The writer Kelsey McKinney had been in the wine bar-cum-restaurant for only a few minutes when the host waved her over — to seat her at a banquette in the center of the room, but also to share some personal news.
As Ms. McKinney settled in, the host told her about an upcoming move to California for a big career opportunity but demurred on the specifics.
“I don’t want to talk about it until I leave here,” she said. “And if I start talking about a life coach and a guru, if I start taking ayahuasca, you have to come get me.”
Ms. McKinney nodded sagely.
“But I’ll be back,” the host said. “My hair person is still here. That’s a legally binding relationship.”
Ms. McKinney is used to hearing about the lives of strangers. For the last three years, Ms. McKinney, a tattooed redhead from Texas with an open face, has been the host of “Normal Gossip,” a podcast about the travails of everyday people. For each episode, Ms. McKinney and her producer, Alex Sujong Laughlin, bring on a different guest — often other writers and creative types — to discuss gossipy stories submitted by the show’s tens of thousands of listeners.
Think: someone who posts on social media about her status as a “marathon runner” but who has never actually finished a race. What may seem low stakes at first — like the internecine sagas of a queer kickball league — usually unfurls into something riveting.
Ms. McKinney, 33, frequently pauses to check in with her guest, “How are you feeling right now, and whose side are you on?”
“Ultimately, it’s equal parts, ‘Oh my god,’ and, ‘This is the most fun thing anyone’s ever asked me to do,’” said the humorist Samantha Irby, who has appeared on two episodes. “You just sit there and have to react, and hope you say the thing that makes Kelsey cackle.”
As the show has found a cult following, and as Ms. McKinney and Ms. Sujong Laughlin have become entrenched in the thorny lives of strangers, Ms. McKinney has developed theories about the wider cultural fascination with gossip. In a new collection of essays, “You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip,” Ms. McKinney explores the anthropological, sociological and philosophical uses of gossip, one of the oldest modes of self-understanding.
“We gossip,” she said, “because that is how we each make sense of the world, with ourselves at the center reaching outward trying to connect with others, to prove to ourselves that we are real.”
Social Beings
On a recent snowy morning, Ms. McKinney showed me the charming, tchotchke-stuffed rowhouse in the Queen Village neighborhood of Philadelphia where she lives with her husband, Trey Dondrea, and her elderly dog, Georgia.
When they moved there in 2021, she knew almost immediately that it would suit her. “It’s a loud town,” she said: loud sports fans, loud conversations at the bar, loud opinions.
In her home office, a room tucked away on the top floor, looms a giant white board, covered in a chaotic-good palimpsest of outlines and to-do lists.
“This chart is how my brain conceives of all stories,” Ms. McKinney said, pointing to a line graph at the top that she uses to map out “Normal Gossip” episodes. “This is the five-act structure.”
The idea for the show came to Ms. McKinney in 2020. It was the middle of the pandemic, and everyone needed fresh tea. “Someone should simply give me a podcast called Normal Gossip where I talk about gossip that everyone has,” she posted on Twitter on a whim.
At the time, Ms. McKinney was in the early days of running Defector Media, a worker-owned culture and news organization she had started with former staff writers from the sports blog Deadspin. When her colleagues saw her post, they encouraged her to make the podcast for their new company.
She began looking around for a producer, and hit it off with Ms. Sujong Laughlin, whom she had never worked with but whose byline she recognized from her years in journalism.
For each episode, Ms. McKinney rewrites the stories her listeners submit to her anonymously into theatrical retellings. Then, she and Ms. Sujong Laughlin hone into a script with buildup, a climax and hairpin twists and turns along the way. Everyone gets a pseudonym, and geographic locations and other details are obscured.
Ms. McKinney does not mind that the resulting tales sit in an uncomfortable space between fiction and nonfiction. “I’m incredibly interested in the obsession with ‘confirmation’ and ‘the truth’ and whether we can know that at all,” she said.
She is partly inspired by the mystery novels she devoured as an adolescent growing up in Flower Mound, a small town near the Dallas-Fort Worth megachurch where her father was an evangelical pastor. A truly tantalizing piece of gossip, she suggested, is sort of like a whodunit.
“I was a library kid,” Ms. McKinney said. Once she’d burned through the young adult section, her mother turned her on to Agatha Christie.
She attended a performing arts high school in Dallas, and then studied the humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. She moved east when she landed an editorial fellowship at Vox, which led to writing jobs at Fusion and Deadspin.
Just before “Normal Gossip” got going, she published her first book, a novel about the effects of a pastor’s affair on his wife and daughters called “God Spare the Girls,” set in an evangelical Christian community in North Texas.
Growing up as an evangelical Christian herself, Ms. McKinney recalled learning that gossip was a sin; at the same time, connecting with others through stories was the bedrock of the church community.
That seemingly idle chatter — which in fact contains fundamental human dramas — “feels like a way to train you to be a social being,” she said.
The Serious Side
Though “Normal Gossip” deals mostly in lighthearted subjects, in her new book, Ms. McKinney touches on the role of gossip in more serious matters.
“You Didn’t Hear This From Me” features riffs on West Elm Caleb, a young man whom scores of women online accused of ghosting; a cheeky play on the Epic of Gilgamesh; and salacious bits about Picasso borrowed from the artist Françoise Gilot’s account of her time as his lover.
It also includes insights about how whisper networks can be a means of holding powerful people accountable, as they did during the #MeToo movement. The legal battles that surrounded Britney Spears, Ms. McKinney posits, are an example of how unchecked gossip has the potential to alter someone’s life for the worst.
In a personal essay, Ms. McKinney writes about how a childhood cholesteatoma destroyed her right eardrum and most of her ear canal, leaving her partly deaf.
Growing up, the condition made her both listen more carefully and become more skeptical of what she did pick up. Sometimes, she argued, whether or not a scrap of gossip is strictly true is irrelevant. The best gossips may leave it up to their listeners to draw their own conclusions.
“When we gossip,” she writes, “we have to acknowledge that the truths we are attempting to convey are in the meanings we take from the moments,” not in what is actually being said.
In December, Ms. McKinney announced that she and Ms. Sujong Laughin would be leaving the podcast and handing it over to a new host, the journalist Rachelle Hampton.
Ms. Hampton, one of the podcast’s earliest guests, had quickly become an informal member of the “Normal Gossip” team after she joined Defector last summer.
In January, she released a “bonus” episode as the incoming host, discussing the romantic plotlines of a low-budget Christmas movie. She’ll take over Ms. McKinney’s role in a new season later this year.
“A lot of podcast transitions happen too late, when someone is burned out,” Ms. Hampton said. “But I’m being handed a show that’s at the height of its powers.”
The post Know Any Good Gossip? appeared first on New York Times.
