‘That is the ugliest effing skirt I’ve ever seen” is among the most memorable lines from the 2004 version of Mean Girls, uttered by high-school queen bee Regina George. The musical remake, in cinemas now, inherits the original film’s bitchiness and its iconic Burn Book – a scrapbook filled with cruel gossip about students and staff.
Gossip beyond school is less brazen but perhaps more insidious. As these five books suggest, gossipy networks pervade communities of all sizes, from small towns to the British political system.
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Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh
When an ambassador and his glamorous wife Violet arrive in a small French town under vague reasoning, rumours fizzle at the lavoir, where a circle of women meet weekly: Violet bathes in milk and rose petals, she came from an asylum, she was a sex worker. Gossip also flies over the bakery counter, where the narrator, Elodie, works and becomes a sort of confessor for the neighbourhood, hearing of affairs and plans for revenge. “I think that all those small and meaningless secrets gave me pleasure because they distracted me from the larger terror of it all,” she later reflects.
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On Ajayi Crowther Street by Elnathan John and Àlàbá Ònájìn
In this Lagos-based graphic novel, characters see gossip as a threat, worrying about the reputational damage of whispers spreading. After the pastor’s son Godstime falls in love with his guy friend and a gossip blogger writes about his sexuality, the pastor’s immediate concern is whether members of his church have heard. In the Sunday service, he attempts to quash the “whisperings of the agents of the devil”. Meanwhile, Godstime’s sister reassures him that “this is Nigeria. Something more scandalous will happen.” Ironically, the pastor is sitting on a genuinely egregious secret the whole time.
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Haven’t You Heard? by Marie Le Conte
“People think Westminster is like House of Cards but it’s actually more like Mean Girls – so many people come in expecting to be Francis Urquhart but they’re just Regina George,” an anonymous Conservative MP tells Le Conte. Her book explores the complex but informal networks of gossip – tidbits murmured in division lobbies, tea rooms, pubs, Portcullis House – that grease the wheels of Westminster politics and media.
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Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
The play’s title is a triple entendre: in Elizabethan England, “nothing” was slang for “vagina”, and was pronounced as “no-ting”, suggesting “noticing” – a nod to the gossip and eavesdropping that carve the plot. A conversation about Beatrice’s “love” for Benedick is staged for Benedick to overhear, and vice versa, which leads to the pair getting together. Later, Borachio is overheard bragging about tricking Claudio by pretending to woo his love interest, Hero, and is arrested.
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Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes
“Nosey cows”, “gobshites”, “stupid bigmouths”, “two-faced harpy” – there is no shortage of savage descriptions for neighbourhood gossips in Melchor’s fictional Mexican village of La Matosa. Yet, the novel itself is an artefact of hearsay, with each section moving through the perspectives of villagers connected to the death of the Witch, who is found rotting in an irrigation canal on the first page.
