Can you keep a secret? As the pandemic forced us to socialize at a distance, Kelsey McKinney was mourning the juicy updates, jaw-dropping stories, and idle chatter that she’d typically collect over drinks with friends, encouraging her to create the blockbuster Normal Gossip podcast. With listenership in the millions and gossip quickly becoming her day job, Kelsey found herself with the urge to think more critically about gossip as a form and to better understand the role that it plays in our culture, leading to her new book You Didn’t Hear This From Me.
All tickets, with the exception of a limited number of Pay What You Can tickets, include a copy of You Didn’t Hear This From Me, shipped to their door by our partner bookstore, Queen Anne Book Company.
In You Didn’t Hear This From Me, McKinney explores the murkiness of everyday storytelling. Why is gossip considered a sin and how can we better recognize when gossip is being weaponized against the oppressed? Why do we think we’re entitled to every detail of a celebrity’s personal life because they are a public figure? And how do we even define “gossip,” anyway? She dishes on the art of eavesdropping and dives deep into how pop culture has changed the way that we look at hearsay. But as much as the book aims to treat gossip as a subject worthy of rigor, it also hopes to capture 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.
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.
