In Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “To a philosopher, all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.” In You Didn’t Hear This From Me, Kelsey McKinney takes a similar view of her ever-expanding, ever-present subject: gossip. She draws out the contradictions and intersections that underlie the act of gossiping, exploring both its delights and dangers as she weaves together insights from popular culture, scientific literature, and personal memory.
McKinney has been practicing the art of gossip for years—both professionally and otherwise. During the coronavirus pandemic, struck by boredom and isolation, she and producer Alex Sujong Laughlin began conceptualising Normal Gossip — the Defector Media podcast that would soon take off. Each episode follows an anonymised, crowd-sourced piece of gossip: always richly detailed, unfailingly delightful, and told with a kind of warm theatrical relish. As the New York Times noted, “The low stakes are part of what makes it work — each yarn is as inconsequential as it is juicy, a pleasure as fleeting as cotton candy.” And it’s the revival of this fleeting pleasure—the effort to rescue gossip from its long shadow of guilt and trivialisation—that animates McKinney’s long-form investigation into gossip’s cultural purpose in a digitally saturated, politically fraught world.
McKinney’s book captures the thrill and intimacy of gossip with precise, often lyrical clarity. “Gossip was a pill you were handed before a concert,” she writes, “an easy, if clandestine, decision to spend your evening a little happier, a little stranger, a little more open to the world than before.” Gossip, for McKinney, is far from frivolous. It shifts how we view others and ourselves. “Not all stories are gossip,” she notes, “but the best ones feel like they could be. They invite a kind of collusion between the teller and the hearer, a secret shared that binds them together.” This intimacy is central: gossip builds trust, forms a shared moral code, and draws its power from the delight of secrecy.
But gossip is also fraught with contradiction. “We say we love to gossip, and in the same breath we say that gossip is dangerous,” McKinney observes. Gossip is narrative in its rawest, most elastic form—a story that shifts and grows, resists finality, and leaves room for desire and fear to sit side by side. In the urgency and emotional weight McKinney gives to gossip, one hears the echo of Joan Didion’s famous line from The White Album: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” For McKinney, gossip is part of that life-making enterprise. She links it to oral traditions and the evolution of language, where stories proliferate in multiple versions with no single truth at their center. In a clever meta-turn, she even invites ChatGPT to gossip with her—only to discover that gossip, as it’s popularly understood, is bound up in the diction of the marginalised, and thus frequently dismissed or condemned through misogynistic, racist, or homophobic lenses.
Drawing on Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women, McKinney highlights how gossip is judged by who tells it. Dworkin notes, “While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.” This gendered framing has a long history. McKinney reminds us that women have been punished for gossiping—literally. In Scotland, the “gossip bridle” was a torture device used on talkative women. She also analyzes modern cultural relics like the Mean Girls Burn Book: tools that both keep and spread gossip, shaping hierarchies and alliances, especially among women. Recalling an abusive man she knew as a teenager, she writes: “We gossiped about him, if you want to call it that. I’d say we kept one another safe.” Gossip becomes survival, in the form of whisper networks that protect women who can access them. But secrecy, she adds, can also shelter harm. “Gossip can’t always save us,” she writes, “but it can teach us whom to trust.”
The book also delves into religion. Raised Christian, McKinney describes how gossip was cast as sinful, even while it clung to her mind. “No matter how hard I tried to tell myself that gossiping was wicked, and that God hated it, the stories just stuck to my brain.” In revealing the details of her own life, McKinney draws readers into her central argument: that gossip offers not just stories, but structure. She contrasts the moral silence expected of women in church with the liveliness and clarity she found in gossip. In a surprising parallel, she treats gossip and faith as twin survival mechanisms—ways of imagining alternate worlds, promising hope or safety when reality falters. “Our sense of self is tied up in the stories we tell,” she writes. “In gossip and in religion, we can build for ourselves a placebo net so strong and so fortified that it can catch us when we fall by promising a different, better world.”
In that vein, gossip is always political. In revisiting the saga of West Elm Caleb—the ‘fuckboy’ who briefly became the Internet’s main character—McKinney tracks how gossip morphs from storytelling into social censure. Gossip, she argues, can serve as “an extra-legal form of justice.” She interrogates the Gaylor conspiracy theory (which posits Taylor Swift as a closeted lesbian) not to endorse or reject it, but to explore gossip’s mythmaking potential and its creep toward the conspiratorial. She looks to #FreeBritney, to DeuxMoi, to the cycles of parasocial intimacy and online whisper networks that blur the line between revelation and performance. Gossip, in this view, becomes a tool for cultural re-scripting—but also a mirror for our own appetites.
Ultimately, McKinney refuses to simplify gossip. For her, it exists in “a kind of transitory, imaginary space between events and their codifying: a retelling that grows and morphs with every translation through time.” Gossip bleeds into the serious. It lives in scripture, in music, in chimpanzees, in Picasso paintings, in text chains and tabloid headlines. It animates us. “Without the self-awareness gained by gossiping,” she writes, “we would become husks of ourselves, so uninterested in the world around us that we become separated from it entirely.”
Quoting Phyllis Rose, McKinney closes in on gossip’s truest draw: “We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.” In defending that desire, McKinney doesn’t just redeem gossip—she redefines it. Her writing reminds us that in searching for the truth about others, we sometimes find ourselves. And perhaps that, too, is worth passing on.
Yamini Krishnan is a graduating student of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. She enjoys writing poetry and culture pieces. Her writing has been published in Vayavya Magazine and Scroll.in amongst others.
