You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip

by Kelsey McKinney

“Great minds,” the quote goes, “discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

But that is the truth about gossip: We want to separate ourselves from it at the same time we want to drown in it. We want the truth, all of it, not told slant, until suddenly we don’t.

I was sixteen. I didn’t know then that people older than you are not always right.

“Harassment is always a sexual demand, but it also carries a more sinister and pathetic injunction: ‘You will think about me,’” Jacqueline Rose wrote in her 2021 book On Violence and On Violence Against Women.

You have to set up dominoes, writing teachers say, in order to knock them down.