“You Didn’t Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip,” Reviewed

The soft-brain theory has been pretty thoroughly debunked, but scriptural notions have proved harder to dismiss. McKinney grew up attending an evangelical church in Texas where she was taught that her tendency to gossip would keep her from holiness. On her bedroom mirror, she inscribed Ephesians 4:29: “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building up others according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” But her compulsion would not be suppressed. No matter that she wasn’t out to cause harm; any talk about a person not present was verboten. From the pulpit, pastors fulminated against the “woman’s sin” for spreading lies and discord.

McKinney left the Church long ago. Looking back, she concludes that its leaders did not merely despise gossip; in fact, they feared it. She points to cases like those of Bill Hybels, a founder of Willow Creek Community Church, based in Illinois, who was forced to resign in 2018 after being credibly accused of sexual misconduct, and Paige Patterson, the former president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Texas, who was ousted from his position the same year after more than two thousand female congregants signed a petition denouncing him for counselling abused wives to pray for their husbands. (Hybels denies the allegations.) Convincing women that God will punish them if they don’t hold their tongues is one way to try to prevent such dark truths from getting out.

Certainly, Christianity has no monopoly on the prohibition of gossip. In Islam, McKinney tells us, there is a difference in degree between buhtan (slander), ghibah (backbiting), and namimah (malicious gossip); none is advised. Jewish law holds that a person who hears gossip—lashon hara, literally “the evil tongue”—is as much at fault as one who tells it. A few months before the #MeToo movement began, in the summer of 2017, the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith published a blog post called “In Defense of Lashon Hara: Why Gossip Is a Feminist Imperative.” Like McKinney, the post’s writer, Rachel Sandalow-Ash, concluded that women’s speech had been unfairly maligned by powerful men who would prefer that their doings not be discussed. By encouraging women to share information that might protect them, be it about a community leader or a college classmate known to play fast and loose with sexual consent, she argued, gossip actually fulfilled the Jewish imperative “to create a more just world.”

So gossip, in the service of truthtelling, can act as a check on power, and as a source of solidarity and irreverence for those who lack it. “Tea,” that now ubiquitous term, originated in the Black drag-ball scene. McKinney writes of contemporary whisper networks; Spacks cites an account of women in a harem whose chat is flavored with “satire, ridicule, and disrespect for males and the ideals of the male world.” That could double as a description of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who delights in the company of the woman she calls (in a modern English translation) “my gossip”:

For had my husband pissed against a wall,
Or done a thing that might have cost his life,
To her and to another worthy wife,
And to my niece whom I loved always well,
I would have told it—every bit I’d tell,
And did so, many and many a time, knows God,
Which made his face full often red and hot
For utter shame; he blamed himself that he
Had told me of so deep a privity.

Poor husband, to be so humiliated! But the Wife of Bath is unrepentant. She enjoys gossiping—and it is not her only enjoyment. Gossip, like sex, is an intimate, sensuous pleasure, most satisfying when the giver is attentive to the receiver. “I didn’t just want to hear gossip,” McKinney writes, of her younger, churchgoing self. “I wanted to take it in my hands and mold it, rearrange the punch lines and the reveals until I could get the timing right enough that my friends in the cafeteria would gasp.” The molding, the gasping—no wonder the pastors weren’t thrilled.

But what of the gossiped-about? They can’t all be tyrants, criminals, and creeps. If gossip can subvert norms, it can also enforce them; remember high school? To be discussed by others can confer status, make you part of the club. “I heard they got pinned!” the teen-agers of “Bye Bye Birdie” sing on the phone to one another as—hallelujah!—another boy-girl couple is minted in their midst. And it can just as easily strip status away. Women, vilified as gossip’s venomous purveyors, are also its frequent victims. Think of Hester Prynne, with her scarlet letter, or Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s novel “The House of Mirth,” whose hope of securing her future among New York’s upper crust is dashed by a rumor that she is having an affair with the husband of the wealthy socialite Bertha Dorset, planted by Bertha herself. By the time Lily shows up in the gossip rag “Town Talk,” she’s as good as dead.

McKinney knows that gossip can be weaponized as “an extralegal solution to enforce the community’s ideals and powers,” and the legality is not always so extra. East Germany, Soviet Russia—these are places where whisperings found their way into police files. And what was the House Un-American Activities Committee but one big, malevolent exercise in gossip-mongering? McKinney notes that the actress Jean Seberg’s career was derailed when the Los Angeles Times ran a blind item suggesting that she was pregnant by a Black Panther; Newsweek subsequently published her name. The story turned out to be an invention of the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO program. Her baby was born premature, and died. So, eventually, did Seberg, at forty, in what was ruled a probable suicide.