Kelsey McKinney is a reporter and writer who lives in Philadelphia. She is the host of Normal Gossip, as well as a co-owner and features writer at Defector.com. She has worked as a staff writer at Deadspin, Fusion, and Vox, and her reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and many others. Her first novel, God Spare the Girls, was published in the summer of 2021 by William Morrow.
Come for Kelsey McKinney’s alluring voice, stay for her brilliant insights about words, secrets, gender, shame, pop culture, and technology. McKinney is not only our generation’s most beloved raconteuse, she is a rigorous and deeply thoughtful writer who can quote Emily Dickinson and Doja Cat on the same page and make a reader feel both delighted and challenged to come along for the ride. You Didn't Hear This From Me is cogent and sharp, and I will be whispering around town about it for a long time. * Amanda Montell, author of Cultish * Totally brilliant. With the buoyant curiosity that makes her so beloved, Kelsey McKinney dishes an elegant treatise on gossip as an engine of both personal intimacy and cultural sea change. Incisive and vulnerable, gentle yet uncompromising, McKinney stakes a place among the best cultural critics of the age, without ever losing her sense of fun. I loved this book -- Lindy West * comedian and author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman * I devoured this book like it was a series of 4-minute voice memos about someone Kelsey and I vaguely know. Her meditations on gossip -- sometimes a powerful force for good, sometimes a sign of a diseased culture -- are, like the best gossip, so fun. -- Blythe Roberson * author of How to Date Men When You Hate Men * You Didn't Hear This is a beautiful, expansive ode to the joy of information exchange. An ode that, like the practice of gossip itself, can be all at once inviting, tender, enlivening, and rich with humor, complexity, and an abundance of joys -- Hanif Abdurraqib * author of A Little Devil in America *