This essay is an online-only exclusive from the LARB Quarterly, no. 42: Gossip. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print. And join us to celebrate Gossip’s release at our end-of-summer party on August 22.
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I DON’T TALK to my dad anymore, but I hear his baritone voice in my head all the time. “There’s three sides to every story—both people’s sides and then the truth,” he says. In court, it doesn’t matter what the truth is. It only matters which story the jury believes. My dad is a world-class storyteller. That’s how he built a law firm big enough to take up a whole floor of Chicago’s historic Marquette Building by the time he was 35. It turns out the truth matters to the bar association. Disbarred or not, my dad is a lawyer to the bone.
We lived in a small, gossipy town where, for a few years in the nineties, my family was the main subject of the gossip. We made good fodder. To start, my parents were (are) exceptionally beautiful people who were in an open marriage. Additionally, not long into his successful career, my dad committed some major white-collar crimes that got him into some very big, very public trouble, tanked his law firm, and saddled him with either one or three felonies.
My dad is six feet tall and broad-shouldered. He is loud, opinionated, and also loves to say that “no just means you haven’t asked enough times.” He wears a diamond pinky ring. There’s nothing low-key about him. Drawing attention to yourself gets you attention, I learned early, but not always the kind you want. Make yourself a character and people will be even more inclined to tell your story.
I was in second grade when his troubles began, so my parents, appropriately, did not explain to me exactly what had happened. There was a “mommy and daddy are going to live in different houses” talk but not a “daddy mishandled a few million dollars” talk. I knew that something with a dark and mysterious gravity had happened, and I wanted to know what it was. This is how I came to learn that, despite its reputation to the contrary, gossip is as good a source of information as any.
My little sister vaguely remembers our neighbor, who had once been a close friend of my dad’s, saying to her, “Your dad’s an asshole.” I vaguely remember several people saying that. Tables of adults would get silent as I approached. I was acutely aware that the other kids’ parents thought that I had information, and that they wanted that information. They would feign concern, casually asking how he was, or outright ask me what had happened. In any case, I didn’t have much to offer. I was trying to piece the story together myself.
All I knew for sure was that the electricity was often out, the bank was taking our house away, my mom was furious at my dad and grocery shopping with food stamps, we were not getting new winter coats, my best friend’s married mom was somehow also my dad’s girlfriend, and he no longer went to work every day. I did not know he was home so much because he was under house arrest. I did not know that when we drove around with him delivering meals to old people, we were accompanying him on his community service hours.
Once, a little girl came over to our house and announced, “My mom said you guys are dirt-poor.” (My mom called that mom, who said, “Well, it’s true.”) When I later repeated to my dad that we were dirt-poor, he immediately pulled over the car he was driving, stuck his pointer finger in my face, and said, “People in this world are starving. People actually live in dirt. We are rich. Don’t ever say that again.” We were on welfare at the time, but he was right. Among his oft-repeated axioms is that when people say “small world,” he corrects them: “small upper-middle class.” My dad could always reframe the narrative.
My dad told me stories and I believed him. Then other people told me different stories, and I no longer knew what or whom to believe. My heart would race and my cheeks would burn while I tried to act normal. I just wanted the truth—something steady to hold onto.
When my dad and my best friend’s mom had a long, dramatic breakup supposedly involving a private investigator and sex photos mailed to my dad’s newest girlfriend, I was caught between two people I loved who now hated each other, who had completely different stories about the same events. (My parents’ divorce was happening too, but my mom, in a show of herculean strength, refrained from poisoning us against our dad or putting us in the middle.)
I learned the skills of journalism (and what sex and blackmail were) long before I would learn long division. I learned to let both my dad and my best friend’s mom think I was on their side and to react in the ways I knew would engender trust and, with that trust, the divulging of more information. I learned to read the way the story was told more than the text of the story itself. I learned not to believe anybody by default. I filed each side of a story away, continued gathering evidence, and pieced stories together by triangulating.
As the years went on, the gossip about my dad piled up—so many stories I would never be able to fact-check but that seemed truer the more of them there were. Some of them came in moments that will never leave me, like when an ex-girlfriend of his, whom I was quite fond of, told me, sobbing: “He left me in more debt than my condo is worth.” Or when, after I had a one-night stand with his ex-landlord’s son, the guy rolled off me and said, “Your dad owes my dad a ton of money.” I knew they were probably telling the truth. There are not three sides to every story.
Why did my dad repeat that maxim so often? Was it to destabilize my notion of the truth? Was it a defense against the gossip he knew I was hearing? Did he know he was teaching me not to believe him either? Did he say it because it was simply so central to his experience of reality? I don’t know. What he taught me, even if unintentionally, was to pay close attention to gossip.
