Spend enough time in the library stacks and you’ll begin to absorb the organizing principles of the Dewey Decimal System. Reading a history book means you’ll be in the 900s. You like books about musicians or movies or video games? Check the 700s. Maybe you’re enough of a savant that you don’t need the catalog at all and can use the system without a reference. I’m not quite there yet, but I was also kind of surprised to see that Kelsey McKinney’s text bore the number 296.3 in my local library. The 200s? What the hell kind of book is in that section? A good one, certainly, even though this is a section I’ve apparently not read from much.
All I know about 200s is from what I read in Judith Flanders’ A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. In a footnote, she gives a more-than-adequate criticism of Dewey as a person and as the creator of a system. “While all systems are inevitably biased, making more space for some elements and overlooking others, Dewey’s was particularly so, and has proved troublesome in the modern world. Being based on Baconian hierarchies, it is predisposed to an Anglo-centric worldview. More, it is almost laughably Christian-centric: religion, allocated the 200s in Dewey’s system, sees 200-289 devoted to Christianity, while all of Islam is contained in just 297. Women, meanwhile, are patronizingly categorized alongside etiquette. (Dewey himself had chronic woman trouble, or, rather, women had chronic trouble with Dewey: he was forced to resign from the American Library Association after no fewer than four women complained that he had assaulted them in a single ten-day period in 1905. He was, in addition, a notable anti-Semite and racist, even for those notably anti-Semitic and racist times, also being requested to stand down from his position as librarian for New York State owing to his endorsement of clubs that operated on Christian-whites-only policies.)” (p. 217). That is one hell of a footnote! It is prompting me to think about checking out a number of books and to leave open many browser tabs for months.
What’s relevant about Flanders’ footnote with regard to McKinney’s book is that my local-ish library (and maybe yours, too) has classified it in the 200s, which means it is considered a text about Religion. According to the Dewey Decimal System, 296 is reserved for texts on Judaism. More specifically, the number 296.3 is a subsection titled “Theology, ethics, views of social issues.” What the fuck? Like, what the actual fuck? Does this library branch think that only practitioners of Judaism have an ability to or an interest in gossip? Or that gossiping is the sole purview of members of the Jewish faith? Flanders’ commentary makes it plain that Dewey was antisemitic. Guess that goes for a few librarians using his system in 2025, too.
For what it’s worth, every other branch in the library consortium where I got this book has it classified as 302.24, which is Social Sciences > Social Interaction > Communication. That is a lot more reasonable.
All that misclassification aside, this book is excellent. I was late to listen to Normal Gossip, but I have grown to love it. It has survived without McKinney, which proves that it is strong as a concept. People like knowing “anonymized morsels of gossip” about people they’ll never meet. This book is a worthy companion to the podcast in that it reviews some of the literature on the topic of gossip and features relevant autobiographical details from McKinney that help to explain her history with gossip. There are also the tiniest little amuse-bouches of gossip at the beginning of each section just to make the whole book that much more fun. I say this all with the caveat that I do not know McKinney. As she explains in a section on parasocial relationships, “Researchers have found that listening with headphones is a superconductor for creating a feeling of emotional connection, because it sounds like the person’s voice is inside your head” (p. 114). I think the truth of that comment rings even more loudly when the podcast is about gossip. It’s like you’re listening to two of your friends or coworkers tell you about something that you all share. I’m sure in a few decades I will misremember something like the Bunco cheating story as an event that happened to someone in my life, or their friend, all because I listened to it on the way to and from work one week.
A benefit of listening to Normal Gossip so much is that it has helped me process social interactions better. Typically during an episode, McKinney pauses and asks the guest “So, whose side are you on?” at a pivotal point. This was a good check for me because it let me see whether I was “getting it” in terms of the social rules or norms that were being violated or contested. I’m self-aware enough to know that social interactions are not my strong suit (and now I have a psych eval to prove it, lol), so it was helpful to have a chance to practice thinking about other people’s perspectives while listening along to a gossip story each week. McKinney comes back to this topic in the book, writing, “We are teaching our peer group how we want to behave and how we want them to behave” when we are dealing with gossip (p. 51). The idea is that the stories we choose to tell about other people are revelatory of what we find to be important or valuable. If something goes unremarked upon, it’s not even worth noticing, let alone talking about. You can learn a lot just by hearing what other people find distasteful or rude or funny. Gossip is key part of participating in a society because it teaches you about norms and behaviors that might otherwise go unstated. It’s kind of like an ad-hoc instruction manual for how to live.
In my 20s, I engaged in plenty of behaviors that seemed like good enough ideas at the time. One of them is that I thought it was an interesting topic of conversation to declare I wasn’t going to read fiction ever again because—are you ready?—it’s fake. That was my argument. I held forth on it at parties and other gatherings, not realizing how alienating I was being at the time. I would ask people to recommend me a novel to read because I was only going to read five more of them. I was engaging in “debate me, bro” conversational patterns without even realizing it. I sure hope some of my friends talked about me behind my back about this phase because I know it must have been excruciating. I was an English major, for crying out loud.
At the time, I was too emotionally stunted to realize that the emotions I was feeling in response to fiction were proof of my humanity. McKinney knows this is a line of criticism that gossip-haters will maintain; they’ll focus on the capital-T Truth of the matter and want to know every fact about a situation before passing judgment. The world isn’t so clean. As she says about gossip and its relation to fiction, “Many people balk when forced to acknowledge that fiction can make them feel something even if it is not real” (p. 96). That’s just it. I was unwilling to accept that a “fake” story could make me feel real emotions. I thought I was weak or easily manipulated instead of recognizing that I was a human and that those emotions were normal. If you’d asked me at the time, I’m sure I would have thought gossip was beneath me and a waste of time. I would have probably hit you with the Eleanor Roosevelt quote that McKinney cites early on about how “small minds discuss people” (p. 4) and felt confident that I had put you in your place. I’m wiser now that I recognize the power (and fun!) involved in gossip, and I have McKinney and everyone else involved in Normal Gossip to thank for that.
In each episode of the show, McKinney (and now Rachelle Hampton) asks about the guest’s relationship to gossip. The range of responses across the episodes reveals the utility of gossip beyond mere self improvement. It’s not idle chatter that helps us pass time. It can serve a vital role about keeping in check those who have broken social conventions or engaged in maladaptive behaviors. These whisper networks benefit from anonymity, because to put a face and a name and an address with certain gossip could be dangerous for the one sharing it. Dominant perspectives on sex, money, and power may not withstand anonymous gossip. “When we talk about sex and money, what we are actually talking about is power and who wields it. Anonymity gives people without power an opportunity to grab a little bit as their own” (p. 83). The cloak of anonymity is not fabricated of cowardice. There are reasons to use care when sharing information about powerful people. No one willingly gives up power, but the embarrassment or shame that gossip engenders might help make it hard for the powerful to save face if a critical mass of people keep spreading it publicly. Do your part: keep talking about weird dudes.
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