The Gossip Columnist's Daughter

by Peter Orner

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Alexander Popper can't stop remembering. Four years old when his father tossed him into Lake Michigan, he was told, Sink or swim, kid. In his mind, he's still bobbing in that frigid water. The rest of this novel's vivid cast of characters also struggle to remain afloat: Popper's mother, stymied by an unhappy marriage, seeks solace in the relentless energy of Chicago; his brother, Leo, shadow boss of the family, retreats into books; paternal grandparents, Seymour and Bernice, once high fliers, now mourn for long lost days; his father, a lawyer and would-be politician obsessed with his own success, fails to see that the family is falling apart; and his college girlfriend, the fiercely independent Kat, wrestles with impossible choices.

Covering four generations of the Popper family, Peter Orner illuminates the countless ways that love both makes us whole and completely unravels us. A comic and sorrowful tapestry of memory of connection and disconnection, Love and Shame and Love explores the universals with stunning originality and wisdom.

Release date: August 12, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 448

Sample

LOS ANGELES

DECEMBER 1963

THREE MEN DROP into Los Angeles out of a Chicago November. Outside the terminal, waiting by the curb, much as they try to refuse it, the men can’t help but enjoy the heat of the morning sun on their faces. They’ve begun to sweat in their heavy charcoal suits and overcoats.

You don’t wear a lightweight suit on an occasion like this.

Two of the men stand so close their thighs touch. Irv Kupcinet, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist, and his pal, my grandfather Lou Rosenthal. Both are in their early fifties. Irv is bulky, and at the same time compact, an ex–college quarter-back (plus a half season with the Philadelphia Eagles). His meaty face is dominated by a long, bluntly angled nose that surges ahead of him like a ship’s prow. His blood-soaked eyes are hidden by the brim of his fedora, pulled low.

Irv Kupcinet has legions of friends—the freshly dead president was one of them—but nobody on earth is more devoted to him than Lou Rosenthal.

Lou’s short, rotund, and bald as a newborn. A lawyer specializing in wills and trusts, he’s not here in his professional capacity. Even so, my grandfather’s expertise at handling the property of the dead will be useful over the next two days. As he stands beside Irv, Lou stares at the sidewalk as if he’s trying to read it. Scattered across each concrete square are specks of glass that wink in the sun.

The third man, standing alone, is my grandfather’s brother, Solly. He’s sixteen years younger than Lou, closer in age to my father, his nephew, than to his older brother. And he’s as hulking as Lou is squat. To my knowledge, no Rosenthal male before or since has ever cleared five feet six on a good day. My father used to say that Great-grandmother Willamina must have had an assignation with the Jolly Green Giant.

At more than a foot taller, Solly not only dwarfs Lou, but he’s also got a few inches on the columnist.

In his massive hands, Solly holds Irv’s and Lou’s suitcases. He has yet to set them down. His face is unevenly shaved and pocked with small patches of beard. Solly made the trip without a change of clothes. When my grandfather summoned him to the airport, he had no time to pack a bag. It was sleeting when they left Chicago. He’s still wearing his galoshes.

A friend of mine, a novelist, once said that minor characters don’t know they’re minor. Doesn’t this apply to us all? Those of us who are minor characters have no idea. We all think we’re the star of our own show. But Solly Rosenthal, standing on the sidewalk in front of an airport, holding two suitcases, neither of which is his, is well aware he’s an afterthought.

My grandfather shrugs off his overcoat and hands it, wordlessly, to his brother. Solly sets down one of the cases and drapes the coat over his shoulder.

“Irv?” Lou says.

No answer.

“Irv?”

Still no response.

“Why don’t you take your coat off and give it to Solly?”

The columnist’s gaze is fixed beyond the car park in front of them. He’s motionless but for a nearly imperceptible rocking motion, slightly forward, slightly back—forward, back, forward, back—an ancient movement only his body remembers. Lou thinks of his own father, who used to rock on his heels like that in the old synagogue on Twenty-Sixth Street. So slightly you had to watch him closely in order to know he was moving at all.

DEERFIELD, ILLINOIS

SEPTEMBER 2019

THE NURSING HOME on Waukegan Road, next to the old Sara Lee cake factory. The place is called Sunshine or Sunrise. I can’t keep it straight. They shut down the plant years ago. All that’s left are broken windows, smokestacks, and a vast parking lot. Yet the sugary reek of industrial cake still permeates these windows that are otherwise screwed shut. Babs calls the place Joliet.

She’s stopped eating.

One of my earliest memories is of Babs feeding me family cars. We’re in what they call the dayroom. I dip a plastic spoon into a carton of Yoplait.

“Open wide for Lou’s cherry-red Lincoln Continental Coupe, doors as big as Rhode Island!”

“Why are you shouting?” Babs says.

It all reverses. History repeats itself backward.

With disgust, she accepts the spoonful. Again, I dip the spoon in the carton.

“Vroom, vroom! It’s your own ’83 Seville. Two-tone paint job and that weird hump of a trunk, remember? Like you could stuff a body in it? Open, Babs, open…”

We’re surrounded by strangers in wheelchairs haphazardly parked like bumper cars. It’s midmorning. Some doze. Some slurp cold coffee. Others stare at the wall. At a table in the corner, they’re playing cards. That serious murmuring. Nobody here is waiting around to die. They’re waiting on lunch. Except Babs. For her, lunch can come and go and come and go. Next time, on my way here, I’ll pick up canned peaches. She always had a thing for canned peaches.

I’d take a canned peach over a peach peach.

Lou always said that was the Depression talking. And for the same reason, he said, he wouldn’t touch a canned anything anything.