In the United States, we think of gossip as an unreliable source of information. But I’ve lived in Mexico for nine years, and here, gossip is definitely the most reliable source of information there is. You learn this quickly, especially as a reporter. “Truth” is a looser notion here. People often contradict themselves from one minute to the next, but to call someone out on it would be an act of aggression. Normally, as a reporter, you would say, “You just said X. Why are you now saying Y?” I’ve learned that in Mexico, this gets you nowhere. People will shut down or grow frustrated that you’re missing the message. Often, they’re telling the truth, just layered under strata of plausible deniability and hints. Or they’re trying to tell you without telling you that they’re simply not at liberty to tell you what you want to know. Mexico has been living its post-truth era far longer than the US has. The official line is the least likely to be true. That’s why, as a reporter in Mexico, your job hinges on access to chisme.
There’s a theory that language developed for gossip, as a survival mechanism to let us warn each other about whom we could trust so that we could build strong social structures—the kind that could keep us alive. This theory makes a lot of sense in Mexico. I make fun of my husband for being so chismoso. But he peers out the window from behind the curtain like a tía when he hears so much as a whistle outside past 9:00 p.m., not only out of nosiness but also because knowing who was doing what on the street at night was crucial to his survival in the neighborhood he grew up in. For him, passing on this information to others could be a matter of life or death. And doing it the right way—very, very discreetly—was too. In a place where telling the truth can get you killed, by the narco or by the state, the truth is more likely whispered than spoken. Gossip can be trusted here, if you know how to listen to it.
Gleaning truth from gossip is about learning to read the metadata. The metadata is mostly, but not all, about the person telling it. What behaviors made them angry or hurt them in their story? You can deduce a person’s wounds from this. What are they most judgmental of? You can deduce what qualities they fear or dislike in themselves. Are they making a case to justify their actions when nobody asked them to? They feel guilty. Are they making a case to justify someone else’s actions? Unhealthy relationship. Who told them this information? What are they being cagey about? What are they steering your attention toward? Are they priming you for the story in some way? How? Why?
I am hyperaware of these things because I needed to be as a child. But that doesn’t make me a more careful gossiper. I gossip with reckless abandon, tipping the world off to my wounds, my guilt, my insecurities, and the things I refuse to look at directly. This is because, like everyone else, I am trying desperately to retrofit the Great Senselessness of Being Alive with stories that make it make a little more sense.
I gossip even knowing, from my family’s days as the town scandal, just how bad it feels to know people are talking about you. I hated it. Perhaps that’s why so much of my writing is self-critical or touches on things most people would never divulge publicly—I was left with a desire to control the narrative. If people are going to talk shit, I’d rather provide the language.
In a gossip session, both parties are judge, lawyer, and jury. The gossiper tries to win over the listener with a story. But they are also often trying to win themselves over—being their own jury. The listener also plays lawyer, asking questions that stress-test the proposed narratives, and then plays judge, deciding who in the story was in the wrong. We are trying on stories that make our messy, contradictory relationships a little neater and more coherent. Stories that soothe our guilt, fear, hurt. Many times, gossip is the product of people packaging uncomfortably complex stories inside simpler ones. These simpler stories are what my dad was referring to as “sides.”
Sometimes, though, it’s as easy as this: one person is telling the truth and the other is lying. In the 2021 HBO docuseries Allen v. Farrow, Mia Farrow says, “I’m scared of [Woody Allen]. A person who has no allegiance to the truth will do anything. A person who will do anything is somebody to be scared of.” Hearing that hit me hard. It’s why I don’t speak to my dad anymore. The truth matters. People use stories to shape truths for themselves and for others all the time, but at a certain point, doing so becomes dishonesty, even violence. I have no idea where the line is. I just know that my dad was way past it, at least for me.
I tried to find my dad’s criminal record to fact-check this story. I tried to locate the newspaper articles I remember uncovering when I googled him in high school. But after many hours of coming up empty-handed, I let it go. That truth isn’t the point here. In a lot of ways, my dad is right: what matters is the story that wins people over. That’s what stays in people’s memories.
Judaism teaches the opposite of faith: the word Israel means “one who wrestles with God.” You arrive at belief by wrestling with a concept. But the point isn’t the arriving; it’s the wrestling. That’s why a page of the Talmud is a piece of text surrounded by many contradictory interpretations, which are not meant to be reconciled but held together. I think this is why Jews argue so much and maybe why so many Jews become lawyers. I’ve always loved this about us. I’ve always felt closest to the truth when I’m arguing with someone smart who disagrees with me. (Judaism also strictly condemns telling bad stories about people, even if they’re true. Good thing there’s no Jewish hell.)
The more interpretations, the more conflicting narratives we can hold together, the closer we can get to the truth. Or at least that was the thesis of my first book. But I’m wrestling with it. I want my dad close. I never want to talk to him again. Truth exists. Multiple truths exist. Truth matters. Truth doesn’t matter, in effect, very often. In the end, gossip holds us together. It’s the semi-true, semi-untrue stories we tell ourselves and each other that end up determining our relationships, our experiences, our lives—our truths. May the truth prevail. May the best story win.
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Featured image: Juan Gris. Ace of Clubs and Four of Diamonds, 1915. Gift of Robert and Mercedes Eichholz, National Gallery of Art (2014.17.12). CC0, nga.gov. Accessed August 8, 2024. Image has been cropped and rotated.
