A deliciously insightful exploration of why we are so obsessed with gossip, and what it can tell us about humans and their search for truth
Can you keep a secret? It’s harder than it seems – after all, it’s only human to thirst after the juicy updates, jaw-dropping stories, and idle chatter that we typically collect over drinks with friends. No one knows this better than journalist Kelsey McKinney, whose Normal Gossip podcast has accrued a listenership of millions.
In YOU DIDN'T HEAR THIS FROM ME, McKinney explores the murkiness of everyday storytelling. What even is gossip, and why is it considered a sin? Why are we obsessed with the details of celebrity drama and tabloid headlines? How do we use and abuse gossip – and why do we want to do it at all? McKinney dives deep into a range of cultural cornerstones – from the Epic of Gilgamesh as told by chatbots, to the head-spinning betrayals in The Traitors – and captures the heart of gossiping: how enchanting and fun it can be to lean over and whisper something a little salacious into your friend’s ear.
With wit and honesty, McKinney unmasks what we're actually searching for when we demand to know the truth – and how much the truth really matters in the first place.
About the Author
Kelsey McKinney is a reporter and writer who lives in Philadelphia. She is the host of Normal Gossip, as well as a co-owner and features writer at Defector.com. She has worked as a staff writer at Deadspin, Fusion, and Vox, and her reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and many others. Her first novel, God Spare the Girls, was published in the summer of 2021 by William Morrow.
Industry Reviews
Come for Kelsey McKinney’s alluring voice, stay for her brilliant insights about words, secrets, gender, shame, pop culture, and technology. McKinney is not only our generation’s most beloved raconteuse, she is a rigorous and deeply thoughtful writer who can quote Emily Dickinson and Doja Cat on the same page and make a reader feel both delighted and challenged to come along for the ride. You Didn't Hear This From Me is cogent and sharp, and I will be whispering around town about it for a long time.
- Amanda Montell, author of Cultish
Totally brilliant. With the buoyant curiosity that makes her so beloved, Kelsey McKinney dishes an elegant treatise on gossip as an engine of both personal intimacy and cultural sea change. Incisive and vulnerable, gentle yet uncompromising, McKinney stakes a place among the best cultural critics of the age, without ever losing her sense of fun. I loved this book
- Lindy West, comedian and author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman
I devoured this book like it was a series of 4-minute voice memos about someone Kelsey and I vaguely know. Her meditations on gossip -- sometimes a powerful force for good, sometimes a sign of a diseased culture -- are, like the best gossip, so fun.
- Blythe Roberson, author of How to Date Men When You Hate Men
You Didn't Hear This is a beautiful, expansive ode to the joy of information exchange. An ode that, like the practice of gossip itself, can be all at once inviting, tender, enlivening, and rich with humor, complexity, and an abundance of joys
- Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America
McKinney has written this book to prove that gossip isn’t just bitchy women with raised eyebrows exchanging each other’s secrets like currency. It’s a vital means of communication, and part of an ancient tradition of oral storytelling…This book is not simply a manual for those who like to harvest facts about their former friends on Facebook. Sure, it uses the Barbie film as a serious scientific case study, but it’s also sharp-witted and thoroughly researched. There’s history, theology, legal cases, a detailed physiology of the ear. Most usefully, McKinney convincingly proves that gossiping is a legitimate part of modern life
- The Times
