For those who love it, live for it and regularly traffic in it, nothing is more delicious than exchanging gossip. Kelsey McKinney is one of us. In “You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip,” she writes, “What I crave is a phone call that starts with, ‘You’re never going to believe this.’”
McKinney is a creator of the podcast “Normal Gossip,” which provides all the kicks of rumor-mongering and none of the baggage: Each week she recounts to a guest an anonymized story from someone else’s life — drama at a dog park, say, or an episode of cheating at bingo.
“At its most basic, gossip is just one person talking to another about someone who isn’t present,” McKinney writes in a fair example of the book’s dialectic style. In “You Didn’t Hear This From Me,” she seeks to understand why we do it and why it’s important. I just wish the result were more fun.
The book, a collection of essays, contains some amusing historical accounts, such as how women in 16th-century Scotland were put into the brank “to curb women’s tongue’s that talk too idle,” as one such iron bridle was inscribed. There is a passage about “Town Topics” — a kind of Us Weekly of the Gilded Age — which published juicy blind items about Alice Roosevelt having allegedly listened to risqué jokes in Newport.
More so than its lineage, McKinney aims to understand gossip’s place in our lives. The book is laden with references to very recent history; topics that were obviously the talk of le tout internet at the time of writing but already feel dated: the show Hannah Gadsby curated at Brooklyn Museum, mentioned in a chapter about tell-alls; West Elm Caleb, who wooed many women via online dating platforms, referenced in a discussion of strangers online; the social media account Deuxmoi, which self-presented as arbiters of celebrity gossip.
By the time McKinney mentions America Ferrera’s speech about the expectations placed on women in the “Barbie” movie, I had lost track of what the point was. Doja Cat’s song “Need to Know,” the finale of a “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” season, the reality game show “Traitors” and Britney Spears’s conservatorship are just a few of the topics in which the reader must be already interested — because the book doesn’t manage to elevate them much.
Much juicier are the anonymous anecdotes and vignettes slipped between chapters, which serve to illustrate how gossip is used in real life — including the scene in which members of a wedding party dish about the complicated love life of an arriving guest and the description of a high school that publicly posts students’ disciplinary infractions. These interludes are brief but shine far more brightly than the book’s essays.
The writing of these essays relies heavily on quotes from an array of other thinkers. In just a few pages one encounters the philosopher Aaron Ben-Ze’ev on whether we are born with the desire to gossip; the anthropologist Robin Dunbar on gossip’s relation to the animal kingdom; Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist, discussing its development in humanity. Soren Kierkegaard, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” Emily Dickinson, bell hooks, Oscar Wilde and Kurt Vonnegut all weigh the book down further.
I’d far rather know what the author thinks. She occasionally dips into her own formative experiences, such as the time a storyteller came to her school to tell a spooky yarn from their small town that was really an urban legend, or the experience of growing up in an evangelical church culture where gossip was considered an affront to God.
McKinney seems to still be wrestling with her own relationship to gossip, whether it can be fun or is something to condemn. “The sense of awe I felt when a car careens around a turn and the land lies out in front of me and it feels divine is almost identical to the physical experience of the gasp that involuntarily escapes my mouth when someone sends me a 12-minute voice memo filled with good information.”
She likes when gossip builds community or spreads warnings against predators. She approves of gossip that holds people accountable and keeps power in check. But she gets a little pious when it comes to parasocial relationships. About Taylor Swift and her love life, McKinney writes that the singer does not owe fans personal details.
The essays don’t dig deep enough into her ambivalence about gossip to come away with any big ideas. Instead she writes, “In a few years I will have no memory of writing most of this. It will fade from me, even as it stays in print.” No one should aspire to write a book as ephemeral as a rumor.
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