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The critically acclaimed author of Good-bye and Amen, Leeway Cottage, and More Than You Know returns with a sharply perceptive and emotionally resonant novel about all the ways we talk about one another, the sometimes fine line between showing concern and doing damage, and the difficulty of knowing the true obligations of friendship
Gossip
Beth Gutcheon
"Did you know that the origin of the word gossip in English is 'god-sibling'? It's the talk between people who are godparents to the same child, people who have a legitimate loving interest in the person they talk about. It's talk that weaves a net of support and connection beneath the people you want to protect."
Loviah "Lovie" French owns a small, high-end dress shop on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Renowned for her taste and discretion, Lovie is the one to whom certain women turn when they need "just the thing" for major life events—baptisms and balls, weddings and funerals—or when they just want to dish in the dressing room. Among the people who depend on Lovie's confidence are her two best friends since boarding school: Dinah Wainwright and Avis Metcalf.
Outspoken and brimming with confidence, Dinah made a name for herself as a columnist covering the doings of New York's wealthiest and most fabulous. Shy, proper Avis, in many ways Dinah's opposite, rose to prominence in the art world with her quiet manners, hard work, and precise judgment. Despite the deep affection they both feel for Lovie, they have been more or less allergic to each other since a minor incident decades earlier that has been remembered and resented with what will prove to be unimaginable consequences.
These uneasy acquaintances become unwillingly bound to each other when Dinah's favorite son and Avis's only daughter fall in love and marry. On the surface, Nick and Grace are the perfect match—a playful, romantic, buoyant, and beautiful pair. But their commitment will be strained by time and change: career setbacks, reckless choices, the birth of a child, jealousies, and rumor. At the center of their orbit is Lovie, who knows everyone's secrets and manages them as wisely as she can. Which is not wisely enough, as things turn out—a fact that will have a shattering effect on all their lives.
An astute chronicler of everything that makes us human, Beth Gutcheon delivers her most powerful and emotionally devastating novel to date. Gossip is a tale of intimacy and betrayal, trust and fidelity, friendship, competition, and motherhood that explores the myriad ways we use and abuse "information" about others—be it true, false, or imagined—to sustain, and occasionally destroy, one another.
Beth Gutcheon is the critically acclaimed author of eight previous novels: The New Girls, Still Missing, Domestic Pleasures, Saying Grace, Five Fortunes, More Than You Know, Leeway Cottage, and Good-bye and Amen. She is the writer of several film scripts, including the Academy-Award nominee The Children of Theatre Street. She lives in New York City.
"When my second novel was in manuscript, a subsidiary rights guy at my publisher secretly sent a copy of it to a friend who was working in Hollywood with the producer Stanley Jaffe, who had made Goodbye Columbus, The Bad News Bears, and Kramer v. Kramer, run Paramount Pictures before he was 30, and met the queen of England. My agent had an auction set up for the film rights of Still Missing for the following Friday, with some very heavy-hitter producers and such, which was exciting enough. Two days before the auction, Stanley Jaffe walked into my agent's office in New York and said, ‘I want to make a pre-emptive bid for Beth Gutcheon's novel.'
‘But you haven't read it,' says Wendy.
‘Nevertheless,' says Stanley.
‘Well, I have this auction set up. You're going to have to pay a lot to have me call it off,' says Wendy.
‘I understand that,' says Stanley.
Wendy named a number.
Stanley said, ‘Done,' or words to that effect.
To this day, remembering Wendy's next phone call to me causes me something resembling a heart attack.
When, several weeks later, Stanley called and asked me if I had an interest in writing the screenplay of the movie that became Without a Trace, I said, ‘No.'
He quite rightly hung up on me.
I then spent twenty minutes in a quiet room wondering what I had done. A man with a shelf full of Oscars, on cozy terms with Lizzie Windsor, had just offered me film school for one, all expenses paid by Twentieth Century Fox. He knew I didn't know how to write screenplays. He wasn't offering to hire me because he wanted to see me fail. Who cares that all I ever wanted to see on my tombstone was ‘She Wrote a Good Book?' The chance to learn something new that was both hard and really interesting was not resistible. I spent the rest of the weekend tracking him from airport to airport until I could get him back on the phone. (This was before we all had cell phones.)
I was sitting in my bleak office on a wet gray day, on which my newly teenaged son had shaved his head and I had just realized I'd lost my American Express card, when the phone rang. ‘Is this Beth Gutcheon?' asked a voice that made my hair stand on end. I said it was. ‘This is Paul Newman,' said the voice.
It was, too. The fine Italian hand of Stanley Jaffe again, he'd recommended me to work on a script Paul was developing. Paul invited me to dinner to talk about it. My son said, ‘For heaven's sake, Mother, don't be early and don't be tall.' I was both. We did end up writing a script together; it was eventually made for television with Christine Lahti, and fabulous Terry O'Quinn in the Paul Newman part, called The Good Fight."
"I read all the time. My husband claims I take baths instead of showers because I can't figure out how to read in the shower, and he's right."
"I started buying poetry for the first time since college after 9/11, but wasn't reading it until a friend mentioned that she and her husband read poetry in the morning before they have breakfast. She is right -- a pot of tea and a quiet table in morning sunlight is exactly the right time for poetry. I read The New York Times Book Review in the bath and on subways because it is light and foldable. I listen to audiobooks through earphones while I take my constitutionals or do housework. I read physical books for a couple of hours every night after everyone else is in bed -- usually two books alternately, one novel and one biography or book of letters."
"I have a dog named Daisy Buchanan. She ran for president last fall; her slogan was ‘No Wavering, No Flip-flopping, No pants.' She doesn't know yet that she didn't win, so if you meet her, please don't tell her."
