“We gossip and tell stories because that is how we make sense of the world,” Kelsey McKinney writes in her new book, You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip.
Growing up in an evangelical community in Texas, McKinney was taught that gossip was a sin and spent years praying that God would take away her desire for it. She wanted to stop, but each time she heard a piece of gossip, she felt a deep desire to retell it. “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,” she writes in her book, out in the US this week.
