Kelsey McKinney
speaker
607 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Kelsey McKinney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Like there's either questions about craft, which are basically only interesting if you are a writer or want to be a writer, or it's spoilers. And people are really anti-spoiler culture. So if you're talking to a novelist, you don't really have a choice besides to talk about either process or them personally.
Whereas with a nonfiction book, it's easier to talk about the stuff that's actually in the book.
I don't know that I'm sick of it, but I feel like the question of, like, what my relationship with gossip is at this point, I've said so many times that, like, someone asked it to me recently, and I, like, zoned out halfway through and came back after I was done talking, and I was like, that's crazy. Like, I don't—who knows what I said, right?
Exactly. Like entered like a fugue state to answer that question. It reminded me of being like a teenager, you know, when you're like in college and people keep being like, what are you going to do with your degree? And you just like create an answer. That is so like repetitive and that you're just saying the same thing over and over again that you forget you're saying it.
One of my publicists sent me this video of Lady Gaga doing press for A Star is Born. Yes. You sent me this. It's so funny. It's like four minutes of just like spliced interviews that she did of her saying the same exact quote over and over again. Just saying like there can be 100 people in the room and 99 of them don't believe in you.
And I don't feel like I'm like at any level near that well media trained, but it is when you're answering the same question over and over again, you start to feel like a broken record a little bit.
I think I've gotten better at answering it for sure. And I think I have realized, you know, I used to answer the question by being like, oh, well, I grew up in this way. And I, you know, stuff I've talked about on this podcast a hundred times. I grew up in this way and this is the way my relationship with gossip evolved.
And I think I've started through this process of being asking it a lot, thinking more about like, well, what is my relationship with gossip right now? Right. What does it look like in this immediate moment? Right. And I think the answer to that is it feels very intimate. Not in the intimacy of a lifelong friend. It feels intimate in the way of a summer camp bunkmate.
I didn't go to summer camp, but I assume this is what it's like. Having a freshman year roommate where it's like, I see you vomit and also I'm so tired of you. It's that kind of beautiful, I'm excited to move out and be like, I miss her. I'm having flashbacks. Yeah. Everyone has one of those roommates where it's like you have this forced intimacy because you are constantly together. Yes.
Which is like interesting because even if you might have chosen it by the time you're forced to be together for so long, it's like, oof.
There's a chapter in the book that I think is like maybe one of the last ones I wrote that is about Picasso and like what we do with gossip that we maybe don't like that I feel like I haven't talked about at all, which is maybe because it's like a little dicey.
Sure. So I write about how I have always loved Picasso. I was trained as an artist in high school and I love to go to a museum and look around. And it has always been infuriating for me that I immediately in any gallery, I'm like, ooh, what's that? I love that. And then I walk over there and it's Picasso.
And I'm like, this is so annoying because it is like very well known that Picasso is an asshole, right? Everyone knows this. It has like been known for decades. And I write in the book about one of my favorite books, which is Francois Guillot's My Life with Picasso, which is a memoir. She was his third wife, basically, had kids with him.
And she wrote this memoir about living with him that is really, really brutal. It's this kind of like drawn out affair where she's like, I had never been more in love with my life. And then also he like burnt me with a cigarette, right? Which is like this terrible, right? Awful form of violence, right?
And I found it so interesting to read because she's a great, I mean, the book is really well written and it provides you this insight into one of these quote unquote great men. But I think she also is willing to hold a lot more nuance for him than people now. Like she's able to say like he was an awful partner. He was an awful man. I had a terrible time being married to him.
And also he's one of the greatest painters to be alive. Right. And that is like a really complicated place to sit. And like, I don't know that I can even do it fully with Picasso. I can't do it with really any of these like great abusive men. But it's like that is a kind of interesting problem with gossip where it's like, does gossip discredit everything?
I think sometimes it can, but I don't know that it always does.
Yeah, I think it's really hard to talk about this at this point in time because we've been through kind of the first wave of cancel culture. And what we saw in that is that no one really got canceled, right? Like some people got called out for their behavior, but there were basically no consequences for most of those people.
Exactly. And so I think it's really hard to even talk about that in a nuanced way because it's like, well, there is no actual consequence here, right? It would be a different conversation if we were talking about someone who actually faced consequences for their behaviors, and then we could look at the things they had produced separately. And I don't know that we'll ever get there, but it is a
I mean, it sucks, right? It sucks that the people who make art are people and that some of those people are bad.
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