irv Cuffs wasn't writing important things, that he was creating some kind of record, you know, And I started to appreciate it, even though I. I spent my whole life making fun of it. And I spent much of the book making fun of it too, because it's ridiculous. But. And yet, you know, I think that there's something about, you know, who. Who was doing what when, you know, at the. At the. At the. At the Palmer House ballroom that night. Who. Phyllis Diller's at the Palmer House. And somebody was there and some alderman was there. And, you know, it just. It just became kind of an interesting social history, I guess.
- [15:30]
Sarah Wasserman
Yeah, I think it's not trivial. And you mentioned making. Making fun of things. And I. I think that this book is so sincere in many ways that maybe we'll come back to. But I think we should talk about Chicago, since you're talking about the way that the gossip column. Maybe it's not gossip, it's doings around town and how it's creating community. And I also just think, I don't know, when they do the archival history of our current moment, what will they pull? Like a thousand billion tiktoks of Kim Kardashian that. What is it? What is it that constitutes community if not things that seem trivial? But I wanted to talk about the process of research and the. The Chicago question. Here you have this. You quote, I guess, Betty Howland saying Chicago isn't a city, just the raw materials for a city. And I imagine that part of the research process for this book felt like gathering the raw materials of a city out of the archives. And did, you know at the outset you wanted to write a novel about Chicago or did the research take you in that direction?
- [16:35]
Peter Orner
I, you know, I never know what I'm doing right, you know, but I, So all I knew at the, the kernel of it was that, you know, I had this, this horrible thing that happened in a family, you know, a young, young. The daughter of this gossip economist dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1963. And that it was part of the narrative of Chicago at that time, like one week before the President was killed. That was a national tragedy, but also pretty personal to Chicago. You know, a lot of people think, and there's some truth to it, that Chicago elected Kennedy right by, by, you know, getting enough votes for Illinois when Mayor Daly made a phone call. You know, that's apocryphal. But, you know, there was a lot of people who. Voting against Kennedy in the state of Illinois. So, you know, Chicago had to bolster the Democratic votes. That's the story, you know, and some, some dead people voted and put Kennedy over the top. It's probably ridiculous. Kennedy probably would have won Illinois, but there was a, you know, Chicago was mourning the President in, in November of 20 of 63. A week later, the, I wouldn't say beloved columnist, but the very, very famous and well known columnist Irv Cups and its daughters found dead. And that became a kind of history of that particular moment. And it was a big, big story in Chicago. And it was, you know, I was born later, I was not born when this happened, but I heard about it growing up, the mystery of this particular death and how it affected my own family and how it affected the city in a sense and up from that particular time, you know, and because it was like went around the time my brother was born and I was born a few years later, it became sort of just something we sort of carried with us as an, you know, as we like among many, many other things. You know, my family is just weirded out the fact that I became obsessed with this particular story. But, you know, it's just, you kind of, it's like what my grandmother used to say, my Massachusetts grandmother used to say. She would say, what hurts you, hurts you. You know, like, so I was upset. You can't, you can't choose your obsessions, right? And so I became obsessed with this, the idea of what the impact of this, of this story had on a city and on a family. And the Chicago part of it became inextricable from this because all my characters were operating in that space. And then I had a contemporary character who was is living in Rogers park, which is my favorite part of town. It's where my family's originally from. And so I love to wander around Rogers Park. And so a lot of the stuff that happens in the real time in the book is just for me. Just every time I'm home, I go to Rogers park and I walk the streets. And so I could imagine my character who's separated from his partner and child, and so he's living a mile away and so he's just wandering around your park in that part of it. So yeah, Chicago in the 63 and 70s and then Chicago in 2022 or whatever the time the book is taking place. It just. It just became sort of a character in the book.
- [19:51]
Sarah Wasserman
Everyone knows that unexplainable it factor. That smile that lights up a room, that wow. Well, it doesn't happen by itself. There's chemistry behind the curse.
