The literature of gossip …

… Rumors of the Stars by Austin Allen. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… gossip is less soul-searching than confession, but isn’t it also a shade less self-involved? Epstein notes that in literary confessionalism “one often ends up confessing other people’s sins, which comes to little more than gossip in a self-serving form.” True, but to spill the dirt on others, we at least have to learn about them. And not all gossip is unkind: it can reflect a love, even a reverence, for its subject. After all, O’Hara’s poem about Lana Turner is a kind of plea for her resurrection.