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

by Kelsey McKinney

Without all the infrastructure and profit and power seizing, gossip and religion are braided together throughout the course of our history. Both require us to believe. Perhaps that is the real identifying factor of whether something is gossip: Does it ask you to take a leap of faith, to trust the teller enough to believe a story you did not see with your own eyes and did not hear with your own ears? Gossip is always about a friend of a friend. It is always lightly or highly exaggerated. It always asks you to imagine a world different than the one you previously imagined, to consider a version of a person that might be far worse than the one you assumed existed—or far better. Gossip exists in a kind of transitory, imaginary space between events and their codifying: a retelling that grows and morphs with every translation through time. To embrace gossip as a concept is to extend your arms as far as they can go and still not grasp it all, but to believe that the bounds exist. Maybe it is not faith that stands in opposition to gossip, but power.