- [19:59]
Peter Orner
Charisma.
- [20:00]
Sarah Wasserman
Colgate Optic White Pro series toothpaste removes 15 years of deep set stains when you brush twice daily for two weeks.
- [20:06]
Emily Hyde
How?
- [20:06]
Sarah Wasserman
The clinically proven formula is powered by Colgate's hydrogen peroxide complex. It works at the molecular level to gently dissolve stains deep within the enamel where your brush can't reach. It's proof that daily routine can be remarkable. That's the science of wow. Colgate Optic White K Pop Demon Hunters,
- [20:22]
Emily Hyde
Haja Boys Breakfast meal and Huntrek's meal
- [20:24]
Sarah Wasserman
have just dropped at McDonald's.
- [20:26]
Emily Hyde
They're calling this a battle for the fans.
- [20:28]
Sarah Wasserman
What do you say to that, Ruby? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [20:35]
Peter Orner
It is an honor to share.
- [20:37]
Sarah Wasserman
No, it's our honor.
- [20:39]
Peter Orner
It is our larger honor.
- [20:40]
Emily Hyde
No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side
- [20:49]
Peter Orner
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- [21:21]
Sarah Wasserman
So I wanted to ask you. The passage that you read for us ended with, you know, the. Can we do harm to our dead? And since you were just talking about this being a little perplexing to your own family as a topic that interested you, I think any good reader of this novel will recognize that there must be some of Peter Orner in Judd Rosenthal, but that there is plenty of Jed Rosenthal that is not Peter Orner. And I bet you get questions about that all the time. Do people really feel like you have done harm to the dead or aired people's dirty laundry? Or do you ever get frustrated that people can't maybe draw the line between what is something like autofiction or autobiography and fiction? Fiction?
- [22:05]
Peter Orner
Yeah. Yeah, I would say. Yeah, I get it. I get. Was sort of the dominating question around this book in a lot of ways for some readers, especially readers who are closer to the story. I. And my. I struggle with the answer because it's in. In a weird way for me, it's always like, the closer I get to real things, the more fictional it becomes. So Jed sh. He. He teaches writing. He's. He's a novelist. He hasn't sold that many copies. There's. There's some commonalities there, I don't deny. But. But he's, He's. He takes the obsession that I sort of shared in. In different directions and deeper directions and weirder directions. And I had fun sort of becoming him. I was thinking today, like, I don't think about this story at all anymore, which is weird. I woke up with it every day for 15 years and long. And before that, because I was always planning on trying to write this one. This was always in my mind. And I just like. And I don't let things go very easy. But I have this. This is like. It's out there. You know, it's, It's.
- [23:21]
Sarah Wasserman
It's.
- [23:21]
Peter Orner
It's gone from my mind. And I assume in Jed's mind, wherever he might be in some cosmic senses, he's not letting it go. So maybe that's the difference is, is, you know, I am ultimately, you know, the. The puppet master, to answer your question. Really, I love using real fact as a way of. I, I, in. In almost a mercenary sense. Like, I don't mind if people ask me, you know, is this your real grandparents? Is this you? Is this, you know, did you. Did your partner leave you and take the kid? All these things. I don't mind it because they. Because something must feel real to them that they would ask me that now. Sometimes they can't tell the differ. Like, it's weird. You know, we all. And I'm sure on your show you've dealt with a lot of writers who have this issue of people not being able to separate, you know, but for the most part, I think readers do get it eventually. But I think I was particularly playing with it here. I was. I was using very, very real things. Everything about Karen Cookie Cups in it is real. Even the crazy shit, you know, even her shoplifting, even her crazy notes, even her obsession with her boyfriend, actor. Except for those moments that I think hopefully it goes deeper when I tried to imagine my way into what she was actually dealing with out in Hollywood trying to make her way at 22 years old.
