You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip, by Kelsey McKinney

McKinney isn’t exactly a “gossip columnist” in the tradition of Hedda Hopper, Walter Winchell, and later the likes of Page Six and Deuxmoi. While she’s certainly not above sharing gossip herself, McKinney is more of what I would describe as a gossip theorist.

Locker rooms, politics, and religion

This very entertaining book analyzes small and large-scale gossip, from the high-school locker room to the White House. Most often, it involves day-to-day stuff: adults, telling stories to each other about other adults that they know. That’s always been at the core of the Normal Gossip podcast.

Gossip certainly has a dark side: it can be very hurtful, especially when it’s not true, or done maliciously. At the same time…just about everybody does it, to some degree. Also, many world religions have scriptural prohibitions on gossiping; lashon hara, or “evil speech”, is the version in Judaism. But as the author points out, way too often, religious taboos against gossip have been weaponized for evil ends, like helping clergy members of all denominations get away with terrible crimes.

The argument could be made about “punching down” or “punching up” with gossip, similarly with comedy, but McKinney, to her credit, doesn’t go there, or push for gossip to be used as a weapon of political change. Such a system would likely prove just as unworkable with gossip as it has in comedy.

McKinney’s gossip canon

McKinney is clearly an expert on things like the canon of reality TV, the subtle differences between the two Mean Girls movies, and Reddit’s AmItheAsshole forum, and how the book’s thesis relates to them. Somewhat charmingly, McKinney returns to the story of Britney Spears—a major victim of the gossip-industrial complex—throughout the book, with the author acknowledging that she has dressed up as the pop star for Halloween over the years, and once visited her hometown as a reporter.

McKinney also tells a story, with details changed, about husband-and-wife painters who divorced when the husband fell in love with a pop star; even as someone who doesn’t follow the intricacies of celebrity gossip as closely as most, I almost immediately clocked exactly who she meant.

Gossip for all genders

While gossip is certainly female-coded, men do a great deal of it too, both of the interpersonal variety and also stuff like baseball trade rumors. And other kinds of sports rumors: It seems like every generation, there’s a new rumor about a local hockey player having an affair with a teammate’s wife.

And one of the world’s leading gossip hounds, of course, is the current president of the United States.

If only the book had been finished, say, six months later, it could have delved into a couple of recent developments. For example, what Taylor Lorenz calls “The Alt-Right Pipeline for Women”. She details the way certain bad actors, led by Candace Owens, have sought to push gossip-hungry women into extremist politics, largely through the prism of the Justin Baldoni/Blake Lively imbroglio. And the terrible story of Mary Kate Cornett, a Mississippi college student who became the subject of a false sexual rumor that somehow spread to national sports shows.

“Perhaps the greatest purpose of gossip is helping us understand our own perspective,” McKinney writes. I can get on board with that, but I’ll add a warning out of a beer or gambling commercial: “Please gossip responsibly.”