"Last little-known fact: When I was in high school I invented, by knitting one, a double-wide sweater with two turtlenecks for my brother and his girlfriend. It was called a Tweter and was even manufactured in college colors for a year or two. There was a double-paged color spread in Life magazine of models wearing Tweters and posing with the Jets football team. My proudest moment was the Charles Addams cartoon that ran in The New Yorker that year. It showed a Tweter in a store window, while outside, gazing at it in wonder, was a man with two heads."
Anonymous
Posted August 26, 2012
Just tell him you want to make out after you get him to like you more and then bam you get a kiss. Flirting is a good idea to
1 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted June 3, 2012
I had not intended to purchase this book but glad that I did. I had a little difficulty getting into it at first, but was glad I kept going to the end. I enjoyed it.
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.BookReflections
Posted March 31, 2013
Three women connected through an elite boarding school grow through life's trials and tribulations. Where Avis is quiet and refined, Dinah is outgoing, loud, and fun. Avis marries an alcoholic and raises her only daughter, Grace with the help of her stepmother and the nanny. Dinah marries and has two boys. One is responsible and the other wanders through life without much direction and undecided about his goals. Lovie finds herself solidly in the middle of both. She chooses a life as an outsider looking in. Lovie tells the story from high school till she is 60 years old and a life altering event occurs that touch them all.
Gossip is interesting enough but failed to draw me in. It was difficult to connect to the characters for a couple of reasons. First, the Lovie's storytelling is distant and unemotional; thus, I didn't feel anything either. Second, there is much focus on parties, clothing made by designers I've barely heard of, and summers in vacation homes. I just didn't connect with any of it. Halfway through the book the the characters were past middle-age and I it took me by surprise. For most of the book everything seemed to be moving without any real point. Then it ended in a dramatic way and I felt that things were left unresolved. It felt like the story finally got to an interesting point and then ended without much ado.
The writing style sets this one apart though. It's kind of weird in that Ms. Gutcheon follows each individual story/event from the beginning to its end, resulting in a a kind of jumping through time situation. For example, we are introduced to a character, told how they die, and any resulting consequences of the event. Then the next part of the book will carry on with that person alive and a part of it all. It's different and I liked it though it could be confusing at times.
Overall, a solid read though I failed to connect with both the story and the characters.
KrittersRamblings
Posted March 30, 2013
Check out the full review at Kritters Ramblings
Set in New York, three friends who met in boarding school find each other again and cross paths in many different ways through the years. With husbands, lovers and children making appearances, the cast of characters was huge and came in and out of the story. Lovie is the main character and I loved her growth from an outsider in boarding school to the one who heard all of the gossip in New York, I didn't love her friends as much as I loved her.
Recyclequeen3
Posted February 8, 2013
I've read all of Beth Gutcheon's books years ago. I loved how each chapter usually dealt with a separate character in the book and then later on in the book it all came together. Gossip had about every other paragraph dealing with another character's story/life moment. It was written in a too scatter-brained way for me to really follow the story line without getting annoyed with some other non-necessary tid-bit of information on someone that just didn't seem to fit the mood of the page I was on.
I have not liked these last 3 books that Beth has written. Gossip is the worst though.
Anonymous
Posted September 27, 2012
Y u gotta hate?
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 26, 2012
Yiu can tell if a boy likes you by following these 3 steps dies he support you does he always want you to be on his team/game and does he talk to yuo
0 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 25, 2012
Hey wnna chat im tiffany
0 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 24, 2012
Wow boys are better
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 26, 2012
I will.
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 23, 2012
I need advice. Theres this really hot guy i like but he thinks im annoying and weird. Theres a dance coming up and i really want to go with him but he already said no. How do i get him to like me?
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 24, 2012
We both really like each other and my friend knows it and is willing to beat up anyone that ruins my happiness. My bus driver knows it and came up with a cute nickname for us 'cotton candy' because we do almost evrything with eachother.
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 24, 2012
Not the best
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 24, 2012
How can you get a guy to like you if he already has a gf?
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 20, 2012
It is not in real life or sum cheesey role play!!!!!!! U chatted with him at the book called angel. ~?
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 11, 2012
Sup
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 17, 2012
Wow.... i see many issues in this situation...
First of all, YOURE TWELVE! Thats a little young, dont you think? At twelve, even if you do get him, you wont even be able to anything as a couple other then share m&ms or something... Then you could loose him before you even get to an age where yor relationship can actually go somewhere! Second of all, whats wrong with being feminine? If you act like another guy and let him know you DONT care about yourself and what you look like then maybe he wont even see you as a posibility. Next, what do you mean he annoys you? Does he tease you because nobody wants a guy who degrades them! Lastly, you cant just break them up! Sabrina and Zach are there own people! Its better you aviod the drama and move on. You dont want to be the girl with no life and needs a guy to feel confidant. Dedicate yourself to a hobby and show them you dont need them! He either will like a confidant independant girl or wants a sluttygirl as a trophey. It could easily go eiher way!
-Hana
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 7, 2012
OMG!!! REF DOWN!!!
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 2, 2012
U pissed a bday boy off
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Posted September 29, 2012
U r a snitch
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Overview
The critically acclaimed author of Good-bye and Amen, Leeway Cottage, and More Than You Know returns with a sharply perceptive and emotionally resonant novel about all the ways we talk about one another, the sometimes fine line between showing concern and doing damage, and the difficulty of knowing the true obligations of friendship
Gossip
Beth Gutcheon
"Did you know that the origin of the word gossip in ...