- [24:54]
Emily Hyde
So this is a good place for me to jump in because what I wanted to ask you about specifically was the photographs in the novel. And you've been talking about not the line between fact and fiction, but how you can go so far into fact that it becomes a fiction and the reverse. So let me just describe the effect of reading the novel with photographs a little bit for listeners. So, for example, the frontispiece is a photo of a door that's partially ajar. There are cigarettes, like, oddly strewn on the floor. It is definitely a crime scene. If you hadn't read the back of the book, you still would know there was going to be a crime, maybe in this. So it's a crime scene, but it's also an invitation at the very start of the book, like to walk in, to enter. And then it's not that there are photos throughout the rest of the novel. It's that the narrator's, the fictional narrator's collection of those photos is what's in the novel. So he's pinned them up all over his office walls. So, for example, we don't see the front page of the December 1, 1963 Chicago Tribune, which we see that front page pinned to a wall with like sticky notes to the side. And then we don't see the back cover of Cupp's book, but we see this kind of creased back cover of the book sitting on a desk. And there's like a pen and maybe a pair of glasses and a notebook in the background. We see on one page a wall of photos and clippings, kind of tastefully lit. And that is an image that's dangerously close to like the evidence room in a police proced or a conspiracy theorist's lair with everything pinned up on the wall and arrows connecting the dots. So as I was looking through these, one thing to say is that these are almost all of them photographs of photographs. So they're participating in the kind of meta fictional aspect of this novel, the Jed Rosenthal overlap, the writer writing about a writer. They're saying, you know, look. Look at the distance between representations in the media and what really happened. You know, we're gonna. This novel is gonna tell you what really happened. But then as you were speaking, it struck me that you could almost say the exact opposite too, that all these photos are real. I assume you took them or you had someone take them for you. I'm guessing maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm one of those naive readers, but maybe I'm guessing that they're photos of your own walls and thumbtacks and archival discoveries. If that's the case, then the photos are pushing against the fiction of the novel itself, its status as fiction. So I guess my very basic question is just why is this novel illustrated with photos? But I'm also interested in how, like, what was the process? And then finally, how do you imagine the relationship between the photo or the relationship between the photographs and the fiction itself as fiction?
- [27:54]
Peter Orner
I don't remember a moment where I decided to put these pictures in, but as you suggest, as part of the research process, I compiled, I mean, you know, thousands of images and documents and stuff. You know, because of the fact that I had a columnist who had all these columns, one thing I did was I loved to pretend to write the column. So I never used the real stuff. I had too much fun parroting it so I could become Cup. I think I make him a little goofier than he actually was, but he was pretty goofy. But anyway, the pictures, they just felt like I couldn't separate the process of telling the story from, obviously myself going through this stuff, but then imagining my crazy narrator going through it. And so it really became. I mean, this sounds cheesy, but it was me and it wasn't me. It was like Jed was like, you know, and yeah, it's certainly, it's. It. It bears a striking resemblance to my little studio in White River Junction, and not necessarily his office at Loyola College and Loyola University in Chicago. But it. It felt to me like it. It wasn't me, it was really him sort of like staring at these weird pictures all day and sort of like. And then, and then putting them in. I wanted them to be sort of sprinkled throughout the book as, as a way of sort of trying to prove this is true. You know, it was like it was all as in, in service of the fiction. I want you to believe it, but yeah, technically, where did I get them from? Yeah, I took the pictures myself with my, with my phone. And then I call my across the street neighbor Alberto, who's credited in the book with. To make them print worthy. And, and. But he was taking pictures of my pictures of the pictures with actual, actual, you know, an actual decent camera. And so he'd come in and do this stuff and I would call him up and I'd say, alberto, it's not. I don't like what we did. Can we try this again? I mean, he took hundreds of pictures. I was so annoying to him.
- [30:08]
Emily Hyde
I love the idea that these real photos, these like, facts, if you will, appear in the novel in service of the fiction of the fictional character and his fictional obsessions, their purpose.
