Literary Gossip: Do’s and Don’ts

This is how gossip works:

A few weeks ago I was at a dinner in a noisy Indian restaurant with students and faculty. One of the writers said, “Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison hate each other.”  And the student sitting next to me said, “Did she say Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison are dating each other?”

 So you have to be careful.

Rule #1: You have to make sure you’re heard correctly.

 When I was a Catholic girl, growing up on a back road in southern Indiana, the books I read saved my life and the lives of the people who wrote those books were a little like the lives of the saints. Admirable, worth emulating, amazing. Then when I was older and began seriously writing, I wanted the inside dope. I went to biographies because I wanted to know how to live like a writer. I wanted to know their habits and their motivations. Along the way I found out things that made me sad, in some cases. (I did some things that were sad, too, but that is another entry: perhaps an entry called “Gossip I would be willing to tell on myself.”)

Katherine Anne Porter was an incorrigible liar. Carson McCullers drank in the morning.  Hemingway, well, where should I begin? He killed animals for sport, for starters. So I found out things I wanted to emulate and things I didn’t.

That’s surely one of the reasons why we gossip. To figure out how to be.

Here are the rest of my do’s and don’ts:

 

  • If someone makes a fool of himself or herself in public, that’s fair game.  I mean, hey, you have to dissect public behavior. If someone tells you something in confidence, put a barrier of silence around that tidbit.
  • Money and sex and mayhem are all that matter. Everything else is small potatoes. In regard to money, fiction writers have more to talk about. In regard to sex, I suspect poets do. Ever since I stopped writing poetry I view the life of poets as whimsical, wild, debauched. While we’re all capable of mayhem.
  • Don’t be hyperbolic. The truth itself is sufficient.
  • Tell gossip on yourself.  It’s called self-disclosure and it’s how we get to know each other.
  • Level of intimacy matters: you and your best friend might call it character analysis. You might work it over like a serial novel in the course of months. But to sit at a table of twelve near strangers at an AWP dinner and gossip could be unethical, or at the very least, show-offy.
  • “Writers should be forgiven their bad books.”  Anne Sexton said this at one of the last readings she gave, at Johns Hopkins University in 1973. So we should not gossip about each others’ failures, unless it is done in a totally empathic spirit.  Consult the Dalai Lama.