Babs and Lou. Lou and Babs.

We called them by their first names.

Eyes closed, her head droops. She’s sitting in a plastic chair. She says she wouldn’t be caught dead in a wheelchair. I’d said, At Sunrise or Sunshine, that makes you immortal. She’d nearly laughed. That was months ago.

“Babs. Don’t sleep.”

She’s become frail. Years she worried her mind would go before her body. A former dancer, she’s always taken such good care of her body. Now her mind’s intact and her body’s so weak…

Eyes still clamped, she says, “And you know something?”

“What?”

“There’s not a single soul here I like.”

“What about Sylvia Weinstein? Did you two get over that thing?”

“Weinberg. What thing?”

“Didn’t you have a tiff with Sylvia Weinstein?”

“Don’t you listen?”

“But you like Sylvia, am I right?”

“Sylvia’s dead.”

“Sylvia Weinstein’s dead?”

“Weinberg!”

“When?”

“Two days ago. Two months ago. What’s it matter?”

I heap the spoon again.

“Open up for Solly’s Gremlin.”

“Solly’s what?”

“You don’t remember Solly’s blue Gremlin? Like a Pinto but even worse. Huge man, itty-bitty car. Lucy said Solly didn’t drive his car, he wore it.”

She opens her eyes.

“Your teeth are yellow,” she says.

“It’s the stress.”

“What?”

“The discoloration is caused by stress.”

“That’s absurd,” she says.

I cram the spoon between my grandmother’s lips.

“Couple more. What about Aunt Judith’s VW Bug? Didn’t she have a convertible Bug? Didn’t she once drive all the way to Chicago from Seattle with the top down because the mechanism was broken? She said it only rained on her in Nebraska.”

Babs bats the spoon out of my hand. Yogurt scatters across the parquet. The card players look up, briefly, from their game.

“Don’t talk about Judy.”

Her eyes lucid, furious.

I leave her and go into the men’s room in the hallway. A bathroom in a nursing home. Disinfectant. That little red string you pull if you need help. We all end up here, one way or another. I yank some paper towels from the dispenser. When I come back, she’s looking out the window at the remains of the defunct plant.

“It’s like a crematorium,” she says.

I stoop and wipe up the yogurt.

“Look, I just want you to eat a little more. Nurse Tabitha said you need more protein and more—”

“Who are you anyway?” She shields her eyes with her hand as if there’s a glare.

“Babs.”

“Oh, what difference does it make? You could be anybody.”

She leans forward and squints at my face as if she’s suddenly taken an interest in something else she sees in it.

“Jed.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you have a wife?”

“We never married.”

“Where is she?”

“Around.”

“Around? What does that mean?”

“It means she’s around. Shouting distance. Just a little more, will you?”

I’m running out of cars. My father’s Mercedes 280SE with the bloodred seats, the one we called his Nazi staff car. My own crap-ass Civic that’s in the shop…

“Shouting distance?” Babs says.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“It’s like you speak some other language.”

“Please, Babs, Nurse Tab—”

“She dropped you.”

“Nurse Tabitha?”

“Your wife.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Gave you your walking papers.”

Those deep-set eyes and that nose, not so much big as prominent. First thing you noticed about her. Fleshy, bulbous, direct. Babs always said she had her father’s nose, a Hodash nose. Her tailor father had a little shop on Plymouth Court, near Dearborn Park. He died when Babs was eleven. She said one of her few contributions to the Rosenthal family was the introduction of the Hodash nose into our gene pool. Lucy and I both have her father’s nose.

“Hanna and I are separated. But nobody dropped anybody—I’ve got an apartment a few blocks away. It’s a trial separation.”

“Trial is right. I know that Hanna without the h.”

“It’s just an alternative spelling.”

“That’s what you say. Isn’t there a baby?”

“We’re co-parenting.”

“What?”

“Parenting alone, together.”

“I’m starting to feel woozy,” she says.

“Times change. People evolve.”

“You think I don’t get it?” she says. “You think I don’t know what it’s like?”

“What what’s like?”

“To be dropped!”

I’ve basically been dropped, but why go into it with my grandmother.

“The separation was a mutual, informed decision on both sides, which is why we’re sharing responsi—”

“It’s in your eyes.”

“What?”

“Dropped. Right there in your sky-blue eyes. Nobody in the family has such eyes. I’ve always found it suspicious on the part of your mother. Irises like yours don’t just appear”—she takes a look around the room, lowers her voice—“and they’ve never been very Jewish-looking.”

“Babs.”

“And you know what else?”

“Tell me but open up for Lucy’s new Mini Cooper.”

“She dropped us like old shoes.”

“Who did?”

“Who?” She turns her face toward the saloon doors of the dayroom like she expects whoever she’s talking about to saunter right through them. “You’re asking me who?”

“Who?” I say. “Who?”

“Who who? Everybody knows who who. And who who would take one whiff of this place and swish away to the Arts Club or the Union League or the Cliff Dwellers or the Alliance Française even though that woman couldn’t speak a word of—”

“Essee?”

My grandmother flinches. The name alone still jabs.

“Visit? Out here? Lower herself? And you know she hated the suburbs with a venom only she—”

“Essee’s dead, Babs.”

“You think I don’t know?”

“At least fifteen years.”

“Longer.”

And she clenches her eyes as if she can’t shut them tight enough, out of sorrow, out of rage, it’s hard to tell. And there it is, the old wound.

“Babs?”

She shakes her head. No, no more talking.

I remember thinking, not then, later, after Babs died, about the fact that she’d used the word us. D. . .