- [30:22]
Peter Orner
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a fictional guy looking at real things.
- [30:26]
Sarah Wasserman
One question I have, which is related to the caring about the characters and caring about Cookie. It's funny because when Emily and I, I think Emily, you might have finished. And I was about halfway through the novel and we were sort of texting about it, and she said, that was a really hard one. Like, I actually felt very moved by the murder of this young woman. And she said that. And I said to her, well, I feel like it's as if Philip Roth were less cancelable and wrote a murder mystery. And I meant that as a compliment.
- [30:55]
Peter Orner
I'll take it, I'll take it.
- [30:58]
Sarah Wasserman
And the comparison comes. I mean, maybe I should say that's a question about genre, right? Is it a murder mystery? Is it true crime? Is it a family saga? Is it autofiction? Is it a riff on Herzog, a retelling of that? But the comparison for me comes in part, of course, because the novel is very clear about the ways in which this is a Jewish. That's in air quotes for listeners, a Jewish story. And by that I mean that the narrator talks about his Jewishness, about what it means to be Jewish and socially striving in Chicago at this moment in the 20th century, and about the ways that at the time, Jews were shaping culture in the press, in Hollywood, in music and in baseball, you name it. They were the cultural producers, but the cultural outsiders. And you handle all of this, I think, in the novel, with a lot of nuance and a lot of humor. I actually love the bit about being a Jew at a Jesuit university and what kind of license that gives it Gives the narrator. But could you, could you talk about the importance of Jewishness to this particular story and what you wanted to say about it?
- [32:07]
Peter Orner
That's a tough one, you know, especially today. But, you know, I, you know, I, I, I always say, like, when this, when, when it, when I'm teaching or when I'm talking about writing about, you know, kind of stuff that's in your, in your orbit versus stuff that's, you know, maybe not in your orbit. And, and my answer to that has always been for better, for worse. Is that what makes you think you can tell the story of your own people much? You know what I mean? Like, it's all hard. Like it, you want to, you want to go outside yourself and imagine your way into some other space, go for it. If you want to try and imagine yourself into what you think is your own space, go for it. Because that's it. I say it's equally as hard to make it, you know, and so, you know, I, I what? I, I, I wasn't writing from personal experience. I was writing from, from what I was researching about what it was like to be, as you said. I think striving is an important word here, you know, for, for 1960s Chicago Jews who were, I mean, if there's a, if there's an assimilated Jew in this country, it's, it's them, right? It's my grandparents. Yeah. You know, they, they sure, they were Jewish and they, they moved in somewhat Jewish Jewish spaces. And Irv Kupsnet was Jewish and unapologetic about it, not hiding it in any way. But also they were very much a part of the fabric of the city in a way that I think while they were insiders in an Irish town, certainly Irish political town, but they were deep insiders. And Mayor Daley had close, close Jewish advisors and Jewish comrades. But I think Jews always, and maybe to this day have a little bit of a pushed awayness, you know, that for better or for worse, is just a part of being of so few, you know, and, and I don't know, I think it just, I, I want to investigate that idea. My grandfather was A World War II vet, somewhat based on Lou in the book, but Lou is kind of a different kind of guy. My grand, my grandpa's a big blowhard and he would take up all the hair in the room, and Lou doesn't do any of that. And I want to deliberately sort of make him not my grandfather. But they share that. They were both captains in World War II, and, you know, that was A big deal to my grandfather. I was. I remember reading his letters from World War II, and he would. He would. There was one letter. There was one letter where he used the word. It was in capitals and it was M O, T. And I didn't know what he meant for a long time. I had to ask around and somebody finally told me what it meant. It means member of the tribe. Right. And he was coding the letter because he'd met someone on his ship that was an mot and they didn't talk about it, but he. They identified each other almost silently. That was what the subtext of the letter was. And I think. I don't know, that's how I sort of carried that around with me. Right. And you know, that's not the case today. Right. We don't have anything like that, I suppose. But I wanted in this book to explore what it was like to be doing really well, but at the same time looking over your shoulder.
