You Know You Love Gossip. Does It Love You Back?

YOU DIDN’T HEAR THIS FROM ME: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip, by Kelsey McKinney

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.