By Kathryn Hughes

At its most basic, gossip is one person talking to another about someone who isn't present. In "You Didn't Hear This From Me," Kelsey McKinney argues that gossip, far from a sign of a second-rate mind or a shaky moral constitution, is an essential life skill and an important way to strengthen social bonds.

Three years ago, Ms. McKinney co-created a podcast called "Normal Gossip, " which today garners millions of downloads a year. It grew out of her post-Covid-19 realization that what she had missed most during the pandemic was the emotionally sustaining practice of connecting with friends and colleagues over stories about people she didn't know.

"Normal" is the key word. Ms. McKinney's podcast, which she handed over to a new host last year, does not deal in celebrity takedowns of the sort you might find in the National Enquirer. Instead, episodes are built around friend-of-a-friend stories that have been sent in by listeners. There was the time a pregnant woman was planning to give her baby a rare, old name, and then her friend went and used the name when her own baby was born two weeks before. Landlord dramas figure frequently, as do horrible bosses who send passive-aggressive emails. Normal gossip, in Ms. McKinney's lexicon, is low stakes and anonymous, harming no one while providing that intense hit of pleasure that comes with sharing a slice of human life that can be parsed to infinity.

The richest part of "You Didn't Hear This From Me" is Ms. McKinney's account of how she first fell in love with gossip -- and her mounting terror that she might have imperiled her soul. As the daughter of an evangelical preacher, she had learned early that gossip was not only a sin but a particularly female one. Men, by contrast, were susceptible to lust. Yet despite her best intentions and strenuous prayers, Ms. McKinney found that as soon as she heard a story she knew she should keep to herself, she heard her "mouth telling it to someone else."

It wasn't, she insists, that she was a mean girl desperate to spread malice around Sunday school. Rather, she loved the way that she could take a scrap of narrative, rearrange the punchline and tinker with the timing until the story positively sang. Her rewards were the gratifying gasps and widened eyes of the person to whom she had just made a perfect offering.

It is when Ms. McKinney tries to broaden her thesis to make a case for gossip's force as a social good that her argument starts to snag and stumble. She may be right to suggest that one of the reasons churches like those of her youth discouraged gossip was to prevent congregation members from reporting bad behavior by ministers, priests and pastors. She makes the interesting point that the Bible is not much given to telling people to button it: Out of a total of 31,102 verses, she notes, only eight overtly concern the topic of gossip.

Ms. McKinney revisits an infamous online spreadsheet, made public in late 2017, to which people contributed the names of men in the media industry who were rumored to have engaged in inappropriate behavior, from sexual assault to creepy comments. This, the author suggests, is the kind of gossip-with-a-purpose that women have done for decades to keep themselves safe. She recounts feeling affirmed by spotting on the spreadsheet the name of a man who had once come on to her at a fancy party, leaving her uncomfortable. Ms. McKinney points out that "researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have named this kind of gossiping prosocial gossip because it is used to warn others, which in turn can lower the overall exploitation of groups."

The problem with Ms. McKinney's book is that it takes a loosely associational approach to the subject that starts to share many of the less desirable characteristics of gossip. It also features some jarring juxtapositions. We lurch from a detailed account of how, as an adolescent, the author developed a parasocial relationship with Britney Spears, becoming obsessed with the real-life dramas of the troubled singer, to the Stasi Museum in Berlin, where the endless files accumulated on private citizens strike Ms. McKinney as "in some ways, the dream of a gossip."

Ms. McKinney labors to draw together in a meaningful conversation such variant topics as the supposed 2016 unmasking of the pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, with its issues around privacy and authorial agency, and Rosalind Wiseman's "Queen Bees & Wannabes" (2002), the publishing sensation designed to help parents steer their daughters through the dramas of "cliques, gossip, boys, and the new realities of girl world."

To disguise the breaks and non sequiturs in her methodology, Ms. McKinney leans heavily on quotes from thinkers whom she scatters haphazardly throughout her text. In short order we hear from the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the poet Emily Dickinson and the activist bell hooks. Oscar Wilde, naturally, puts in an appearance. All have interesting things to say about gossip, but quite how they relate to Ms. McKinney's argument, or even what that argument is, remains unclear. As a result, "You Didn't Hear This From Me" reads as a buffet of tasty tidbits rather than a sustained inquiry into the rights and wrongs of spilling the tea.

--Ms. Hughes is the author, most recently, of "Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania."

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 18, 2025 10:24 ET (14:24 GMT)

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