- [35:51]
Sarah Wasserman
Mot I haven't heard that either. That's fascinating. And it just strikes me that in some way it's also a kind of gossip, right? That it's the who knows what and who can say what and what don't we have to say to one another. It's a nice through line. And I suppose the current Gen Z or Alpha version, which is completely secular, is game recognizes game.
- [36:16]
Peter Orner
Right?
- [36:17]
Sarah Wasserman
Nice to say to each other about something else.
- [36:20]
Peter Orner
Right. One thing I just thought of real quick is that, that I. I think your identity is only just a tiny fraction of the story that goes forward. And the identity is always shifting and never quite, you know, the thing. But, you know, I had fun having a Jewish professor at a Jesuit university. I feel fairly, you know, loyal, is not. Is not entirely secular. Right. Even to this day. So I had fun kind of just having, you know, having him talk to the monsignor on the quad or whatever it was. And, you know, but like, just, just, I think, you know, everybody's an outsider in some way. And I think I sort of just worked with that idea that I had characters who were. Who were able to pass in the city and become of the city completely and yet always there, always that distance. And I think especially with the grandparents, characters in the book, Babs and Lou, they became sort of isolated, out in the cold because of their ability to see more truth and be more honest and that there's lots of ways you can become slightly out of the circle. And I was really exploring that idea. And so identity is only just a tiny part of it, I think.
- [37:40]
Emily Hyde
That's a great place to end. Thank you so much, Peter. You're not quite off the hook yet because novel dialogue always asks a signature question, the same question of all the different novelists guests for each season. So for season 10, our question is who was your favorite teacher?
- [37:59]
Peter Orner
I'm going to say, you know what, I'm going to. Mrs. Winnie Angerman was my English teacher in high school who I loved. I wrote in one of, in a book of essays. I wrote a letter to her apologizing for a paper I had written on Scarlett letter. And I tried to write it again anyway, but, so Winnie was great. She passed away a few years ago. But I'll say someone who is, as far as I know, and I'm sure I'm right about this, is still living and her name is Tish o' Dowd and she is a lecturer professor at University of Michigan. And she took me under her wing and she read my stories when I was a punk. And, and I took like four classes with her. I basically went to the University of Tisch. I didn't go to, I didn't go to Michigan. I went to her and she would, she, she was hilarious and if you, if you were funny sometimes she really gave you a pat on the back. And so I was always trying to make, make her laugh and I, I can't over emphasize the kind of encouragement that somebody like that. She just said, you know what? And I was writing these stupid, you know, dumb drunk college kid stories. Like literally, that's what they were. You know, there was one about a car accident. Anyway, wasn't terrible, but she, she, like, she said, you know what? She saw a little bit of inkling of something and I can't tell you how grateful I am. Tisho Doubt. She sometimes goes by Tisho Doubt Ezekiel. I'm not sure exactly what she is at the moment, but she does have one novel and it's called Floaters and it's a beautiful novel. Anyway, Tish Ezekiel was a wonderful professor at Michigan.
- [39:41]
Emily Hyde
That's great. Thank you. And thank you for being on Novel Dialogue.
- [39:45]
Peter Orner
Oh, thank you, Emily. Thank you, Sarah. This is great.
- [39:48]
Emily Hyde
We'd like to thank the Society for Novel Studies for its sponsorship, Public Books for its partnership, and the Rick Edelman College of Communication, Humanities and Social Sciences at Rowan University for its support. Beck Daly is our production intern and Connor Hibbard is our sound engineer. If you liked what you heard, tune into the 50 plus conversations between novelists and critics that we have archived at Novel Dialogue. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
- [40:31]
Sarah Wasserman
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Emily Hyde
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Sarah Wasserman
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Peter Orner
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Sarah Wasserman
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Peter Orner
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