Don’t underestimate juicy gossip: How rumors have dodged classism to conquer culture

Although he dubbed it a “sign of weakness” best ignored, gossip was encouraged at Kant’s dinner parties under “the duty of secrecy”: what was said at the table, stayed at the table. Kierkegaard also repudiated the practice. The Danish philosopher considered it ephemeral and applied a classist lens to its analysis: “Idle talk is something that anyone can rake up,” he wrote, detracting from gossip’s exclusivity and in so doing, any interest it might hold. Hannah Arendt believed that, when it came to being seen and heard, only that which lay in the public sphere was of any importance. Gossip? An act unworthy of organized memory. Even Phoebe Ephron, the mother of Nora Ephron who was a screenwriter given to telling her writer-director daughter about the importance of listening carefully because everything can serve as fodder for art — “everything is copy,” she’d repeat — feared the consequences loose lips could have on her own persona. When a friend who she had invited to her home asked if she could bring Lillian Ross, The New Yorker’s observative social chronicler who had a unique ability to express the character of her subjects, Ephron placed a condition upon Ross’s attendance: that she could come, but she wasn’t allowed to write of anything she witnessed.

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines gossip as “information about the behavior and personal lives of other people” or “a person who often talks about the private details of other people’s lives.” Such a summation suggests that the negative aspects of this kind of exchange have always been primary, immutable, right down to the word’s very definition. But gossip is undergoing a cultural reimagining that looks to brush off this classist dust and inherited misogyny and allow us to understand this sharing of knowledge as something far from trivial. From essayists who defend the act of gossip (and complaint) as a subversive strategy in taking on power structures, to writers who have elevated the practice in literature — the revolution can even be seen in the way the algorithm elevates gossip social media accounts like Pop Crave, which wield more influence than traditional media when it comes to even our interaction with the political news — how have we arrived at this new paradigm, stripped of the past’s elitist disdain?

Revindicating gossip in literature

“All literature is gossip,” Truman Capote once told Playboy. “What in God’s green earth is Anna Karenina or War and Peace or Madame Bovary, if not gossip?” He should know. Capote, perhaps one of his craft’s greatest gossips, was quite clear on the fact that those who draw lines between high and low culture are only expressing prejudices meant to denigrate certain kinds of writing, relegating them to the domain of the nosy, of those lacking intellectual sheen.

“Gossip has always had misogynistic connotations, it’s been an easy way to discredit the writing of women, declaring certain subjects ‘not sufficiently serious’ because they explore romance, the domestic sphere and social customs, relegating them to an inferior category of artistry,” the editor of Los Angeles Review of Books, Medaya Ocher, says in an email. Her quarterly publication’s latest issue focuses on literary and philosophical approaches to the art of gossip.

Ocher says that the issue was originally meant to be about lies in eras when the notion of truth has been weakened, before it wound up centering on the subject of gossip. “It has a community dimension that makes it much more dynamic. You need at least two people to gossip, and then they need someone to gossip about. The word itself denotes communication and shared knowledge. It implies movement and change, relationships and secrets, proximity and precision. So, our focus was broad: What does it mean in today’s world and how does it interact with language? How does it affect knowledge sharing? And what about communication systems?”

One of the issue’s essays that garnered the biggest response, says Ocher, is about everything we say to and hide from others in the group chats we now use to communicate. Another stand-out piece comes from journalist and writer Francesca Peacock, a Margaret Cavendish biographer, in which she asks whether gossip has served as a tool to discredit women’s writing. Peacock starts with the genre’s anchors, invoking Hélène Cixous, Maggie Nelson, Marguerite Duras and Rachel Cusk, among others, in addressing the limits of acceptable discourse around scandal in the literary sphere. In essence, her text wonders about both the willingness and misgivings of female authors when it comes to fitting in, or not, to the concept of “feminine writing,” that which seems forever condemned to stand apart from the canonical or universal.

Though even the Pope still believes that “gossip is a women’s thing,” Ocher wants to be optimistic that a new literary paradigm, one less elitist and more inclusive, is on its way. “All of that is changing and the power and complexity of gossip in narrative is becoming more recognized. Look at Jane Austen, she used it in a masterful way, and I think that, where we’re at today, her literary merit is unquestionable,” she says. She is not alone in the quest to give gossip its due.

In defense of balcony culture

If Austen has transcended by writing about the moral labels of her time, couldn’t the same be said of Spanish author Carmen Martín Gaite in her prize-winning 1957 novel Entre Visillos (Behind the Curtains), which adeptly explored provincial gossip in her country’s post-war period? The text was ahead of its time, and described the “room of one’s own” so coveted by Virginia Woolf to be a prospect both boring and chilling for its protagonists, who were more interested in spending the day at their house’s lookout point. There, one could monitor the street and all comings and goings, including the doings of the servants, a chance to chat with friends on their way home from mass without the risk of being judged for being out and about. A fascinating perch that Montserrat Roig would later laud in her book Dime que quieres aunque sea mentira (Tell me what you like even if it’s not true), which was translated from its original Catalan to Castilian Spanish in 2023 by the editorial Plankton, when she pronounced, “I don’t want to talk about sensitive writers, but rather, gossip. And about windows, balconies and porches.”

What if gossip was used to trace a story’s moral research? “Gossip is the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-knowledge. We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying,” writes U.S. literary critic, essayist and biographer Phyllis Rose in Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, which was published in 1983. Before she easefully dissects the union of Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth and other romantic partnerships of the era, the gossip enthusiast makes her position clear: “If marriage is a political experience, then discussion of it ought to be taken as seriously as talk about national elections.” As good citizens, she says, we must resist the cultural pressure that invites us to turn away from such conversation.

Good power

In workplace culture, the sharing of information about salaries and possible dismissals is disparaged as “watercooler talk.” When the beneficiaries of nepotism or others who abuse power are called out, as in the early days of public allegations against Harvey Weinstein, many fall back on such tactics, reducing denouncements as “nothing more” than gossip, envy-driven rumors. Such a dynamic may be familiar to fans of Bridgerton, a series with one subplot that explores the opportunities gossip provides to discuss social equality and feminism in a publication read by the elite. Those who are excluded generally have less to hide and little to lose, yet are painted with a certain tinge of moral corruption should they dare to verbalize their disadvantage.

Writer Sara Ahmed has spent years researching the strategies employed by the system to discredit the culture of complaint and has pointed out that gossip, in addition to being socially rooted in the gender of the person who transmits the information, is used to denigrate the power of collaborative information among those who have been left without their piece of the pie. She details this in Complaint! (Duke University Press, 2021), a book in which she focuses on the obstacles to formalizing complaints in the university environment.

In 1996, anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar identified two group practices that are exclusive to humans: religion and storytelling, both strategies that allow us to imagine the existence of another world. When she was contacted by journalist and writer Kelsey McKinney — host of Normal Gossip, one of the most-listened-to podcasts in the post-pandemic era, on which guests explain and analyze gossip among normal people and their relationship to such rumors — Dunbar clarified that “good gossip is one of the ways that communities are brought together, just as bad gossip can be useful because it allows a community to control itself.”

A 2017 poll asked 1,000 Spaniards if they considered Spain to be a country given to gossip: 87% said that it was, although only two out of 10 put their own feet to the fire, saying malicious comments only made up about 5% of their conversations. No one, not even the most avid spreader of their neighbors’ intimate affairs, wants to be seen as a gossip.

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