‘It’s how we make sense of the world’: why are we all obsessed with gossip?
![‘It’s how we make sense of the world’: why are we all obsessed with gossip?](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9b8a517d78d5a1b392677586700efbf5a5535509/0_403_6040_3624/master/6040.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=06e368428cfe4aaae3c75ba85947aefc)
In her new book, Normal Gossip podcaster Kelsey McKinney explores our unending interest in talking about other people behind their backs
“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.
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