The Perilous Pleasures of Family Gossip
A couple of years ago, my teenage daughter Violet sent me a “War and Peace"-length text full of searing moral condemnation: “Our family literally operates on an axis of drama and gossip, that is perpetuated by Nana and possibly you and your sisters." She went on to talk about how she and her cousins did not want to be involved in this “adult dysfunction." When I read this text I was chastened, and also a little amused. I have a big family with many sisters. At any given point in the day, my mother is on the phone with one of us.
But were we operating on “an axis of drama and gossip"? And is it so bad if we were? Maybe family gossip actually diffuses tension. Maybe it’s not dysfunction but a way of coping. Maybe gossip enables us to work through the difficulties of family life so we can get to its pleasures.
How better to make sense of the world than to talk about it with the people you’ve been talking about things with since you were born? I realize that this is not the popular view. A few minutes on TikTok will unearth earnest lectures on “toxic family gossip" and cathartic riffs on freeing yourself from it. In Jewish law, there are commandments against gossip.
In the Bible, Miriam gets leprosy for gossiping about her brother Moses. And of course, there are situations, maybe even in my own family, where we are fanning fires, egging each other on, just being catty. But what about harmless family gossip? What about the human need to comment on goings-on? In her wonderful essay “In Praise of Gossip," the scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks calls gossip “healing talk." This may sound like a stretch, but I think there can be something therapeutic about talking things through, about expressing rather than simmering.
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