‘T“This is the ugliest skirt I’ve ever seen,” is one of the most memorable lines from the 2004 version of Mean Girls, uttered by high school queen Regina George. Now in theaters, the musical version retains the original’s nastiness and the infamous “Burn Book,” a scrapbook filled with cruel gossip about students and faculty.
Outside school, gossip is less brazen but perhaps more insidious: as these five books suggest, networks of gossip permeate communities of all sizes, from small towns to Britain’s political establishment.
When the ambassador and his attractive wife, Violet, arrive for vague reasons in a small French town, rumors spread in the chapel where the women meet weekly: that Violet bathes in milk and rose petals, that she comes from a psychiatric hospital, that she was a sex worker. Rumors also fly at the bakery counter, where the narrator, Elodie, works, becoming a kind of confessor to the neighborhood, eliciting stories of infidelity and plots of revenge. “I suppose these little, meaningless secrets gave me pleasure, because they distracted me from bigger horrors,” she later recalls.
“Ajayi Crowther Street” by Elnathan John and Alaba Onagin
In this graphic novel set in Lagos, characters see gossip as a threat and worry that it will spread and damage their reputations. After a pastor’s son, Godtime, falls in love with a male friend and a gossip blogger writes about his sexuality, the pastor’s first concern is whether his church members have heard about it. At the Sunday service, the pastor tries to quell the “whispers of the devil’s agents,” while Godtime’s sister reassures him, “This is Nigeria. There are far more scandalous things happening.” Ironically, the pastor is still harboring a truly shocking secret all this time.
“People think Westminster is like House of Cards but it’s more like Mean Girls. People come expecting a Frances Urquhart role but it’s just Regina George,” an anonymous Conservative MP told Le Conte. Her book explores the complex but informal web of gossip that drives Westminster politics and media – the tidbits whispered in party lobbies, tea rooms, pubs and Portcullis House.
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Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
The play’s title has three meanings. In Elizabethan England, “nothing” was slang for “vagina,” pronounced “no-ting,” and meant “to notice,” alluding to the gossip and eavesdropping that is central to the story. Beatrice’s conversation about her “love” for Benedick is staged for Benedick to overhear, and vice versa, and the two begin a relationship. Later, Borachio is arrested after he is overheard boasting that he has deceived Claudio’s lover, Hiro, by pretending to woo him.
“Nosy cows,” “big talkers,” “foolish mouthers,” “two-faced harpies” — Melchor’s harsh descriptions of neighborhood gossip in his fictional Mexican village of La Matosa are legion, but the novel itself is a product of hearsay, and each chapter is told through the perspective of a villager whose death, on the first page, is the victim of a witch who is found decomposing in an irrigation canal.
